The Edge Magazine Online - Film, TV, DVD: An A-Z of Derek Jarman

Somewhere Over The Rainbow

An A to Z of Derek Jarman

by Gerald Houghton (1993)

Was it about anything?
nothing
something
I'm not sure, why don't you tell me?
But if you ask me was it worth it? I'd say yes
Goodnight, Thank you
For your borrowed time.

(The Last of England, 1987)

A IS FOR . . . THE ANGELIC CONVERSATION. Shot on 8mm during the summer of 1984, The Angelic Conversation dates from Derek Jarman's mid-eighties non-narrative period. Twelve Shakespearean sonnets – read by Judi Dench – provide the film's only dialogue, juxtaposing the exquisitely framed images that proffer an affair between two young men (Paul Reynolds, Phillip Williamson); the stop-frame tableaux are those glimpsed from the windows of an Elizabethan House as the lovers find and eventually lose each other, culminating in a garden.

Originating from the same period as the vitriolic The Last of England, the film cannot help but furnish reminders of shadows baiting the beauty: 'Destruction hovers in the background,' says the director, 'the radar station, the surveillance, the feeling one is under psychic attack. In the background of The Angelic Conversation there is surveillance by Nobodaddy. I was exploring a landscape I had never seen on film: areas of psyche that hadn't been projected before. I have seen very few films on male love which are gentle. At the end of the film (violence) is cauterised by the blossom, which obliterates the radar. The blossom takes over.' The score for the film is provided by Benjamin Britten, with original music by Coil.

B IS FOR . . . BANKSIDE. Derek Jarman's final riverside warehouse home and studio in London that burnt down in 1980: 'I sat through the night, entranced by my burning past.'

C IS FOR . . . CARAVAGGIO. 'The master of dark shadows' Michelangelo Caravaggio, last great painter of the Italian renaissance, lies dying in Porto Ecole, North of Rome in July 1610, reflecting upon his brief but extraordinary life. How, as a penniless runaway at the age of 17, he was taken under the patronage of the painters academy of St. Luke and rose to fame, using prostitutes and street boys as models, flaunting his bisexuality, fashioning unique and frequently homoerotic paintings. And of how his artistry was blighted by the bar brawls, knife fights, and a relationship with Ranuccio Thomasoni that ended in murder in 1606.

Jarman's film of penetrating shadows, prolonged silences and savage aggression was shot entirely on sets in Limehouse warehouse on the Isle of Dogs over six weeks in September/October 1985 with Sean Bean, Nigel Davenport and Jarman muse Tilda Swinton. Forced by the constrictions of budget to rein in reality, the imagination is freed on heavily stylised sets buzzing with the recorded street sounds of modern Italy and the quiet atmospheric scoring of Simon Fisher Turner. The central flaws in the director's immaculate conceit lie in the inherent unease of the modern overlay to a classical tale (a shortcoming far from repeated in the later Edward II), and the curiously under-worked homoeroticism that so charges the artist's imagination and deed, but curiously not the audience. But neither detract from the elegant simplicity of the framing, nor the electric playing of Jarman regular Nigel Terry in the title role.

D IS FOR . . . DANCING LEDGE. Published in 1984, Dancing Ledge is part autobiography, part diary documenting the production of Jarman's early films and assorted projects, including designing several movies and a staging of The Rake's Progress for Ken Russell.

E IS FOR . . . EDWARD II. 'How to make a film of a gay love affair and get it commissioned. Find a dusty old play and violate it. It is difficult enough to be queer, but to be queer in the cinema is almost impossible. Fuck poetry.' Here Jarman elects to violate dusty old Christopher Marlowe, wherein the newly crowned Edward (Steven Waddington) bestows titles and honours upon his lover Piers Gaveston (Andrew Tiernan), much to the ire of both Queen Isabella (Swinton) and a ruling elite incapable of accepting a queer monarch. Thus is the stage set for the archaic scheming and revenge of power and prejudice against love. To this end, Isabella is required to move from slighted lover to throat-ripping vampiric avenger, from confused to calculating and cruel – a detailed and extraordinary performance from Swinton that netted her the Best Actress award at the prestigious Venice Festival.

The modes and manners of Caravaggio were here extended over the five week shoot at Bray Studios to refute any notion of this being a piece of naturalistic cinema: 'I can't even watch (costume dramas),' says Jarman, 'because they never look historical. They just look appalling.' Sets, such as they are, consist of huge stone blocks augmented with a minimum of props, a highly-mannered maze through which the characters move in costumes suited to personality rather than period; thus the excellent Nigel Terry's Mortimer sports modern military garb, the lovers formal suits or leather jackets, and Isabella is reborn as a bejewelled 50s vamp: 'Isabella spent everything she had on expensive dresses,' explains Jarman.

