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.
Films in this Program
Derek Jarman
Paul Humfress
85 minutes
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.
Derek Jarman
103 minutes
Shot in 1977 (the year punk died?) in the then-shitty neighborhood of Shad Thames, over six weeks on 200,000 pounds scraped together ad hoc, JUBILEE's production was as punk as its aesthetics. Having met Jordan in Vivienne Westwood's boutique where she worked, Jarman cast her as the film's fluorescent protagonist, the amateur historian/singer/militant Amyl Nitrate, then picked up Adam Ant in the street to play Kid, a Rimbaudish prodigy who meets his untimely end in the clutches of fascistoid motorcycle police. The shoot was reportedly a month-and-a-half-long party.
The conceit: Elizabeth I is sent forward several centuries by necromancer Dr. John Dee, who tells her, “I will reveal to thee the shadow of this time.” The Southwark that the Queen lands in is crusted with graffiti and burning cars, patrolled by both police and armed punks. The latter have apparently abolished law and order and now broadcast history lessons about the twilight of capitalism. The ruling classes of the past, we are told, created a variety of ideological control mechanisms, such as art (which was invented as a substitute for desire) and statistics (which replaced the world). Nitrate then reads from a History of Britain she's working on: “Human beings don't have any rights, but some dumb fucks told them they did.” Further, “Civilization was destroyed by resentment, but since civilization was always so fucking boring for everyone, who gives a shit.” Juvenile value-clasm at its rawest.
David Thomson called Jarman as “a true experimenter in forms.” JUBILEE bears this out with its poetic, metahistorical interludes and non-sequitur episodes, such as a Super 8 ballet number before a backdrop of burning wreckage and nude men in huge masks. Billed by Jarman as “a cabaret … a docustated fanzine … and a protest” and hailed by music historian Jon Savage as “the best film about punk.” (Cosmo Bjorkenheim)
“Our only hope is to re-create ourselves as artists or anarchists and release the energy for all.”
The conceit: Elizabeth I is sent forward several centuries by necromancer Dr. John Dee, who tells her, “I will reveal to thee the shadow of this time.” The Southwark that the Queen lands in is crusted with graffiti and burning cars, patrolled by both police and armed punks. The latter have apparently abolished law and order and now broadcast history lessons about the twilight of capitalism. The ruling classes of the past, we are told, created a variety of ideological control mechanisms, such as art (which was invented as a substitute for desire) and statistics (which replaced the world). Nitrate then reads from a History of Britain she's working on: “Human beings don't have any rights, but some dumb fucks told them they did.” Further, “Civilization was destroyed by resentment, but since civilization was always so fucking boring for everyone, who gives a shit.” Juvenile value-clasm at its rawest.
David Thomson called Jarman as “a true experimenter in forms.” JUBILEE bears this out with its poetic, metahistorical interludes and non-sequitur episodes, such as a Super 8 ballet number before a backdrop of burning wreckage and nude men in huge masks. Billed by Jarman as “a cabaret … a docustated fanzine … and a protest” and hailed by music historian Jon Savage as “the best film about punk.” (Cosmo Bjorkenheim)
“Our only hope is to re-create ourselves as artists or anarchists and release the energy for all.”
Derek Jarman
95 minutes
Half waking dream and half fiery polemic, THE GARDEN was born of director Derek Jarman’s rage over continued anti-gay discrimination and the sluggardly response to the AIDS crisis—he had been diagnosed HIV positive in 1988. Starring Tilda Swinton, this uniquely kaleidoscopic film shows the filmmaker’s genius at its most coruscating, making space in its breadth of vision for an over-the-top Hollywood-style musical number, nightmare images of tar-and-feather queer persecution, and footage of the particularly menacing-looking nuclear power plant that overlooks Jarman’s own garden, the point from which his film begins, and a cherished spot which he must keep to tending even as his body begins to betray him. Writhing with sorrow and anger, and yet so vividly alive to the loveliness of being, THE GARDEN is a baleful and beautiful epistle from the brink of the beyond.
