Riding A Rocking Horse:
Jim Jarmusch focuses on Neil Young & Co.

by Bruce Kirkland

It's only rock 'n' roll but he loves it: Year Of The Horse is a fan's visual and aural notes on his hero's long career as a pop icon hunched over a guitar.

The hero is rocker Neil Young. The fan is hip New Yorker Jim Jarmusch, who bought into Young's primal music when the filmmaker was just a gangly kid growing up in Akron, Ohio. He heard and loved Young's unique music in the seminal band Buffalo Springfield. When Young went solo and then hooked up with an early form of Crazy Horse in 1969, Jarmusch was hooked for life.

Year Of The Horse, now at the Bloor Cinema and set to move through the arthouse circuit (call them for show times), is payback time. The 107-minute documentary is a celebration of Young and his on-going, three-decade, deeply-felt collaboration with the eccentrics in Crazy Horse.

"Obsession?" Jarmusch asks rhetorically when I ask about his relationship with the music. "I don't know if that is the word that I'd use, but it's a really strong inspiration to me."

Like every fan of a musician who has endured as long as Young, Jarmusch is particular about his tastes. "I'm not a big fan of Harvest and I can't stand Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, except maybe the song Ohio, because I'm from Ohio. I like Neil when he rocks! I like Neil with Crazy Horse.

"Neil has been up and down and he just stays true to himself without worrying too much about what other people think. Obviously, they (Young and the members of Crazy Horse) are not like rock poseurs. Look how they dress! The surface of things doesn't interest them. It's where it comes from that interests them. And it interests me.

"Like when they fight in the movie. They're not bitchy rock stars fighting about their clothes or their trailer or their bus or their backstage food. They're fighting about their music. Because they want it to be right."

The film, first shown at the Toronto film festival last September, was shot in the U.S. and Europe during a 1996 tour. Intercut is historic footage shot by a British film crew in 1976 and by Young himself (under the pseudonym Bernard Shakey) in 1986. The contrasts - and the remarkable similarities - are fascinating.

Jarmusch shot his footage in the Super-8 format, allowing an unobtrusive guerrilla-style approach to the band members and giving the film a rough, raw look in opposition to the full bore soundtrack. Jarmusch loves the contradiction.

"To me, Neil Young & Crazy Horse are very contradictory people. Neil Young is a perfectionist who embraces imperfection. To have this raw and beautiful - to me - look to the film, with a Dolby digital soundtrack that is state-of-the-art and clean and huge, is perfect. That's a contradiction that fits the band."

When he first started shooting the tour in 1996, neither Jarmusch nor Young were even convinced a film would come out of it. It was an experiment. If either filmmaker or musician didn't like the footage gathered, then they had agreed to junk the project and enjoy the camaraderie.

Jarmusch, best known for stylish art films such as Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law, Mystery Train and Dead Man (which Young scored, leading to their friendship), never felt more free. He had no preconceived ideas.

"On this film, I didn't even know if it was going to be a dog, a moose or a rabbit, or even an animal at all," says Jarmusch. "So that was really fun. It was great." And it wasn't a dog, after all. It was the Year Of The Horse.