Coming Soon
EDWARD II
1991
Director
Derek Jarman
Starring
Steven Waddington
Tilda Swinton
Andrew Tiernan
Runtime
90 minutes
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“How to make a film of a gay love affair and have it commissioned. Find a dusty old play and violate it. It is difficult enough to be queer, but to be a queer in the cinema is almost impossible. Heterosexuals have fucked up the screen so completely that there’s hardly room for us to kiss there. Marlowe outs the past—why don’t we out the present? That’s really the only message the play has. Fuck poetry. The best lines in Marlowe sound like pop songs and the worst, well we’ve tried to spare you them.” - Derek Jarman, Queer Edward II
Elizabethan prodigal prodigy Christopher Marlowe, whose tantalizingly brief life ended in political assassination, wrote a history play, in the mid-1590s, about the 1327 political assassinations of England’s Edward II and his lover and boyhood friend, Piers Gaveston. Rarely performed, EDWARD II remains notorious for its disclosure that Edward’s state-sanctioned murder came in the form of his impalement on a red-hot poker—a willing sodomite in life, hence a hell-bound sodomite in death.
Decades after Bertolt Brecht seized on Edward II, and 400 years after Marlowe, Derek Jarman decided to make his own the historical figure of the martyred king, a gesture perfectly in accord with Jarman’s agenda of reclaiming figures from the past and embracing them as embattled precursors of the modern gay sensibility. More than any other English-speaking contemporaries, Jarman continually managed to alter how history can be rendered on film, and to alter our sense of how history and its texts can be made to matter, and made into matter. EDWARD II has as its fierce motor-force the passion to summon the voices of history’s dead, and to greet their desires with joy, and to harness their power to scorch bare the putrid ground of the present. The living call on the awakened dead to sanctify the purifying ritual, and then life, mortified, moves on to its happy end.
Elizabethan prodigal prodigy Christopher Marlowe, whose tantalizingly brief life ended in political assassination, wrote a history play, in the mid-1590s, about the 1327 political assassinations of England’s Edward II and his lover and boyhood friend, Piers Gaveston. Rarely performed, EDWARD II remains notorious for its disclosure that Edward’s state-sanctioned murder came in the form of his impalement on a red-hot poker—a willing sodomite in life, hence a hell-bound sodomite in death.
Decades after Bertolt Brecht seized on Edward II, and 400 years after Marlowe, Derek Jarman decided to make his own the historical figure of the martyred king, a gesture perfectly in accord with Jarman’s agenda of reclaiming figures from the past and embracing them as embattled precursors of the modern gay sensibility. More than any other English-speaking contemporaries, Jarman continually managed to alter how history can be rendered on film, and to alter our sense of how history and its texts can be made to matter, and made into matter. EDWARD II has as its fierce motor-force the passion to summon the voices of history’s dead, and to greet their desires with joy, and to harness their power to scorch bare the putrid ground of the present. The living call on the awakened dead to sanctify the purifying ritual, and then life, mortified, moves on to its happy end.