Films by Derek Jarman
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The Angelic Conversation ( 1985, 78 min, GB )
With Judi Dench's offscreen reading of 12 Shakesperean sonnets providing the audio, this non-narrative, experimental film by gay director Jarman centers around the director on a soul-searching mission for meaning in life, this after he discovers that he is HIV-positive. Action involves the sensual grace of male youth and rather than an acceptance of early death is really an affirmation of life.
Starring Judi Dench
Blue ( 1993, 76 min, GB )
Jarman, who died of AIDS in February 1994, had been battling the disease for six years at the time of making the film. With impaired eyesight and deteriorating health, Jarman created a startling experimental film in which he invites his audience into his sight-deprived world creating a womb-like meditative state by employing a completely blue screen throughout the film. A cast including Tilda Swinton and Nigel Terry reads from Jarman's often poetic journals, recounting the director's medical complexities, thoughts on the loss of loved ones, and reflections on his own life and art. Amazingly devoid of anger and neither sermonizing nor self-pitying, Blue is a fitting closure to an eventful career.
Starring: Tilda Swinton, Derek Jarman, Nigel Terry
Caravaggio (1986, 93 min, GB)
This stylishly bold tribute to the volatile artist stars Nigel Terry as the controversial painter torn between his rugged lover (Sean Bean) and his mistress (Tilda Swinton). Jarman sees the darkly handsome Caravaggio as a passionate man with a liking for "rough trade." An elegant tale centering around both the creative process and the touching homoerotic love story of the two men.
Starring: Nigel Terry, Sean Bean, Tilda Swinton
Edward II (1991, 91 min, GB)
Not only one of the director's greatest, but one of the best examples of "New Queer Cinema." A must for serious film-lovers.
Director Jarman has reworked Christopher Marlowe's play into a homoerotic, sexually charged, radically relevant work for our times. Steven Waddington stars as the tragic King Edward, Andrew Teirnan as his beloved Gaveston, Nigel Terry as the villainous Mortimer and Tilda Swinton is the jealous and destructive Queen Isabella. Graphically brutal, moving, surprisingly funny and always erotic, Jarman blends Marlowe's prose with contemporary jargon and costumes, replete with positive portrayals of queer sex, profanity and ACT-UP activists for a truly mesmerizing experience.
Starring: Steven Waddington, Andrew Tiernan, Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry
The Garden (1990, 88 min, GB)
While director Derek Jarman fitfully sleeps in his garden, his cryptic dreams are played out in their fullest, queerest glory. The lyrical images of male love and art collide against a backlash of homophobia and death. An allegory for AIDS and for his friends who have died of the disease, the film depicts two young male lovers as they, in the manner of Jesus Christ, are taunted, arrested, tortured and then crucified for their beliefs. A stunningly filmed work of art.
Starring: Tilda Swinton, Johnny Mills, Philip MacDonald
The Last of England (1988, 87 min, GB)
A beautifully photographed fragmented poem structured within a series of cross-cutting vignettes and filled with homoerotic images. A politically charged film that deals with the destruction of our physical and emotional world of England by the callous policies of Margaret Thatcher. Nigel Terry provides the off-screen narration.
Wittgenstein (1993, 75 min, GB)
Displaying little of the queer militancy that distinguished his later-career films, and another in a series of biographies of gay historical figures (Sebastiane, Edward II, Caravaggio), Jarman's amusing, intellectual portrait of Austrian-born, British-educated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is both a startling primer in low-budget filmmaking as well as a visually exuberant work. Considered one of the century's most influential philosophers, Wittgenstein's private and professional life is chronicled -- from his prodigy childhood to his reluctant life as a professor at Cambridge and a man whose professional life was burdened with guilt about his homosexuality. Jarman utilizes a pitch-black background, allowing the richly drawn, outrageously costumed characters and their witty, thought-provoking dialogue to take center stage. Karl Johnson plays the eccentric philosopher and an adult and Clancey Chassey is delightful as Wittgenstein as a youth. The always delightful Tilda Swinton is lavishly campy as Lady Ottoline. Shot in less than two weeks for Channel 4, this film proves to be an invigorating, uncompromising work.
Starring: Karl Johnson, Tilda Swinton
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From www.queertheory.com
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