1970及其前因后果 :: 只能是电影

 >1970<+itself :: Pure films   

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Jim's Film Reviews/Jarman

Jim

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< The Tempest

<<The Last of England

<  Blue

<  Sebastiane

< < Caravaggio

<  The Garden

<<  Wittgenstein

Derek Jarman (1942–1994) created eleven extraordinary feature films, including Sebastiane, Jubilee, The Tempest, Caravaggio, and Edward II, and over three dozen shorts, made between the early '70s and his AIDS-related death in 1994. This multi-talented artist is also acclaimed for his painting (several major exhibits), stage and film design (including director Ken Russell's The Devils), gay and human rights activism, literature (memoirs, social criticism, poetry), and, on a serene note, his exquisite gardens. In the sidebar to the right, you will see a complete chronological list of his films. Below you will find:

  • An Introduction to Derek Jarman, which looks at his life and works in film and other media.

  • Jarman's Films, which is my ongoing series of reviews of his work on DVD. It includes all three currently available titles, which are also his first three feature films: Sebastiane, Jubilee, and The Tempest.

You are also welcome to visit Jim's Film Website, where you can read all of my DVD reviews and "best films" lists in many categories, and find other resources, including my list of Outstanding GLBT Filmmakers. I have also created sites dedicated to two other immensely talented filmmakers/artists, both of whom were major influences on Jarman: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Thank you for visiting this Derek Jarman site, and for your interest in his vital legacy.

An Introdution to Derek Jarman

Here is a brief overview of Derek Jarman's life and work:

Jarman as Artist and Designer

Derek Jarman is a prodigiously talented and visionary artist whose works, ranging from painting to film to literature, seem to grow in power with each passing year.

The mercurial Jarman resists pigeonholing at every turn; he is so much more than just a brilliant visual stylist – whether as painter or designer for ballet, opera, and film, or as an author whose works continue to grow not only in popularity but in critical esteem, or as a defiant gay rights and AIDS activist, or as one of the most adventurous gardeners (!) of the twentieth century, or as a proudly self-described "queer filmmaker" who created pictures as diverse as a lifelong series of autobiographical shorts on super 8, several genre-defining music videos, and most importantly eleven feature films. Those intensely personal, yet universally resonant, features are wildly beautiful, socially probing, and deeply moving.

From the beginning, Jarman was concerned with exploring hidden gay history, from ancient times to the present, even as he envisioned a place for GLBT (gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender) people in contemporary life, where sexual difference would be not persecuted but honored, even celebrated. He reveals, through the beauty and audacity of his art, the many deep – but too often obscured – connections between the experiences of GLBT people and those of the majority – historical, cultural, sexual, and artistic. But Jarman being Jarman, we all have to work, as viewers – or more accurately, participants – to find, interpret, and feel those humane connections.

Jarman's avant garde style of filmmaking is visually rich, and often surprisingly entertaining. But it does present some aesthetic challenges. In discussing his 1987 film, The Last of England, Jarman offers a key to all of his pictures: It "works with image and sound, a language which is nearer to poetry than prose. It tells its story quite happily in silent images, in contrast to a word-bound cinema." Of course, Jarman is also a master of evocatively using sound and music, from Brian Eno's atmospheric scores on Sebastiane and Jubilee to Simon Fisher Turner's on most of his later films.

Jarman made his pictures on the low-budget but liberating independent scene: His first seven films all together cost only $3 million, which is pocket change for any one Hollywood blockbuster. This financial freedom allowed him to evolve a distinctively personal cinema, and all of his pictures seem to have jumped out of his head directly onto the screen. Although he often used friends, and sometimes lovers, as cast and crew, and delighted in the relaxed atmosphere he maintained on set, Jarman always focused on creating powerfully original and dramatic images, even as he eschewed commercial narrative structures. It is a testament to his vision that his films are more visually exciting, not to mention enduring, than movies with budgets tens, or even hundreds, of times greater. It is also to Jarman's credit that, even with the complexity of his art and ideas, you can often imagine him winking mischievously to us.

Where did it all begin?