Since his death, Jarman has become a tourist destination in addition to an artist. Pilgrims flock to his garden at Dungeness. THE GARDEN, however, isn’t after your devotion or its associated tokens; its ambitions are grander and less attainable than sainthood. As Jarman writes in Modern Nature, “Strands of thought crisscross, but one thing is clear: the film must show the quaint illusion of narrative cinema threadbare.” Elsewhere: “Had I not raised a hopeless banner against the admen of the Cinema Renaissance, entered a battle I knew I would never win—not even posthumously as they held all the cards?” The banner still flies. Death is not the end. It’s an opportunity.
Since his death, Jarman has become a tourist destination in addition to an artist. Pilgrims flock to his garden at Dungeness. THE GARDEN, however, isn’t after your devotion or its associated tokens; its ambitions are grander and less attainable than sainthood. As Jarman writes in Modern Nature, “Strands of thought crisscross, but one thing is clear: the film must show the quaint illusion of narrative cinema threadbare.” Elsewhere: “Had I not raised a hopeless banner against the admen of the Cinema Renaissance, entered a battle I knew I would never win—not even posthumously as they held all the cards?” The banner still flies. Death is not the end. It’s an opportunity.
Derek Jarman
90 minutes
“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.
Derek Jarman
79 minutes
“The virus rages fierce. I have no friends now who are not dead or dying. Like a blue frost it caught them. At work, at the cinema, on marches and beaches. In churches on their knees, running, flying, silent or shouting protest.”
This voice, one of four narrators (including Derek Jarman, John Quentin, Tilda Swinton, and Nigel Terry), speaks over a field of pure blue in Jarman’s final work BLUE. In the film, Jarman fills the screen with blue—still and unyielding for an hour and nineteen minutes. This radically experimental gesture places something rather simple (a color) where something grand should be (a narrative film). Jarman’s eyesight was deteriorating from the virus and experimental medication and his decision to simplify image to static color is one way of inviting the viewer into his sightlessness.
“In the pandemonium of image / I present you with the universal Blue / Blue an open door to soul / an infinite possibility / Becoming tangible.”
Jarman is interested in reifying the ultimate questions of human existence through the film and this one color. Blue—and all color for that matter—is essentially an abstraction, the wavelength of light reflected from a surface or through a prism which the retina receives, sending signals to the brain that results in our perception. Blue has one of the shortest wavelengths visible to the human eye, which reminds us there are colors we are incapable of seeing. BLUE makes visible those colors or wavelengths—or people—that surround us but have been rendered invisible. The endless and still dying are invoked, voices always echoing somewhere.
“Blue is the universal love in which man bathes—it is the terrestrial paradise.”
BLUE is Jarman’s baptism and death: a dream, a prophecy, poetry.
This voice, one of four narrators (including Derek Jarman, John Quentin, Tilda Swinton, and Nigel Terry), speaks over a field of pure blue in Jarman’s final work BLUE. In the film, Jarman fills the screen with blue—still and unyielding for an hour and nineteen minutes. This radically experimental gesture places something rather simple (a color) where something grand should be (a narrative film). Jarman’s eyesight was deteriorating from the virus and experimental medication and his decision to simplify image to static color is one way of inviting the viewer into his sightlessness.
“In the pandemonium of image / I present you with the universal Blue / Blue an open door to soul / an infinite possibility / Becoming tangible.”
Jarman is interested in reifying the ultimate questions of human existence through the film and this one color. Blue—and all color for that matter—is essentially an abstraction, the wavelength of light reflected from a surface or through a prism which the retina receives, sending signals to the brain that results in our perception. Blue has one of the shortest wavelengths visible to the human eye, which reminds us there are colors we are incapable of seeing. BLUE makes visible those colors or wavelengths—or people—that surround us but have been rendered invisible. The endless and still dying are invoked, voices always echoing somewhere.
“Blue is the universal love in which man bathes—it is the terrestrial paradise.”
BLUE is Jarman’s baptism and death: a dream, a prophecy, poetry.
