Film: Coffee and Cigarettes
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Year: 2003
Country: USA
Duration: 95min
Language: English with English subtitles

Nãi and Sàn Art are happy to introduce a new collaborative film programme. The first edition of our film series will explore different takes on black and white cinema presenting various film genres, eras, and directors on a weekly basis. This programme will accompany Sàn Art’s latest exhibition Masked Force featuring a selection of Vo An Khanh’s iconic black and white photographs of the Vietnam War.

By the 1970s most directors had abandoned low-cost black-and-white film due to its perception as a commercial dead-end. While it remained used by underground film directors, the 1980s and 1990s saw a rebirth of black-and-white movies with the rise of American “indie cinema”. Amongst the contributing figures of this renewal was Jim Jarmusch with films including Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law and Dead Man emblematic of this new “hip” wave with stunning cinematography and capturing the director’s very bleak and deadpan humour.

Our first film, Coffee and Cigarettes, was filmed between 1986 and 2003 and includes eleven segments on the topic of… well, coffee and cigarettes obviously. With an amazing cast including Tom Waits, Iggy Pop, the Wu-Tang Clan, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, the White Stripes just to name a few.

* This screening will be in English only

** Ref: Richard Misek, ‘Absent Color’, Chromatic Cinema: A History of Screen Color, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010

*** Poster: Nathan Collis