Through this the director succeeds in forging the links between past and present, searching for historical resonance within the Marlowe text; OUTRAGE activists appear in crowd scenes to protest homophobia because, 'the whole central relationship . . . is mirrored by what's happening right now with Section 28 and Clause 25 and so on. There's also a sense in which the making of the film is about reclaiming history, because there's been a long tradition of denying the homosexual side of the relationship between Edward and Gaveston.' The BBC/British Screen film supports an elaborate musical score by Simon Fisher Turner, and Annie Lennox appears to sing 'Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye' in its most memorable scene, as the pyjama-wearing lovers dance together one final time before Gaveston's exile. 'I was interested in looking at love in a different way. One can't quite see why this one person is attracted to the other one, and surely that's the way everybody thinks about other people falling in love?'

F IS FOR . . . FAVOURITE FILMS. (In alphabetical order): L'Atalante, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, The Canterbury Tales, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Madame de . . ., Meshes of the Afternoon, Modern Times, Orphee, Pandora's Box, The Wizard of Oz (Sight and Sound, December 1992).

G IS FOR . . . THE GARDEN. The apogee of Jarman's subjective, non-naturalistic cinema is this film set amongst the garden and stark Kent headland of the director's coastal home in the shadow of Dungeness: 'There's a menacing sunset beyond the nuclear power station: livid yellows and inky blacks with a deep scarlet gash.' Shot just before he was seriously ill in 1990, and largely completed in post-production without him, Jarman appears as himself, asleep at his desk, mind filling with images and allegorical dreamscapes of his garden on the shingles of the beach, flowers, the sea and sky, intercut with a reimagining of the New Testament in which Christ is recast as a pair of persecuted Queer lovers (Johnny Mills, Kevin Collins).

The power of the film lies in its ability to be open for interpretation, the garden itself can be thus cast as either that of Eden or Gethsemane; the film an unapologetic celebration of Queer life, or a swingeing attack on the double standards of the Church's attitude towards homosexuality and its role in the face of AIDS.

The strength of this film over his other streams of consciousness lies in its ability to seamlessly blend the portentous and affecting with a surprising contrast through humour (a credit card commercial, a video for the anthemic 'Think Pink'). Through the intricate amalgamation of styles (staged studio tableaux, 8mm, time-lapse, black and white, colour) and a sophisticated soundtrack/sound design by Simon Fisher Turner and featuring the majestic strings of The Balanescu Quartet, the film permits both literal and non-literal readings, anchored by Christ/the lovers, and the presence of the startling Swinton and the craggy Jarman.

Bitter, erotic and elegiac by turn, the film stands in many ways as the summation of director's career, littered with extraordinary moments – the cruel and unusual torture of the lovers by sadistic policemen, the Virgin Mary (Swinton) pursued by a vicious press pack, the transcendent bombardment of ravishing images and music in the finale. Derek Jarman's finest film.

H IS FOR . . . HIV. 'The young doctor who told me this morning I was a carrier of the AIDS virus was visibly distressed. I smiled and told her not to worry, I had never liked Christmas . . . The sword of Damocles had taken a sideways swipe, but I was still sitting in the chair.' (The Last of England, 1987) 'My sense of confusion has come to ahead, catalysed by my public announcement of the HIV infection. Now I no longer know where the focus is, for myself, or in the minds of my audience. Reaction to me has changed. There is an element of worship, which worries me. Perhaps, I courted it. In any case I had no choice, I've always hated secrets, the canker that destroys; better out in the daylight and be done with it. But if only it were that easy.' (Modern Nature, 1991)

I IS FOR . . . IMAGINING OCTOBER. A short (27 minutes) made for the London Film Festival in 1984, and shot in October that year when Jarman was invited to Moscow for a screening of The Tempest in a low-budget festival. The film blends this dream-like footage with specifically political sloganeering: 'The film could have been called Imaging October, but I decided on Imagining October. It was filmed in October, about an October revolution, Eisenstein's film was called October: these were the connections.'

