Almost everything about Dead Man jars with our better instincts, leaving a first impression of a film whose every aspect is in a state of disrepair. The music is imprecise, repetitive, and grating. The hero is dying. The story is unabashedly primitive and fairy-tale-like; telegraphed names like the Native American Nobody (Gary Farmer) or the frontier-town of Machine sound off like explosions amidst a proudly grotesque and decaying setting. The storytelling is indifferent, refusing to explain things, like the bounty hunters’ clockwork precision, or using sham-coincidences to keep reuniting Blake (Johnny Depp) and Nobody. Two hours later, however, the nightmare logic of all these eccentricities has become apparent. We’ve been re-oriented to the film’s somber world, made ready, as it were, for its pitiless and inescapable conclusion.

Or is it just that our eyes have finally adjusted to the startling black-and-white photography? A “broken” format for this broken film completing the list of “limitations” that make for its terrible cumulative impact. Compared with our everyday visual experience, black-and-white is an incomplete format offering us access to a seemingly partial or unfinished reality. It’s one step closer to a contour map than color film intensifying our imagination; given the gap between everyday visual experience and monochrome there’s an extra step required to mentally process the imagery. The detachment and abstraction—which numerous still photographers working in the format have long cherished—amplifies the power of Dead Man’s grating first impression, accentuating our bewilderment. Once we have made the adjustment however, an allusive and telling nightmare emerges whose power is deeply indebted to the gray scale palette.

Five of Jarmusch’s nine features have been shot in black-and-white, marking a distinct commitment to the format. Although it’s possible that for his earliest films this was more by necessity than design, as early as Down by Law (1986) Jarmusch was at a point in his career when shooting in black-and-white was a commercial liability. In his DVD commentary to Down by Law Jarmusch alludes to the difficulties of financing black- and-white films; the lower anticipated returns making them a riskier proposition for producers, all else being equal. Only Jarmusch knows for certain if his insistence was the result of stubbornness, vanity, or careful aesthetic arithmetic but he certainly wasn’t making his life any easier. Dead Man holds a kind of privileged place amongst the resulting films; it marked a return to the format for Jarmusch after making two films in colour and it is the last full feature of his to be shot by Robby Müller.

Perhaps the two were acting for our own protection; the less graphic nature of black-and-white providing a type of built-in welder’s glass through which to observe the slow eclipse of the accountant by the poet and the intensification of violence that it engenders in him. Blake’s killing of two marshals, Lee and Marvin, serves as a tipping point in this overall scheme, and it is around this point that Dead Man begins to gel for me. It is the first instance where Blake kills with precision and agility. There is a palpable resignation to his answering, “Yes. I am William Blake. Do you know my poetry?” From this point on, all bets are off, as Nobody’s initial quizzical statement, about Blake’s gun replacing his tongue, becomes prophecy, and the film’s nightmare rendition of hell no longer feels labored but simply eerie and tragic.

Dead Man was Jarmusch’s first foray into depicting violence but this didn’t stop him from putting as much of it onscreen as he could. The callousness and savagery of his frontier setting and its inhabitants knows no limits; the ruthlessness and barbarity of the bounty hunter Cole Wilson (Lance Henriksen) stands out as the most notorious but also the most humorless example. The photography, buttressed by watchful blocking and acting, invites careful consideration of the calamity as opposed to tantalization. The blood takes on an ink-like quality, utterly unreal but perfectly resonating with Nobody’s warnings. In a late scene Blake comes across a dead fawn. It is a ghostly, pale gray while the blood is almost black. He touches its wound, mixing its blood in his own and then adding this to the war paint on his face. The action—apparently improvised by Johnny Depp—acknowledges Blake’s eponymous status in merciless wordless clarity.

The strangeness of black-and-white plays perfect accompaniment to the more mysterious workings of Dead Man’s world. The film conjures an awareness of the supernatural often through decidedly lo-fi effects like superimpositions. Nobody’s peyote-induced vision of Blake as a skeleton, for instance, makes for a fragile image whose appeal to our imagination is enhanced by the lack of color. At one point Blake briefly sees what appears to be a female Native American in face paint. When he looks again however, there is only a raccoon which scurries off into the bush. Jarmusch handles the effect with simple straight cuts. As seen through a range of grays in the dark the camouflage effect of the woman against the bushes and the resemblance of the face paint to a raccoon are heightened. The ambiguity of the episode confirms the very strange realm that inscribes this film—a realm where it is entirely at our discretion whether the woman transformed herself into a raccoon or whether the episode is a phantasm of Blake’s.

One description of this world is offered by Nobody, whose first incantation upon learning Blake’s name is from Songs of Experience: “Some are born to sweet delight/Some are born to endless night.” In insisting on a narrow range of nocturnal shades, Dead Man’s photography makes good on Nobody’s ominous promise once again, giving him the benefit of the doubt over Depp’s oblivious, though well-intentioned, innocent. For all his alienation, Gary Farmer’s tortured outcast is surprisingly at home amidst the phantom workings of the film’s frontier landscape, a strange and scary place that is equal parts past and present. The film stubbornly and successfully flaunts all expectation—of the western, of real-world behavior and of normal visual experience—requiring spectatorial stunt work as exigent as it is rewarding.