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AMERICAN CINEMA PAPERS
1993 |
DEREK JARMAN A
WINDSWEPT STORMY SEA-GARDEN by Harlan Kennedy You do not yet taste some subtilties o' the isle, that will not let you believe things certain... ─W.S. Extinguish your preconceptions; slip your mind
into a receptive position; welcome
to the world of British filmmaker
Derek Jarman. Those who enter it
are seldom the same again. And those who stand back to frown or censure condemn themselves
to miss out on one of the oddest, bravest bodies of work in modern cinema. We knew what we were in for, or could have guessed, 23 years ago. Jarman's first movie – called Derek
Jarman Film Diary or Studio Bankside –
was shot on Super-8 in 1970. A
ten-minute cut-up impromptu filmed
in his Thameside studio in All this and, just under the floorboards, the ghost of William Shakespeare. For
Jarman's studio, now demolished,
was on the sight of none other than
the old Globe Theatre. This adds
weight to the suspicion some Britons have long had: that Derek Jarman is old Bill the Bard himself, reborn for the late 20th century. His career sits up and begs for the phrase "renaissance man" He's a poet and diarist, painter and designer (from opera and ballet to Ken Russell's The Devils and Savage Messiah), and the most perversely independent filmmaker in England. He made the homoerotic Sebastiane, the punk Tempest, the Thatcher-bashing The Last of England, the gay-rights Edward II, the pop-Brechtian Wittgenstein. He's also an occasional actor – in his own Caravaggio and The Garden – as well as a gay activist and prolific interviewee. But Jarman isn't Mr. Renaissance, he's Mr. Post-Renaissance. That's the secret of his place in British cinema and his uniquely powerful (nec)romantic
vision. That first short movie was
the work of a bricolage artist in love not
with perfection but with fallen
perfection; not with harmony but
with the forensic fragments and lost
chords of a bygone Utopia, an unrecapturable
past. Like his idol and spiritual ancestor Michael Powell ("the only
British feature director whose work is in the first rank"), Jarman is a looker-back at golden
ages: chiefly at an England/Europe that once or never was. And he finds his alter egos among men-who-came-after like the philosopher Wittgenstein, kicking against classical philosophy, or the painter Caravaggio, warping
quattrocento idealism
into the gymnastic emotional
articulations that would lead on to Baroque. Jarman's art – not just his films but his caustic-melancholy poetry and tachist-lyrical
paintings – is a bonfire of human vanity.
It rejoices in the possibility that if you reduce Progress, Prosperity, and established cultural Priorities
to ashes, you'll find a new Born in the genteel Just as mischief-making have been his writings, paintings, sayings, and doings. His diary-memoirs Dancing Ledge and Modern Nature, two of five books of discursive self-portraiture he's
published, have bits of gay confessional that read like a Cruiser's Guide to London's Heathland. His canvases range from early Pop abstracts impaled with 3-D trimmings (real water faucets), via satiric crucifixions, to the paintings gathered for his 1989
exhibit "Queer": smears of
excremental impasto over cut-out newspaper headlines (SEX
BOYS FOR Today Jarman's rebel romanticism sits oddly – but oddly majestically
– on a 51-year-old man who, as
everyone in That single color is projected sans alteration, inflection, or interruption. Only the odd blemish on the celluloid or explosion of scratches at end of reel affords variety: those and the volatile perceptions of the viewer, nudged to see subtle visual changes even when there aren't any (see under K for Kuleshov) by the film's amazing soundtrack. This aural cut-up of voices, music, and sound effects could be a career bookend to the imagistic cut-up with which Jarman and we began. There are musings on art, color, and infinity: "Blue transcends the
solemn geography of human limits." There are dispatches from the AIDS front-line: "The doctor in St. Bartholomew's Hospital thought he could detect lesions in my retina... `Look up, look down'... blue
flashes in my eyes." There are
fantasy sound-trips to far-off
times or places: a café in The movie doesn't so much move forward as swell around us. It's
about an artist's vision intensifying with failing sight. "In
the bottom of your heart" says the voiceover, "you pray to
be released from image." And we are: released from it into new-created
powers of seeing. The color blue suggests
all the things Jarman most loves:
sea and sky, favorite plants
(cornflowers, delphiniums). It is also