Derek Jarman was born on January 31, 1942 in Northwood, England, and grew up in a middle-class, Royal Air Force family. His early life was spent on a series of military bases in England, Italy, and India, where his father, a native New Zealander (whom Jarman recalls was obsessed with being 'more British than the British'), was a bomb-squadron leader in World War II; he also helped establish the Pakistan Air Force after their independence in 1947. Derek completed a degree in history, English and art at King's College, London, even as he found ample time to explore the city's fervid social life. Then, between 1963 and 1967, he studied painting at the renowned Slade School of Art, where he found a thriving gay circle, including such artists as David Hockney and Patrick Procktor. In 1967 he was in the Tate Gallery's Young Contemporaries Exhibition, where his abstract landscapes won the Peter Stuyvesant Award. That same year he began working professionally as a stage designer, with Jazz Calendar for the Royal Ballet. A year later he had a successful one-man show at the Lisson Gallery, but he also designed an ill-fated production of Don Giovanni for the English National Opera.

Around 1970, he began making experimental, often brashly autobiographical, super 8 films (a practice which he continued throughout his life; the 1994 film "Glitterbug" is a highly condensed one-hour compilation). Also at the beginning of the '70s, he designed three projects for maverick director Ken Russell, including his masterpiece, The Devils (1971), Savage Messiah (1972), and Gargantua (which, sadly, was never filmed: just imagine Russell and Jarman tackling Rabelais!).

Jarman's fascination with cinema, now coupled with hands-on experience, led him to begin making his own pictures.

Jarman as Filmmaker and Author

Jarman burst onto the international film scene with his first feature, Sebastiane (read my reviewsee frame to left) – shot in 1975 and released the following year. This is Jarman's openly homoerotic version of the death of Saint Sebastian, who was martyred around 300 A.D., and became not only one of the most frequently-painted subjects in Renaissance art but, with his muscular physique (tied to a pillar and drilled with arrows) and soulful eyes, a central, albeit sadomasochistic, gay icon for several centuries. Following its premiere at the Locarno Film Festival, where it caused a riot, Sebastiane became a surprise critical and audience favorite, at the time due perhaps as much to the statuesque, and often nude, male cast as to the film's visionary power. Although Sebastiane owes a considerable debt to the great filmmaker/author Pier Paolo Pasolini (The Gospel According to [St.] Matthew, Medea; visit my Pasolini Web site), and was co-directed by Paul Humfress (a professional director at the BBC), it clearly reveals Jarman's originality and power.

Jarman made two more films in the '70s: Jubilee (read my reviewsee frame to right) – an anarchic yet beautiful political fantasy in which Queen Elizabeth I travels 400 years into the future to find England a Punk wasteland of violence and bad hairdos, and The Tempest (read my reviewsee frame below), a visually and dramatically riveting adaptation of Shakespeare's last masterpiece with a style eclectically drawn from Baroque painting, Gothic melodrama, and campy musicals.

Jarman's eclecticism can also be seen in the wide range of filmmakers who influenced his work, including such gay cultural icons as Pasolini (mentioned above), artist/author/director Jean Cocteau (The Blood of a Poet, Orpheus), the homoerotic experimentalist Kennth Anger ("Fireworks," "Scorpio Rising"), and the prodigious writer/director/actor Rainer Werner Fassbinder (The Merchant of Four Seasons, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul; visit my Fassbinder Web site). A crucial common influence on both Jarman and Fassbinder was the guru of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard (Pierrot le Fou, Weed End), whose hand is especially evident in Jubilee and several later films. Jarman was also devoted to the visually lush pictures of writing-directing team Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes). Although each of these extraordinary filmmakers is unique (and I enthusiastically recommend all of these films), it is nothing short of awe-inspiring how Jarman could take elements from each – not to mention several centuries of European painting – and forge a style which is completely and unmistakably his own.

