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As part of the public programming for Altered States in the Acid West, this screening of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1996) presents a defining work of the acid western.
Starring Johnny Depp as an accountant turned fugitive, alongside Gary Farmer, Robert Mitchum, Iggy Pop, and John Hurt, the film follows a wounded man’s passage across the nineteenth-century frontier as it drifts steadily away from realism and into myth, hallucination, and spiritual reckoning.
Shot in stark black and white and propelled by Neil Young’s improvised guitar score, Dead Man recasts the Western as a dreamlike procession toward erasure rather than conquest. Jarmusch’s West is a space of displacement, violence, and inversion—where time loosens, identities dissolve, and familiar genre markers give way to ambiguity and critique. The film’s refusal of narrative closure and heroic logic closely mirrors the exhibition’s interest in the West as an unstable psychological and ideological terrain.
Supported by Art Bridges Foundation