Derek Jarman (1942-1994)
Biography from Baseline's Encyclopedia of Film
Born: January 31, 1942, Northwood, England
Died: February 19, 1994, London, England
Leading avant-garde British filmmaker
whose visually opulent and stylistically adventurous body of work stands
in defiant opposition to the established literary and theatrical traditions
of his sometimes staid national cinema. With influences ranging from the
eccentric writing-directing team Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
to seminal gay aesthetes Jean Cocteau and Kenneth Anger, Jarman advocated
a personal cinema more dedicated to striking imagery and evocative sounds
than to the imperatives of narrative and characterization. His comments
on one of his strongest films are revealing: 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."
Like the noted American underground filmmaker
Anger, Jarman displayed a fascination with violence, homoeroticism, gay
representation and mythopoeic imagery. Proudly and openly gay, Jarman shared
news of his HIV infection with his public and incorporated his subsequent
battles with AIDS into his work, particularly in The
Garden (1990) and Blue
(1993). Excavating and reclaiming suppressed gay history was an ongoing
project that informed his several unconventional biopics: SEBASTIANE (1975),
Jarman's sun-drenched directorial debut about the martyred Christian saint;
the unusually accessible and slyly anachronistic Caravaggio
(1986); the raw and angry modern dress version of Christopher Marlowe's
Edward
II (1991); and the stark and theatrical Wittgenstein
(1993).
Trained in the fine arts, Jarman began
as (and remained) a designer of sets and costumes for ballet and opera.
He made his first films (super-8 shorts) while working as a set designer
on Ken Russell's THE DEVILS (1971) and SAVAGE MESSIAH (1972). He continued
to paint and exhibit his work at London galleries while making his own
films, which also reflected a painterly concern with composition. Jarman's
features, shorts and music videos display an artist's lively interest in
contemporary and historical English culture. In JUBILEE (1978), Queen Elizabeth
I is conducted on a tour of a futuristic England in which violence and
anarchy hold sway; the film became something of a beacon of the punk movement
in the late 1970s. Jarman's take on THE TEMPEST (1979) was a typically
irreverent and somewhat rambling reworking of Shakespeare's play. The WWI
poems of Wilfred Owen, set to the music of Benjamin Britten, shaped War
Requiem (1988), a powerful essay on the wastes of wars past while commenting
on the modern ravages of AIDS.
Jarman's feature about the painter Caravaggio
was perhaps his most popular film. This stylishly rendered biopic dramatized
the conflicts between the artist's need for patronage, his religious beliefs
and his sexuality. Noting that Caravaggio consistently painted Saint John
as muscle-bound, Jarman suggested that the painter found sexual as well
as aesthetic elation with the street thug he used as a model. The director
also had fun creating filmic facsimiles of some of the painter's best known
works. Curiously, although it undercuts narrative conventions by using
heavy-handed anachronisms—typewriters, motorbikes—the film nevertheless
reiterated one of the hoariest clichés of Hollywood biopics such
as LUST FOR LIFE: i.e., that art is little more than immediately recorded
experience, "life" thrown directly onto the canvas; the process of artistic
creation is completely glossed over.
Like the celebrated American underground
filmmaker Stan Brakhage, Jarman was a compulsive film diarist. He chronicled
much of his life on super-8 film and incorporated this footage, blown up
to 35mm, into his more personal, non-linear narrative films. Jarman's super-8
movies of beautiful young men in dramatic landscapes featuring caves, rocks
and water lent a lushly romantic mood to THE ANGELIC CONVERSATION (1985),
a non-traditional rendering of Shakespeare's sonnets. Last
of England, a raging, despairing, and emotionally overwhelming vision
of Britain as an urban wasteland, intercut shots of Jarman writing in his
room with excerpts from home movies shot by the director, his father, and
his grandfather and surreal tableaux of violence and degradation. Pastoral
sequences of Jarman's childhood evince a longing for simpler times for
the filmmaker and the nation. Jarman described himself as one of the last
generation to remember "the countryside before mechanization intervened
and destroyed everything."
Though much of Jarman's work is intensely
personal, it was also supremely collaborative. He worked with many of the
same people—in front of and behind the camera—on each of his projects.
He welcomed and encouraged contributions; significant Liverpool sequences
in THE LAST OF ENGLAND were shot by members of Jarman's crew without his
direction. Composer-sound designer Simon Fisher Turner provided powerful
scores and/or densely layered soundtracks for CARAVAGGIO, THE LAST OF ENGLAND,
THE GARDEN, EDWARD II and BLUE. Distinguished actor Nigel Terry starred
as the tortured Caravaggio, and his rich deep voice narrated THE LAST OF
ENGLAND and parts of BLUE. Jarman's most important performer was the prodigiously
talented Tilda Swinton, whose intensity and unusual beauty graced THE LAST
OF ENGLAND, WAR REQUIEM, THE GARDEN, EDWARD II, WITTGENSTEIN, BLUE and
Jarman's segment of Aria
(1988).
In his last years, Jarman was an outspoken
advocate for the rights and dignity of gays and PWAs (Persons With AIDS),
but art remained his primary cause. A champion of film art and a dedicated
experimentalist, he was a critic of, and at odds with, what he saw as the
stifling, repressive commercialism of mainstream cinema. Always struggling
for funds, Jarman produced his first seven features for a combined cost
of only $3 million. His final film, Blue,
was his most unconventional—an unchanging field of blue over which we hear
voices and sounds. Blind and mortally ill, Jarman remained a visionary
film maverick. He authored a number of books, including a 1984 autobiography,
Dancing Ledge. Jarman succumbed to AIDS complications at age 52.
LINKS:
A nice site, but pretty incomplete, about the director:
Derek Jarman, shadow
& substance
Another tribute page, but in japanese!
Derek Jarman pages, WAX
museum
Complete list of his filmography:
Derek Jarman on the
Internet Movie Database
List of books written by Derek Jarman, or about his life and his
work:
Derek
Jarman page, Amazon.com
Some notes about her movies, from the Mystic Fire catalog:
The Derek Jarman collection
A fine amatorial page dedicated to Derek Jarman, with photos of
the Prospect Cottage, by Dave Gardiner:
Derek Jarman
Homepage
Back to the Tilda
Swinton Lovers' Page