J IS FOR . . . JUBILEE. 'In Jubilee all the positives are negated, turned on their heads. Its dream imagery drifts uncomfortably on the edge of reality. Its amazons make men uncomfortable, ridicule their male pursuits. Its men are all victims.' Made in 1977, Jubilee stands as arguably the only Punk film that still holds water: Jarman transports Elizabeth I through time to a kingdom in the throes of disintegration, gangs of women roam the streets of this junky, ravaged urban landscape, law and order has broken down, violence is endemic, and the soundtrack is that of angry youth, most noticeably the then fledgling Adam Ant.

The film was released in February 1978 to, 'uniformly hostile reviews' relates Jon Savage in his captivating epic England's Dreaming, but is stronger in hindsight. It suffers from the over-enthusiasms of youth, succumbing on occasion to juvenile shock-tactics, but had the vision to look beyond the surface of Punk and foster a self-consuming Ballardian landscape of internal-analysis and decay, where the energies of the music are sucked up into a corporate 'rebellion' machine: 'For an audience who expected a punk music film, full of 'anarchy' and laughs at the end of the King's Road, it was difficult to swallow,' wrote Jarman later. 'They wanted action, not analysis; and most of the music lay on the cutting room floor.' But not Jordan's pouting, camp reading of 'Rule Britannia' which acts as the summation of the film. 'It all began with William the Conqueror, who screwed the Anglo-Saxons into the ground,' her Amyl Nitrate says at one point, 'carving the land into Theirs and Ours. There were two languages in the land, and the seeds of war were sown.'

Working to no formal script, Jubilee was built on autobiographical elements and in the streets and warehouses of the director's early life, with a diverse cast from a youthful Toyah, to a young Ian Charleson, who would later find fame in the more conventional Chariots of Fire and largely dissociate himself from Jarman's film, later dying of AIDS related complications.

Shocking and ridiculous, hysterical and authentic, Jubilee is perfect Punk celluloid, far outstripping the 'look at me' sentiments of The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle (which actually features footage shot by Jarman) and the crass political posturing of Rude Boy. 'Afterwards, the film turned prophetic,' wrote Jarman. 'Dr Dee's vision came true – the streets burned in Brixton and Toxteth, Adam was Top of the Pops and signed up with Margaret Thatcher to sing at the Falklands Ball. They all sign up one way or another.'

K IS FOR . . . KENT. 'Prospect Cottage, its timbers black with pitch, stands on the shingle at Dungeness. Built eighty years ago at the sea's edge – one stormy night many years ago waves roared up to the front door threatening to swallow it . . .' (Modern Nature, 1991)

L IS FOR . . . THE LAST OF ENGLAND. 'The film is like no other; occupying its own space; usually when you're told this it's a publicity stunt; but with this film it's true; but don't think I feel novelty a virtue. The Last of England is exciting because it makes all recent British Cinema look very tired. It makes the work of my contemporaries pale into conformity.' A decade after, The Last of England is as close as Derek Jarman has come to a remake – Jubilee recast in an abstract frame, the impetuosity of the punks supplanted by paramilitary threat, any pretence towards conventions of plot deserted in a fever dream of urban collapse. Reference is made to The Falklands, the Bomb, the Royal Wedding: violence and decay await around every corner, Swinton dances hysterically beside a bonfire.

Coinciding with the director's diagnosis of HIV infection and the natural revulsion of the destruction wrought in the wake of the Tory government (1987), The Last of England is by some distance Jarman's most severe, bitter work.

The soundtrack alternately cajoles and batters, calling upon the services of such apparently dissolute talents as Barry Adamson and Diamanda Galas, as well as the regular Simon Fisher Turner: 'The Last of England works with image and sound, a language which is nearer to poetry than prose. It tells its story quite happily in silent images, in contrast to a word-bound cinema,' shot on 8mm blown up to 35mm, colour and black and white, in Liverpool, London and New York, and utilising home movies shot in the 20s and 40s.

'The Last of England is not as manipulative as a conventional feature; you know – jump here, be frightened here, laugh. Traditional features manipulate the audience. Apart from being stuck with my film for 85 minutes, my audience have much greater freedom to interpret what they are seeing, and because of the pace, to think about it. I have my own ideas but they are not the beginning and end. The film is the fact – perhaps in the end the only fact – of my life.'

M IS FOR . . . MODERN NATURE. The Journals of Derek Jarman, a diary kept through 1989 and 1990, it contains reflections on his love for his garden in Kent, the period during which he and his collaborators fashioned the magnificent The Garden, the deaths of several friends from AIDS, his early life, and the writing of Edward II.

