Permanent Vacation. 1980. USA. Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. With Chris Parker, John Lurie, Eric Mitchell, Sara Driver. 35mm print courtesy of Janus Films. In English. 75 min.
In 1974 film exhibitor Sid Geffen and his wife, the French-born filmmaker and editor Jackie Raynal, took over the Bleecker Street Cinema (which was opened by Lionel Rogosin in 1960) a year after they reopened and began programming the Carnegie Hall Cinema. Geffen told the Village Voice that the Bleecker Street programming would be “adapted to a neighborhood heavily influenced by New York University,” and indeed the theater made a policy of showing films by young independent filmmakers. In 1981 they opened Jim Jarmusch’s first feature, Permanent Vacation, in their small second theater, the James Agee Room, which was only equipped to show 16mm. This laconic feature, an embryonic form of Jarmusch’s later films, stands out today as a vivid time capsule of hollowed-out, pre-gentrification Soho. It follows the drifting days and nights of its teenage star, Chris Parker, whose real life is barely fictionalized in the film. As the theater’s newsletter described it, “Permanent Vacation presents a chronicle of the new, lost, post-punk generation.”