After making The Tempest, there is a gap of six years in Jarman's career as a feature filmmaker. But he was far from idle. Between 1979 and 1985 he made 10 short films and shot many hours of autobiographical footage in super 8 (the term "home movies" does not do justice to these visionary glimpses of a life). During that time he also began his parallel career as a highly-lauded author. In all, Jarman wrote five major works, each based on his own journals: Dancing Ledge (1984; originally published as Queerlife), Kicking the Pricks (1987; originally published as The Last of England, to coincide with the release of his film of that title), Modern Nature (1991), At Your Own Risk (1992), Chroma (1994), as well as a few titles published posthumously. He offers reflections on his very different experiences living in both London and at Dungeness, Kent (where he had a seaside cottage, and created his most famous garden – constantly at odds with the salt air and the exposed, rock-strewn beach), as well as thoughts on his friends, lovers, films (both his own and other directors'), reading, history, English society, AIDS, the corrosive nature of homophobia, and much more.

Jarman's literary bent can also be seen in his film projects. He often went to canonical texts by gay or bisexual authors, including Shakespeare (virtually all of his Sonnets are addressed to the handsome young man he is smitten with: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" in Sonnet 18) – in both The Tempest (1979) and The Angelic Conversation (1985). The latter picture - which was Jarman's personal favorite of all his works – marked his return to feature-length filmmaking. In it, he offers a unique dramatization of a dozen of the Sonnets, as read offscreen by Judi Dench and enacted onscreen by a cast of handsome, passionate young men.

Other gay cultural figures, who are also of undeniable importance to "mainstream" society, filmed by Jarman include that randy genius of the Italian Baroque, Caravaggio (1986), World War I poet Wilfred Owen – whose poetry was set to music in an overwhelming choral piece by the great, and gay, composer Benjamin Britten – in War Requiem (1988), Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe's Edward II (1991; this is my favorite Jarman film), and the influential early twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who studied the relationship between language and thought (a theme very close to Jarman), in Wittgenstein (1992). Jarman also found time to continue his extensive super 8 diary, to publish annotated versions of screenplays to his films (including Caravaggio, Edward II, Wittgenstein, and Blue) and, among many other activities, to direct the Pet Shop Boy's legendary 1989 tour, which he also filmed.

In the midst of this time when all of his parallel careers were at their zenith, Jarman was diagnosed as being HIV positive, on December 22, 1986. A month later, he revealed his condition, becoming one of the few public figures to talk openly about living with AIDS. Later in 1987, at the Tyneside Film festival, he met and fell in love with Kevin Collins, who had then recently graduated from university and was writing software for the government. Derek wooed Kevin by letter, and within a few months they were living together in London, where both were ardent campaigners with with GLBT rights group, OutRage! Kevin also appeared in The Garden, Edward II, and Wittgenstein. He took care of Jarman until his death on February 19, 1994.

    One way to deal with Jarman's tragic death is not to speculate about what he might have created had he lived longer, but to delve even more deeply into the fantastic, richly-layered works which he left us.

    The actor best identified with filmmaker/artist, and one of his closest friends, is the brilliantly talented Tilda Swinton (who later starred in Orlando and The Deep End (2001), who with Jarman made The Last of England, War Requiem, the segment in Aria (1988), The Garden, Edward II, Wittgenstein, and his last work, Blue. She perfectly sums up the quicksilver essence of the man, in this excerpt from her August 2002 talk at the Edinburgh Film Festival's In the Spirit of Derek Jarman event (her full text is at the Criterion Collection Web site). As she says:

    This is what I miss, there being no more Derek Jarman films: the mess, the vulgarity, the cant, the poetry, the edge, the pictures, Simon Fisher Turner’s music, the real faces, the intellectualism, the science, the bad temperedness, the good temperedness, the cheek, the standards, the anarchy, the gauchness, the romanticism, the classicism, the optimism, the activism, the challenge, the longeurs, the glee, the playfulness, the bumptiousness, the resistance, the wit, the fight, the colours, the grace, the passion, the goodness, the beauty....

    Yes.

    From Jim's Film Website

    < Edward II

    < The Tempest

    <<The Last of England

    <  Blue

    <  Sebastiane

    < < Caravaggio

    <  The Garden

    <<  Wittgenstein