1 Tilda Swinton, “ALetter to a Boy from His Mother”, Critical Quarterly 48.3, Autumn 2006, p. 110.

2 Cf. Q & A with Jim Jarmusch, The Film Society of Lincoln Center: “Archival Talks: Jim Jarmusch, The Limits of Control”, 30 October 2009. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v62aGp0v64k> Accessed 31 May 2015, 39: 30 – 40: 21.

3 Tilda Swinton, ibid., p. 118f. Cf. Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud IV.1, London: Hogarth, 1964, pp. 11 and 14.

4 See Jean Epstein, L’intelligence d’une machine, Paris: Jacques Melot, 1946, p. 55: “[L] es procédés qu’emploie le discours du rêve et qui lui permettent sa sincérité profonde, trouvent leurs analogues dans le style cinématographique.”

5 Sigmund Freud, ibid., p. 11: “We are thus driven to admit that in the dream we knew and remembered something which was beyond the reach of our waking memory.” Films are on the edge between dream and waking reality, fulfilling the longing to attain knowledge in dreams. They enable access to spaces not necessarily related to our experience, which expands our horizon over a fixed period of time.

6 See Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus”, Film Quarterly 28.2, 1974–75, pp. 39-47.

7 Julian Rice, The Jarmusch Way: Spirituality and Imagination in Dead Man, Ghost Dog and The Limits of Control, Lanham: Scarecrow, 2012; Sofia Glasl, Mind the Map, Marburg: Schüren, 2014.

8 See John Canemaker, Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World’s Most Famous Cat, New York: Da Capo, 1996, p. 150f.

9 Jim Jarmusch, Ghost Dog (1999), Kinowelt Home Entertainment, 2005, 00: 59: 47 – 01: 00: 33.

10 Hartmut Böhme, Fetishism and Culture, trans. Anna Galt, Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2014.

11 Juan A. Suárez, Jim Jarmusch, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007, p. 126.

12 See Julian Rice, ibid., p. 23.

13 Jim Jarmusch, Ghost Dog (1999), Kinowelt Home Entertainment, 2005, 00: 36: 57 – 00: 39: 20. Cf. Julian Rice, p. 21.

14 Emmanuelle André, Esthétique du motif. Cinéma musique peinture, Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2007. See also Kenneth Burke, ARhetoric of Motives, New York: Prentice-Hall, 1950; Lorenz Engell and André Wendler, “Medienwissenschaft der Motive”, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 1, 2009, pp. 38-49.

15 A central motif in The Limits of Control, the Boxeur matchbox becomes more than “a little tribute to Claire Denis’ White Material (2009). James Mottram, “Theme and Variations”, Sight and Sound 20.1, 2010, p. 16.

16 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 32f; Charles S. Peirce, The Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce: A Chronological Edition V (1884 – 1886), Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, p. 243.

17 See Jean Epstein, “The Cinematograph, Machine of Dreams”, Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012, p. 315: “[T] he action of the dream, like that of the film, unrolls each at its own pace, cut up and recognized again ad libitum, where the simultaneous can be drawn out to succession, and the successive can be compressed and happen at the same time, to the extent that the difference from exterior time may go all the way to inversion.”

18 Jim Jarmusch, The Limits of Control (2009), Universum Film, 2009, 00: 21: 08 – 00: 21: 53 (originally in Spanish).

19 Henri Bergson, Œuvres, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984; first edition, 1959, p. 302.

20 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, New York: Zone Books, 1991, p. 165.

21 Cf. National Public Radio, “Director Jim Jarmusch Tests Limits in Control”, Morning Edition, 8 May 2009. ˂http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103902528˃ Accessed 30 May 2015.

