Derek Jarman

I've been having a bit of a Derek Jarman-fest over the last few days. I taped a film portrait which was screened on More4, together with Blue, and found an old tape I'd made years ago of The Last of England, and then The Garden, my latest rental from Amazon. I taped Derek, a biographical portrait, and Blue, his last film when they were screened on More4 recently, so I finally got around to watching those as well.

I first came across Jarman without realising it in 1971 when I saw Ken Russell's The Devils. Jarman was responsible for the extraordinary sets - modernist white walls and tiles for a film set in 17th century-France. The Devils remains one of my top ten films and is scandalously unreleased on DVD, though I have a bootleg copy I got on Ebay. It demands a special edition with copious extras but Warner Bros won't play ball....sigh.

Anyway, back to Jarman. Of course in 1971 I had no idea who Jarman was, but over the years I became aware of his forays into the frontiers of avant-garde Super-8 film. So, was he a 60s, 70s, or 80s figure? It's difficult - he was born in 1942, so was in his 20s in the 1960s, but came to prominence in the 70s, and was at the heart of the punk scene and of the anti-Thatcherite Gay Liberation movement in the 1980s, eventually dying of AIDS in 1994

Watching Derek though, it's clear that he was always immersed in anti-establishment, 60's values and beliefs. His life from the moment he went to the Slade in London was a revolt against his upbringing, which was a very typically middle class army background. Derek is full of home movies showing an affluent, suburban household, with nicely dressed children playing on manicured lawns, yet in all Jarman's work there is a very 60s nostalgia for the trappings of his parent's life. This was always one of the great paradoxes of the 60s - as evidenced by the fashion for dressing up in Victorian costume and facial hair. Yes, it was a fad, but old photos and films became part of the visual landscape in a way they had never done before, and I think it was part of a reaction against the post-war obsession with modernity at all costs. The rejection of modernist architecture was part of all this. Jarman's films are saturated with the past - even though he is nearly always angrily rejecting it, attacking it, or satirising it or laughing at it.

Anyway Jarman, although a child of the 60s, came of age with the advent of punk and obviously felt far more comfortable with it ethos, such as it was, than with the hippies. And, as a gay man, he had more to reject. Although gay lib grew out of the 60s demands for liberation, free love was largely a heterosexual affair.
The Last of England, made in 1988, is a distillation of his feelings towards his native land. Made at the height of the AIDS panic/crisis, it's an angry, often confused but also elegaic vision of post-industrial decline, steeped in apocalyptic alienation yet replete with beautiful, startling images. It's full of home movies and 'found' footage, with a paradoxically upper-class voice speaking Jarman's narrative (actor Nigel Terry).
Today it looks a period piece and reminds me of the films we used to make at art school in the late 60s. Armed with a Super-8 camera (which is what Jarman used in many of his films), we went out into derelict houses and shot bizarre, meaningless little movies, which we took extremely seriously. There's a scene in The Last of England in which a couple of men have sex on a Union Jack spread out on a floor and it's the sort of filming we would love to have made in 1969.
The Garden was released in 1990 and by now Jarman knew he had full-blown AIDS. It's a strange film, made in the now-famous garden of his cabin in Dungeness. It's clearly an amazing place, inspirational and haunting, with the huge nuclear power station looming in the near distance and Jarman was obviously inspired by living there. The film's full of religious imagery - in Derek he talks about his education, and he was at St Juliana's, a private convent in Abingdon, for a while. I remember the place - we used to play them at netball. I'd be amazed if it's still there; it was one of those tiny little private schools, of which there were many in and around Oxford. Anyway, The Garden is full of Catholic imagery - obvously the Church had come out heavily against homosexuality, but in Jarman's films, there's always this split personality there, love and hate. There's a lot of gay martyrdom, and the whole Clause 4 debate and the AIDS panic must have engendered a feeling of intense persecution among gay men.
Much of The Garden is tediously tiresome, but I'm glad it was made, and it's great to have footage of his garden, as now it's become a bit of a tourist attraction, something I'm sure he would have hated.
Blue was his last film, and is simply a blue screen with a voice-over. By now Jarman was virtually blind, and the narrative chronicles his descent into the privations and huniliations of his treatment. It's rather wonderful and, typically, iconoclastic and challenging. It's funny, but in the interviews with him recorded for Derek, it's clear that he was such a nice man, funny and charming, with a great deal of self-deprecation - typically English, one might say, and that's clearly how he saw himself.
I'm looking forward to seeing some of his earlier films - they're rather addictive and compelling. I must mention the sound and music - it's tremendous. He worked with the same composers repeatedly, and in fact a glance at the IMDB will tell you that people worked with Jarman over and over again. There's the famous ones, such as Tilda Swinton, who could almost be called Jarman's muse, but many others turn up repeatedly. he obviously attracted people to hilm and they loved him - simple as that. It shows.