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SEBASTIANE
1976
Director
Derek Jarman
Paul Humfress
Starring
Leonardo Treviglio
Barney James
Neil Kennedy
Richard Warwick
Lindsay Kemp
Runtime
85 minutes
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Having made numerous experimental short works on Super 8mm, Derek Jarman made his narrative feature debut, co-directed with Paul Humfress, with this controversial, proudly homoerotic, Latin-language treatment of the life and martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, a member of Emperor Diocletian’s Praetorian Guard in the 4th century who was persecuted on account of his Christianity, and whose image was appropriated in gay iconography from the 19th century.
SEBASTIANE inaugurated Jarman’s cooperative filmic practice, developing as it did through collaboration with friends, activists, artists, co-conspirators, and lovers. It is a material gesture — made of time, flesh, and film reel — which archives a series of relational moments between queer people assembled around a project and a series of eroto-historical encounters.
Jarman evocatively captures the scorching heat of the Sardinian locations, and the evident effect it has on his cast, while Brian Eno’s typically atmospheric score complements the director’s superb cinematic poetry, especially its ethereal slow-motion sequences. SEBASTIAN is a homoerotic appropriation of Christian hagiography, an unapologetic representation of queer male desire, and a deliberately disorientating experiment in the relationship between history and the present.
SEBASTIANE inaugurated Jarman’s cooperative filmic practice, developing as it did through collaboration with friends, activists, artists, co-conspirators, and lovers. It is a material gesture — made of time, flesh, and film reel — which archives a series of relational moments between queer people assembled around a project and a series of eroto-historical encounters.
Jarman evocatively captures the scorching heat of the Sardinian locations, and the evident effect it has on his cast, while Brian Eno’s typically atmospheric score complements the director’s superb cinematic poetry, especially its ethereal slow-motion sequences. SEBASTIAN is a homoerotic appropriation of Christian hagiography, an unapologetic representation of queer male desire, and a deliberately disorientating experiment in the relationship between history and the present.