Towards the end Jarman falls gravely ill with complications to his HIV+ status, and the entries are painful but unexpectedly free from bitterness or regret, even when he temporarily loses his sight. 'The night's dreams, aided and abetted by morphine derivatives, grew increasingly menacing. Demons lurked in the room.' Quiet and inspirational.

N IS FOR . . . NEUTRON. An unrealised project from 1981-83, based on Jung's Aeon, whose atmosphere is preserved in The Last of England. 'You are the first and last, over and out.'

O IS FOR . . . GENESIS P. ORRIDGE. A reoccurring presence in Jarman's life, Throbbing Gristle provided the electronic score to In The Shadow of the Sun: 'Since then I've been videoed for the Psychic TV cassettes as the Temple Spokesperson, with the honeyed voice of their tattooist Mr. Sebastian, and filmed the Psychic Rally in Heaven with music from the 2nd Annual Report.'

P IS FOR . . . PET SHOP BOYS. In 1987, utilising production designs for Caravaggio, Jarman shot the striking religio-S&M It's A Sin promo for the Pet Shop Boys, going on later that year to shot a second, Rent, around King's Cross station. When the band elected to finally tour in 1989, it was Jarman they called upon to direct a stage show, alternately camp and baroque, and frequently both.

The tour relied upon the director to fashion six typically-themed films to use as projected backdrops, his first work to be shot on 70mm, and greeted by himself as some of his best work. The only problems occurred in Hong Kong where the word 'FUCK' had to be blotted out of Nothing Has Been Proved, and the image of two boys kissing (It's A Sin) inked from 300 individual frames.

The Jarman-directed film – Highlights – of the show utilised live and staged footage with videos and particular images that would later appear in The Garden. The band played the premiere party for Edward II in 1991.

Q IS FOR . . . QUEER. 'Queer means to fuck with gender. Our sexuality is unique. It's not about whether you fuck with boys or girls . . . QUEER IS NOT ABOUT GAY OR LESBIAN – IT'S ABOUT SEX.' (Flyer reprinted in At Your Own Risk: A Saint's Testament, 1992).

R IS FOR . . . KEN RUSSELL. Jarman and the enfant terrible of the British Cinema met through a mutual friend in 1970, when the then young painter was taken on almost immediately to design The Devils, Russell's 1971 overbaked adaptation of Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun. Although the anguished priests (Oliver Reed) and masturbating nuns (Vanessa Redgrave) now operate more on the level of camp, Jarman's majestic, brilliant white sets are still magnificent. A year later Jarman designed Savage Messiah for Russell, and the intervening years have seen a steady, continuing relationship, including stage sets and the two each contributing to the anthology Aria in 1987.

S IS FOR . . . SEBASTIANE. The 1976 story of the martyred St Sebastiane seen as a Roman soldier exiled to back of beyond with his small platoon, examining the relationship between sex and power. It is hard looking back from this distance to fully appreciate the importance to the Queer cause in film of this rather awkward little (£30,000) co-direction debut with Paul Humfress, performed in stilted barrack room Latin with subtitles.

The explicit homoeroticism opened to good reviews, especially in Spain and Italy, and played enthusiastically to record audiences in London. The film gained a second lease of (controversial) life when it played, albeit sans the celebrated erection, on Channel Four alongside Jubilee, much to ire of MP Winston Churchill, Mary Whitehouse and their small band of vocal 'moralists'. The film was scored by Brian Eno.

T IS FOR . . . THE TEMPEST. 'As you from crimes would pardoned be/Let your indulgence set me free.' Shakespeare's masterpiece has held an almost mystical fascination for British film-makers: Michael Powell long harboured a dream to make it with James Mason; Peter Greenaway cast John Gielgud in his massive, mannered alchemical 1991 reading. Jarman had himself broached the subject with Gielgud in the 70s, but finally cast poet/performer Heathcote Williams as the rather bedraggled, frock-coated vengeful exile on his magic isle, and Toyah Wilcox as his ethereal daughter Miranda, which prompted more than one to call this a Punk reading of the play.

The film was shot entirely on location at Stoneleigh Abbey (where the play was once performed for Elizabeth, the Winter Queen, in 1612) for a mere £150,000. 'The endless corridors and lots of rooms . . . suggested servants, romantic scholars with opium pipes, young girls with dresses spun from gossamer and frosted with shells and feathers. By the time filming was commenced, on February 14 (1979), we were living in another world. The cameras began to turn with the house in darkness, its shutters closed against the blizzards outside.'

