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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 review – see 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 review – see 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 review – see 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.