22 Jim Jarmusch, The Limits of Control (2009), Universum Film, 2009, 01: 08: 11 – 01: 08: 37.

23 Ibid., 00: 33: 44 – 00: 33: 47.

24 Ibid., 00: 43: 17 – 00: 43: 22.

25 Ibid., 00: 05: 18 – 00: 05: 24 and 00: 37: 49 – 00: 37: 59.

26 Pierre Schaeffer, “Acousmatics”, Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, New York: Continuum, 2004.

27 Just like the wax cylinder on which Manuel el Sevillano’s guitar is recorded or the CD recording of Schubert must not be equated with the recording itself (cf. ibid., p. 80f).

28 Jim Jarmusch, Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), Kinowelt Film, 2005, 57: 57 – 58: 19. Cf. Sofia Glasl, Mind the Map, Marburg: Schüren, 2014, p. 98.

29 Jim Jarmusch, The Limits of Control (2009), Universum Film, 2009, 00: 05: 16 – 00: 05: 26.

30 Julian Rice addresses the reference to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in a post-colonial reading in The Jarmusch Way, pp. 185-87.

31 Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel”, Desire in Language, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, p. 66: “[A] ny text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read at least double.”

32 Howard Hawks, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Twentieth Century Fox, 2005, 00: 01: 25.

33 Jim Jarmusch, The Limits of Control (2009), Universum Film, 2009, 00: 43: 23 – 00: 43: 52.

34 William Freedman, “The Literary Motif: A Definition and Evaluation”, Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1988, p. 301.

35 See Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, p. 8f.

36 Jim Jarmusch, The Limits of Control (2009), Universum Film, 2009, 00: 05: 56.

37 Ibid., 00.22.14 – 00.22.19.

38 Julian Rice analyzes the allusion to Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (1963) in detail: Julian Rice, op. cit., pp. 24 and 192f.

39 Jim Jarmusch, The Limits of Control (2009), Universum Film, 2009, 00: 26: 43 – 00: 27: 45.

40 Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, Oxford: Berg, 2006.

41 Herein, the paintings not only serve as a template for the following scenes but also, by the way they are staged, enable an approach Garrett Stewart calls “narratography”. He writes in Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. 27: “Where narratology concerns plot types and broad dynamic patterns, narratography is caught up in the local mechanics of interval and transition. Where cinematic narratology concerns the visual discourse of plot, filmic (or digital) narratography plots out the textualization of the image itself.”

42 André Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, Paris: Cerf, 1990, p. 188; André Bazin, What Is Cinema? I, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, p. 165f.

43 Ibid., p. 165f.

44 Jim Jarmusch, The Limits of Control (2009), Universum Film, 2009, 00: 06.04; 01: 39: 12.

45 Rice describes the tower as a symbol for Spanish imperialism and links it to “the current global dominance of the United States”, personified in Bill Murray’s American. Julian Rice, op. cit., pp. 25-27.

46 See Jean-Louis Baudry, “Le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité”, Communications 23, 1975, pp. 56-72.

47 Jim Jarmusch, The Limits of Control (2009), Universum Film, 2009, 01: 30: 33 – 01: 30: 50.

48 Ibid., 01: 35: 14 – 01: 36: 30.

49 John Boorman, Point Blank (1967), Warner Home Video, 2005, 00: 46: 29, 00: 46: 43, and 00: 51: 34.

50 Jim Jarmusch, The Limits of Control (2009), Universum Film, 2009, 01: 41: 00 – 01: 42: 07.

51 Fabienne Liptay, ‘‘‘The Limits of Control’. Understanding Cinema Beyond Signs and Meaning”, Habitus in Habitat II: Other Sides of Cognition, Sabine Flach and Jan Söffner (eds.), Bern: Peter Lang, 2010, p. 237.

52 Jim Jarmusch, The Limits of Control (2009), Universum Film, 2009, 01: 27: 10 – 01: 27: 14.

53 See Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, London: Athlone Press, 1993, p. 22f: “[T] he whole world is only a virtuality that currently exists only in the folds of the soul which convey it, the soul implementing inner pleats through which it endows itself with a representation of the enclosed world.”