Unlike Greenaway's pyrotechnic but ultimately faithful interpretation, Jarman's Tempest opts for a dream format, allowing the director to dissect the text at will: 'I cut away the dead wood (particularly the comedy) so that the great speeches were concertinaed. Then the play was rearranged and opened up: the theatrical magic had to be replaced.' What it is replaced with is a genuine magic.

In the same way Greenaway makes the island central to his concept, so Jarman makes the house a character in his, gathering shadows and occult symbolism to often quite startling effect, so that for much of its run his film is a surreal, claustrophobic and almost frightening confection. But brilliantly, the finale overthrows the dark horror and unease in favour of the transcendent magic of which Greenaway falls short, topped off by the arrival of the sublime veteran jazz singer Elizabeth Welch to croon 'Stormy Weather' and the little sailor boys dancing.

'The Tempest obsesses me. I would like to make it again, would be happy to make it three times.'

U IS FOR . . . UPPER GROUND. The first of his riverfront warehouses, 'a large, airy L-shaped room' at the end of Blackfriars Bridge.

V IS FOR . . . VILLA QUESSA. The young Jarman's one-time dream childhood home when his RAF father was posted to Italy in 1946, a villa on Lake Maggiore: 'But after a brief summer we left for Rome.'

W IS FOR . . . WAR REQUIEM. 'War Requiem is a collage. A cut-up'. Jarman uses Benjamin Britten's celebrated musical setting of Wilfred Owen's poems to weave an abstract but surprisingly coherent non-linear narrative on the futility and mourning of war. We see the poet (remembering that Owen wrote in the trenches of the First War), interleaved with remarkably blunt found footage of war across the ages, and staged sequences of a more symbolic nature, all with the uninterrupted score calling for marked, subtle silent performances.

Tilda Swinton is a nurse at the front and later attending to the needs of an old soldier (Laurence Olivier, shortly before his death) who looks back from an institution in 1988 at the horrors of war, and is required at one point to grieve at the foot of an altar for an extraordinary seven minute static shot. The film is beautiful, angry and melancholic by turn: The NURSE takes the basket of white poppies from her MOTHER, kisses her and leaves . . . The UNKNOWN SOLDIER is naked. She leaves the room, turning around once more. The UNKNOWN SOLDIER has vanished. On the altar there is a flame. She closes the door. The white poppies remain as an offering. 'I throw this film into the water, lest we forget.'

X IS FOR . . . 'X' rated. You don't see his films on TV very often since he died, do you?

Y IS FOR . . . YOLANDA. A friend who designed The Tempest for Jarman in 1979. 'She moves like a ballet-dancer, and dresses like one. A touch here and there – she stands forlornly like a doll in a tide of tinsel artefacts.'

Z IS FOR . . . THERE IS NO ENTRY FOR 'Z'. •

Selected Filmography:

SEBASTIANE (with Paul Humfress) Colour 1976 86 minutes

JUBILEE Colour 1978 104 minutes

THE TEMPEST Colour 1979 95 minutes

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SUN Colour 1980 51 minutes

IMAGINING OCTOBER Colour 1984 27 minutes

THE ANGELIC CONVERSATION Colour/B&W 1985 84 minutes

CARAVAGGIO Colour 1986 93 minutes

ARIA (one aria in anthology) Colour/B&W 1987 89 minutes

THE LAST OF ENGLAND Colour/B&W 1987 91 minutes

WAR REQUIEM Colour 1988 93 minutes

HIGHLIGHTS (Pet Shop Boys) Colour 1990 33 minutes

THE GARDEN Colour/B&W 1990 92 minutes

EDWARD II Colour 1991 91 minutes

WITTGENSTEIN B&W 1993 75 minutes

Selected Bibliography:

DANCING LEDGE Quartet 1984 254 pages

WAR REQUIEM (annotated script) Faber & Faber 1989 50 pages

THE LAST OF ENGLAND Constable 1987 249 pages

LUMINOUS DARKNESS (exhibit cat.) Uplink (Japan) 1990 56 pages

MODERN NATURE Century/Vintage 1991 314 pages

QUEER EDWARD II (script) BFI Publishing 1991 169 pages

AT YOUR OWN RISK Hutchison 1992 138 pages

QUEER (exhibit cat.) Manchester Gallery 1992 40 pages

Selected Soundtrack Discography:

CARAVAGGIO El/Cherry Red 1986 ACME 6

THE LAST OF ENGLAND MUTE 1987 IONIC 1

THE GARDEN MUTE 1991 IONIC 5

EDWARD II MUTE 1991 IONIC 8

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