A samurai noir about a hitman by one of the key American independent filmmakers.
Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker) looks after pigeons, reads the code of the samurai and takes orders from a man who he chose to be his master after he saved Ghost Dog’s life. As a hitman, he is prepared to die any day. But one day he becomes the target: either he or his master has to die.
With his work deeply rooted in American culture, Jim Jarmusсh’s film tribute to hip-hop came as no surprise. The score was written by RZA of the cult collective Wu-Tang Clan, known for their love of Japanese and Chinese cultures. RZA himself appears in a cameo (this is not his only role in a Jarmusch film) as a hip hop samurai to whom Whitaker’s character pays his respects. The script was inspired by the cult French neo-noir Le Samouraï (The Samurai) by Jean-Pierre Melville about an honorable hitman chased by the people who hired him for a job. If Le Samouraï opens with a quote from a Japanese philosopher, Ghost Dog makes numerous references to Hagakure, the code of the samurai, which adds an ironic undertone, yet at the same time reflects the filmmaker’s genuine love of literature (books play an important part in the movie) and the legacy of the past in general. Despite clearly being a parody of the myths of American criminal cinema, Ghost Dog is also a love letter to the end of twentieth-century culture, with its white Italian mafia and old school hip hop that stressed the importance of community, solidarity, and collective cultural identity. Ghost Dog and his ideas of honor are also a relic in the face of the new era, which Jarmusch anticipated in this film.
The film will be screened in English with Russian subtitles.
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
Director Jim Jarmusch
France, Germany, USA, Japan, 1999. 116 min. 18+