for Jarman the AIDS victim the portcullis of his mortality: blue, the color he kept seeing when doctors treated his deteriorating sight. Blue has its meaning and power for the audience, too. At first as featureless-looking as a trampoline, it soon becomes as versatile and animating. Thoughts
bounce off it higher and higher, propelled by its elastic invocations from ocean depth to furthest firmament. Colors creep in where there are none: blink and you see its polar hue in the spectrum, orange. Space is displaced:
blink again and the single screen-rectangle
overlappingly multiplies like a Cubist
painting. And other invocations flood in from art or literature. Blue the color of forbidden erotic cinema; blue the color of Arcadian melancholy from Poussin to Picasso. Above
all, that "little tent of blue'
Wilde saw through
his jail cell window that became one
gay martyr's badge of dissonant freedom handed down to others. Blue's triumph is to dissolve a dichotomy that's been at the heart of Jarman's cinema for twenty years. He The "experimental" movies – not just the early shorts but the feature-length ballads or broadsides in nonnarrative
form like The Angelic
Conversation or The Last of Another early film, Pontormo
Punks at Santa Croce ('82), showcases a fresco by the Italian Renaissance artist, traveled
over in Jarman's stop-start slow motion – every detail of faces,
gestures, and drapery fixed on for that
serial millisecond that will store it in the witness's memory bank. Later medium-length experimental films like Imagining October ('84) and In
the Shadow of the Sun ('80)
extend the style of flicker-book expressionism
while reemphasizing its roots in painting. October is about the act of
painting: 27 minutes of fire-licked images depicting the creation of a
Socialist Realist–style canvas of British soldiers carrying a red flag. (The film was
inspired by a trip to In his book Dancing Ledge, Jarman gives an idea of how
painterly in another sense – the
budget-improvising, artist-in-garret
sense – movies like In the
Shadow of the Sun were. "The camera I used was a simple NIXO 480 which cost £ 140. Most of the sections were filmed for the price of the stock, usually about £20 – some
lavish sequences, the fiery images for instance, had a budget: costumes £5, sawdust £4, paraffin £2, roses £10, candles £4.50, notebook £ 1, taxis £5." Jarman's technique in these films extends that lyrical shoestring staccato first fashioned in Derek Jarman Film Diary. One of his standard methods is to film on Super-8 at three to six frames per
second, then project the footage at the
same rate (often on his livingroom wall) while recording it anew on normal-speed VHS video. Result: a fluid,
dream-like stop-motion that,
together with the blurry-oneiric textures of the "degraded" footage, makes the movie resemble a painting half-come to life. The Angelic Conversation and
The Last of The Last of England ('87)
– loathed by British critics almost
as much as The Angelic
Conversation was loved – applies the
same visual pixilations to a landscape where past beauty is under threat from present brutality. The film's title comes from a Victorian painting showing two exile-bound newlyweds in a boat gazing their last at British shores. In Jarman's metaphor for 1986, the whole population is looking its last on All these technically adventurous movies, long and short, seek out the hidden atomic energy in places, people, and events by splitting
the atom of the image or the sequence
itself. Action is filmed, then
un-filmed (i.e., slowed to virtual standstill), then re-filmed. Never deconstructionist in the dry
sense – Jarman once said that
branch of avant-gardism was
"like calling water H2O"
– the films take a dead past or elusive
present and use their fissioning imagery to create what Jarman calls "a shimmering mystery/energy." It's a cine-optical version of what goes on in his other artworks. Opera designs for a Gielgud-produced Don
Giovanni (skittery abstract
shapes suggesting predatory tricorn hats)
or for a Ken Russell Rake's Progress (giant dinosaur skeleton as proscenium arch; last scene set in a subway station) subject classic texts to a wittily seismic molecular reconstruction. And his paintings – even the
semilyrical landscapes of his beloved Dungeness –
seek a destructive energy in their
subjects' cores as a warranty of
the desired rebirth. The key to death is the key to life. Who else,
after all, with the whole of Jumping from Jarman's experimental cinema to his more mainstream story-films
should shock us with contrast, and sometimes
does. In Jubilee and Caravaggio
and Edward II there are clear lines –
