2 UNCOMMON FILMS WITH SOMETHING IN COMMON

With the arrival last week of Jim Jarmusch’s latest drollery, we suddenly have access to two films of utter originality: Jarmusch’s “Down by Law” and David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.”

And quite apart from their special stamp, they mark a real turning point in the way we perceive film making. One was made for an independent production company, the other for what can be called a major studio. But both, I would warrant, are exactly the film each director wished to make, down to the tiniest detail.

This may mark the end of the long-cherished belief that only away from a studio situation, by working independently, can an artist control his or her vision. It may take a very special studio in which this freedom exists, and a director may have to be ready to bargain for it, but you could hardly have a better example of a director’s vision than “Blue Velvet,” as made for Dino De Laurentiis’ De Laurentiis Entertainment Group.

In Lynch’s case, the bargaining chip was artistic control. He had been given a $9-million budget to make the film. However, De Laurentiis offered that if writer-director Lynch could bring it in for a little more than $6 million, he could have final cut. It’s an astonishingly canny idea, guaranteed to make a penny pincher out of the most lavish director (not that Lynch was ever that).

The results would seem to be the definition of a no-lose situation. Each man got what he wanted, the picture doesn’t look compromised in any way--quite the opposite--and both artistic and budgetary justice is done.

Jarmusch was also working under what, from his experience, must have seemed like luxury, a reported budget from Island Pictures of $1.03 million, still modest but up considerably from the $100,000 on which he turned out “Stranger Than Paradise.”

“Down by Law” also has a minuscule cast, only marginally more than the trio who held “Stranger Than Paradise” together. There’s a woman in a key scene for each of the men, but although their scenes do linger in the mind, they actually have only brief on-screen time: Ellen Barkin crying as she heaves all of Tom Waits’ worldly possessions, (down to his radio and his Gene Pitney album), out the window; Billie Neal, whose languid scorn for John Lurie is cool, monumental and dead-on, and Nicoletta Braschi, of the white white skin and the black black hair, whose rag-doll dance with Roberto Benigni is romance incarnate.

It seems safe to say that “Down by Law” was also exactly the film Jarmusch wanted to make, since it has the director’s earlier sensibilities intact and an added sense of lusciousness in Robby Muller’s sensuous black-and-white photography. (“Repo Man,” “An American Friend” and “Paris, Texas” are Muller working in color; “Alice in the Cities,” “Kings of the Road” are some of his black-and-white films.)

So two films have emerged with their integrity intact, from opposite ends of the film-making spectrum. And at least two earlier films made under De Laurentiis’ watchful eye--Michael Cimino’s teeming “Year of the Dragon” and Michael Mann’s stylish “Manhunter”--had an on-screen opulence that belied a careful budget. From the independent side, you could counter with the elegance of Alan Rudolph’s high-style “Choose Me,” made for the ridiculous price tag of $865,000 for Island Alive, the company that is now two companies, Alive Films and Island Pictures, each half seemingly flourishing. Or you could cite any of the recent Robert Altman films, but especially “Fool for Love,” whose dreamlike beauty and flawless casting concealed a bare-bones budget.

It would seem that we are in the early stages of a richly interesting period in film making, and that we in the audience will benefit from it most. Film makers with something to say, exceptional casts, handmade films--you could only hope that, like a benign disease, this trend was communicable and would spread.

To get back to our artists, Jarmusch and Lynch’s uncommon films seem to have several things in common--in addition to serving as the flash point of current dinner conversations.

Both are by young, or youngish, directors who made their mark with luminous black-and-white. (Jarmusch had plans to make a film in color until the particulars of “Down by Law” presented themselves and he realized that this one, too, demanded black-and-white.) Their films include one character who may stand in for the figure of the director: John Lurie in “Down by Law” and Kyle MacLachlan in “Blue Velvet.”

Each director is beginning to build a stock company of actors and technicians: MacLachlan, Dean Stockwell, Brad Dourif came from “Dune”; “Eraserhead” star Jack Nance is also in “Blue Velvet.” John Lurie and Rockets Redglare are Jarmusch repeaters. Lynch has used the same sound designer, Alan Splet, for the distinctive sound patterns of each of his films since “Eraserhead,” and the same cameraman, Frederick Elmes, who shot “Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet” and the second unit of “Dune.” John Lurie’s music is as much a part of the Jarmusch equation as Lurie’s own slab-faced persona and deliberate phrasing.

What this seems to suggest is that, like the “working family” units of Altman or Rudolph--or like directors of the past, including Orson Welles and John Ford--these are directors who are comfortable with the same team.

So much for the parallels. In style, Jarmusch is a formalist; his films, for all their deadpan wackiness and the romance that erupts from them willy-nilly, are a little like intellectual fairy tales.

Lynch, for all his technical control, could be called an artist of the unconscious, perhaps almost a schizophrenic one. What is mined from the unconscious is dark and moist and unpredictable, and there is almost the feeling that Lynch is as astonished as the rest of the world by what he has turned up. (It is then up to him to give it form and power and persuasiveness, and he seems to have no problems at all with that.) His strength has been growing with each film, but “Blue Velvet” is Lynch’s promise fulfilled.

The fact that it provokes the emotions it does seems reasonable; if material this shocking, with its implied comment on the sunnily repressive climate of the Reagan ‘80s, passed unnoticed, one might really worry. From the letters and columns here, and almost everywhere, there seems no danger of that.

At the very heart of each of these singular cinema artist’s work is his passion--his right--to put on the screen exactly what he sees, exactly the way he sees it. It’s reassuring that this also seems to be the interest of producers on both sides of the studio gate.