DEREK JARMAN: DO WE CONTINUE TO GROW MARIGOLDS EVEN AS THE EMERGENCY SIRENS BLARE?

When Derek Jarman died from AIDs in 1994, the last words in his diary read ‘Birthday. Fireworks. HB true love’. Throughout his life Jarman revolutionized cinema, queering the collaborative models and approaches he was taught by directors such as Pier Paolo Pasolini. He emphasized the people making art, not just the art they made. His work was a communion. He was even canonized by the Canterbury branch of the international order of queer and trans nuns, The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who declared him Saint Derek of the Celluloid Knights of Dungeness. Jarman’s process-based approach to filmmaking did not present mythic worlds and historical events as the products or outcomes of artistic collaboration; instead, in the films he helped make, those worlds and events are always in a process of becoming, through the artistic strivings of his collaborators, in their gestures, lighting decisions, songs, or merely their fleeting presence in front of the camera. In short, the cinema Jarman made was not one of iconicity or symbolic reference to a timeless or universal myth, but cinema which indexed the ephemeral myth-making processes of queer life and art. This is marked in his last diary entry, in the fleeting contingency of a birthday celebration barely sketched, in the crack and splatter of fireworks long faded from the sky, or in Jarman’s final written gesture, which orientates us towards Hinney Beast or HB for short—also called Keith—who was Jarman’s long-time partner, collaborator, friend, and ‘true love’. All of Jarman’s artistic attempts to render something of the past so that it may remain for longer than just the fleeting contingent moment of the present—and may perhaps be carried on into the future—were not made for the sake of, say, the Roman past or History, or the Classical, but for the lives and futures of the queers he loved.