narrative, visual, thematic – and well-known actors reciting recognizable dialogue in recognizable (if sometimes spoofed-up) settings. But a similar decon–recon impulse is at work. The manner changes, not the post-Renaissance matter, nor the hunger for a lost wholeness
of soul and society that stands Jarman in
the same relation to post-greatness
Britain as Caravaggio to Italy-after-Michelangelo
or Webster and Jonson to England-after-Shakespeare. Jarman's narrative movies are a mirror-play between diffèrent phases
of history. One of his early shorts, The Art of Mirrors ('73),
an eerie arabesque involving
three costumed figures playing light-semaphore
with a square of glass, could be a
mocking template for his later approach
to story cinema. Modern sensibility
is used to reflect and refract the past
– to offer reversals, multiplications, dazzlements – and the invocations here are
literary as much as painterly. If the experimental movies are indebted to Blake and Turner, the narrative feature films owe as much to Jonathan Swift or Laurence Sterne. Dystopic worlds lit by shafts of bilious
humor. Characters in whom grandeur and aspiration are punctured by bathos and
shaggy-dog non sequitur. Where
Jarman's experimental films shatter
form with lyric formlessness, his story-films
and biopics use satire, surrealism, anachronism, and comic lèse-majesté to crack the tablets of received wisdom about what makes political, intellectual, or artistic "greatness" In Jubilee ('78), Elizabeth I (Jenny Runacre) is a time-tripping monarch visiting the New Elizabethan age – London in the year of Liz II's silver jubilee – and finding a world of punks, drug addicts, and
graffiti-scrawlers. Between these two movies came Jarman's most ambitious and longest-nurtured bio feature, Caravaggio ('86): six years in
the planning and once intended for the full
Cinecittâ treatment. Two early drafts were co-written with Visconti
scenarist Suso Cecchi d'Amico. It's the
filmmaker's most serious study of the
interface between a man and his myth,
and between history and hindsight.
It's also Jarman the painter's study of
his own craft, using a 17th century painter, rebel, and rumored
homosexual as his alter ego. As Nigel Terry's Caravaggio
turns his life and friends into paint – the
canvases-in-progress juxtaposed with the straining models, from restless Cardinals to dressed-up street urchins – the film itself seems to agonize between motion and stillness. And at times between vitality and torpor. For this is Jarman sailing perilously close to routine biopickery:
risking entrapment by the very
hagiographic solemnity he's spent
his life attacking. But between the sober genius-at-work sequences, Jarman slips in the decadent Cardinals, a high camp Pope (the Great Orlando, the circus performer who earlier served as The Tempest's mincing Caliban), and time-slip incongruities (motor-bikes, pocket calculators, Italian neorealist clothes). Here his zest for iconoclasm holds history upside down by the ankles and shakes out all the small change. Caravaggio at its keenest, like Sebastiane or The Garden, or like Jarman's mischievous early painting series "Magic Copes" (mock-religious canvases designed to be wrapped round the body and celebrating the four elements), disconcerts the historical-hieratic by eliding times and spaces; and by washing up all the witticisms and wisdoms that hindsight can license onto some terminal beach of wry retrospection. Even when tackling high art rather than high artist – when commandeering texts like The Tempest ('79) and
Edward II ('91) – Jarman subjects them to rebaptism by hindsight and by forced submersion
in his own time and culture. All this director's movies are about modern Anachronism in Jarman is not just a pretty device. It's a way of yoking Then to Now; of insisting that the distance-counter on art's
cultural time-machine can be put back to
zero suddenly and at will. Thus The Tempest, Shakespeare's late fantasy large with post-Renaissance longing and vanishing magic, becomes Jarman's
elegiac-witty tribute to a Swinging This was too much for some critics, including Vincent Canby, whose New York Times review – if that word does justice to a delinquent assault by mixed metaphor – helped to close The Tempest and set back Jarman's As for Christopher Marlowe in Edward II, he gets the
anachronism treatment with a
vengeance. Jarman knows that Gay King Eddie, killed
by Marlowe with a red-hot poker up
his ass (no historical corroboration
for this), could be a gift of a
martyr figure for modern times. So
he modernizes him. Lots of leather,
shaven heads, and gay rights demos. Annie Lennox singing Cole Porter under a spotlight. Tilda Swinton as Joan Collins
as Queen Isabella. And the rebel Earl
Mortimer heading up a Home Counties
