Derek Jarman - Films

Films

Jarman's first films were experimental super 8 mm shorts, a form he never entirely abandoned, and later developed further in his films Imagining October (1984), The Angelic Conversation (1985), The Last of England (1987) and The Garden (1990) as a parallel to his narrative work. The Angelic Conversation featured Toby Mott and other members of the Radical artist collective The Grey Organisation.

Jarman first became known as a stage designer, getting his break in the film industry as production designer for Ken Russell's The Devils (1970). He later made his debut in "overground" narrative filmmaking with the groundbreaking Sebastiane (1976), arguably the first British film to feature positive images of gay sexuality, and the first film entirely in Latin. Sebastiane is a story about the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, which created a stir on the art cinema market because of its overt depiction of homosexual desire.

He followed this with the film many regard as his first masterpiece, Jubilee (shot 1977, released 1978), in which Queen Elizabeth I of England is transported forward in time to a desolate and brutal wasteland ruled by her twentieth century namesake. Jubilee was arguably the first UK punk movie, and among its cast featured punk groups and figures such as Wayne County of Wayne County & the Electric Chairs, Jordan, Toyah Willcox, and Adam and the Ants.

This was followed by Jarman's unconventional adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest in 1979. Praised by several Shakespeare scholars, but dismissed by some traditionalist critics, the film contains a considerable amount of nudity (mostly male, but also some female, including a scene in which Caliban's mother Sycorax breast-feeds her son), some unconventional casting (Toyah Willcox's Miranda hardly suggests innocent purity) and an unusual setting (a crumbling mansion as opposed to an island). Throughout the film, Jarman is liberal with Shakespeare's text, using it as a springboard for his own interpretation.

During the 1980s Jarman was one of the still few openly gay public figures in Britain and was a leading campaigner against Clause 28. He also worked to raise awareness of AIDS. His artistic practice in the early 1980s reflected these commitments, perhaps most famously in The Angelic Conversation (1985), a film in which the imagery is accompanied by a voice (that of Dame Judi Dench) reciting Shakespeare's sonnets, obviously chosen for their openness to a homoerotic re-reading.

Jarman spent seven years making experimental super 8 mm films and attempting to raise money for Caravaggio (he later claimed to have rewritten the script seventeen times during this period).

Released in 1986, Caravaggio attracted a comparatively wide audience (and is still, barring the cult hit Jubilee, probably Jarman's most widely-known work). This is partly due to the involvement, for the first time, of the British television company Channel 4 in funding and distribution. Funded by the BFI and produced by film theorist Colin MacCabe, Caravaggio became Jarman's most famous film, and marked the beginning of a new phase in Jarman's filmmaking career: from now on all his films would be partly funded by television companies, often receiving their most prominent exhibition in TV screenings. Caravaggio also saw Jarman work with actress Tilda Swinton for the first time. Here, his trademark aesthetics flourished: overt depictions of homosexual love, narrative ambiguity, and superb visuals, particularly the live representations of Caravaggio's most famous paintings, are all prominent features of the work.

The conclusion of Caravaggio also marked the beginning of a temporary abandonment of traditional narrative in Jarman's films. Frustrated by the formality of 35 mm film production, and the institutional dependence and resultant prolonged inactivity associated with it (which had already cost him seven years with Caravaggio, as well as derailing several long-term projects), Jarman returned to and expanded the super 8 mm-based form he had previously worked in on Imagining October and The Angelic Conversation. The film was entered into the 36th Berlin International Film Festival where it won the Silver Bear for an outstanding single achievement.

The first film to result from this new semi-narrative phase, The Last of England told the death of a country, ravaged by its own internal decay and the economic restructuring of Thatcher's government. "Wrenchingly beautiful…the film is one of the few commanding works of personal cinema in the late 80's – a call to open our eyes to a world violated by greed and repression, to see what irrevocable damage has been wrought on city, countryside and soul, how our skies, our bodies, have turned poisonous", wrote a Village Voice critic. This film re-interpreted Ford Madox Brown's famous painting of emigrants leaving the English shores for a life in the New World, and has been compared to Humphrey Jennings's documentary Listen to Britain (1942) which constitutes its very antithesis. Where Listen to Britain indulges in the idyllic, The Last of England tries to expose the decay.

During the making of his film The Garden, Jarman became seriously ill. Although he recovered sufficiently to complete the work, he never attempted anything on a comparable scale afterwards, returning to a more pared-down form for his concluding narrative films, Edward II (perhaps his most politically outspoken work, informed by his Queer activism) and the Brechtian Wittgenstein, a delicate tragicomedy based on the life of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was a later complaint of Jarman's that with the disappearance of the Independent Film sector it had become impossible for him to get finance. Jarman made a side income by directing music videos for various artists including Marianne Faithfull, The Smiths and the Pet Shop Boys.

In 1989, Jarman's film War Requiem brought the legendary actor Laurence Olivier out of retirement. It turned out to be Olivier's last performance.

By the time of his 1993 film Blue, Jarman was losing his sight and dying of AIDS-related complications. Blue consists of a single shot of saturated blue colour filling the screen, as background to a soundtrack composed by Simon Fisher Turner, and featuring original music by Coil and other artists, in which Jarman describes his life and vision. When it was shown on British television, Channel 4 carried the image whilst the soundtrack was broadcast simultaneously on BBC Radio 3, a collaborative project unique for its time.

His final testament as a film-maker was the film Glitterbug made for the Arena slot on BBC Two, and broadcast shortly after Jarman's death. Compiled and edited from many hours of super 8 footage shot with friends and companions throughout his career, it is a moving collage of memories, people and moments lost in time, accompanied by a specially commissioned soundtrack from Brian Eno.