PATERSON

jim jarmusch has written a film which quietly puts the lie to just about every other film out there, that life is best portrayed as a series of large-scale extraordinary episodic events. his recent film Paterson depicts the mundane daily routine of an ordinary couple living modestly in paterson new jersey. it is repetitive in exactly the way life is, routinized and mostly unsurprising.

though it is unashamedly rigged and in some respects unlikely (as was de Sica's Bicycle Thief early in the neorealist movement), it manages to reveal an inner poetic and meaningful aspect of everyday life that anyone can relate to, because in one fashion or other, like all animals, we nearly all nearly all the time really live this kind of routinized life. and what that means is that we are none of us really ordinary, that life without embellishment is touching, rich and meaningful and, if you like, extraordinary.

to me that is still the most important use of film as a vibrant contemporary art form of singular importance in our time.