fox-hunting crowd, their uppercrust accents as braying as their hunting
horns. In addition, Marlowe's dialogue is
freely tampered with, four-letter words thrown about like shrapnel and tactical-ballistic line changes like "Is it not strange?" becoming "Is it not queer?" The Tempest and Edward II both highlight the overlap
between Jarman's experimental cinema and his up-budget, anti-Masterpiece Theatre canon. Movies like Gerald's Film, Imagining October,
and The Angelic Conversation destructure idyllic frescoes in order to revitalize
them. Reality is shaken into a movie pointillism; the
art of perceiving becomes at once
more scientific and more lyrical. In the narrative features a different kind of idyll is dismantled: it's the comfort we feel in the presence of a biopicked "genius"
(Caravaggio, Wittgenstein) or a filmed "masterpiece" (The Tempest,
Edward 11, War Requiem). Jarman's
postrenaissance impulse, like the postimpressionist scientism of Seurat's pointillism or Cézanne's proto-cubism, demands that Golden Age art and thought be celebrated not by a weak, invertebrate nostalgia or hagiography,
but by a ruthless restretching of the old canvases on modern frameworks. No wonder Jarman gets scant support, moral or financial, from a mainstream British
film industry that likes its idylls and
the jewels in its country's cultural crown
preserved intact. All those chariots
of fire; all those expensive travel brochures
for imperial Jarman has never made a movie for a million pounds sterling in his life. His most expensive was Edward
II at £800,000 ($1.3 million).
Lay all his budgets end to end and you might finance the first twelve
minutes of Gandhi.
He's never claimed a virtue for this
exigency – Caravaggio ended up at a mere £450,000, though he once had hopes of a multimillion-pound
budget – but he's also never shown fondness for the British big boys who abandoned their country (as he sees) to chase the bucks in Hollywood. When British Film Year tootled its
trumpets back in 1985, hailing the
Scotts and Parkers and Puttnams as our great white hopes, Jarman was right in there flinging mud. This penurious patriotism takes odd and diverse forms. Jarman the misfit messiah can make The Last of England,
a blast of hate at the perceived
divisions of a new Tory Britain
where "Victorian values"
the pursuit of wealth and the intended restoration of the nation's greatness led (he argues) to a storm-trooper climate of suppression, censorship, and
class hatred. Yet Jarman the patriot-romantic
can also make a War Requiem ('88), his tribute
of tears to a generation of lost
soldiers. This film puts pictures to
Benjamin Britten's oratorio based on the First World War poems of
Wilfred Owen. Among those pictures:
home-movie footage from Jarman's
own childhood (including glimpses of
his Royal Air Force dad), shots of
Lord Olivier
in his last movie being wheeled around by nurse Tilda
Swinton (the Olivier voice
declaiming Owen s verse on the
soundtrack), and a large supply – too large – of
religious imagery, from
crowns-of-thorns to crucifixes,
memorializing British martyrdom. War Requiem was a commissioned project,
and seems it. One doesn't doubt Jarman's
sincerity, but it's thinly stretched.
How thin is demonstrated by his next
and, with Blue, his greatest film: The Garden ('90).
There is patriotism here, too, but
it's more mysterious, more sensual,
more touching: a pastoral paean to The Garden is a feature film in that it tells a story, has actors, and lasts 90 minutes. It's also an experimental film that plays games with continuity, rejoices in "forbidden" images (male nudity, gay love, mock-crucifixion), and uses Jarman's old friends, Super-8 and video, to turn cinematography into painting-by-celluloid. Retelling two Bible stories – the Expulsion and the Crucifixion – it turns them into gay fables and surrounds that metamorphosis with a vaster, stranger, more volatile quasi-nuclear mythscape. The Garden was filmed on
Dungeness beach in While the movie's "chorus" – a row of old women at a (last-)supper table – sit at the beach's edge like Norns
or distaff Disciples, the sea
behind them sparkles with sudden silver or a stray galleon, and the sky grows bright or dark, red or purple,
big with cloud or throbbing with thunder.
The metamorphic background so
disarms us that we surrender willingly to the weird happenings in the foreground. Scribes and Pharisees recast as flashbulbing paparazzi; Adam and Eve as
Adam and Adam; Christ as a pair of male
lovers set before a sauna-bath hulk crawling
serpentlike through the sand clutching a dildo. Not so much faux-naïf as
fauve-naïf. The propagandist blasphemies
are full-frontal and the film comes
on at times like a school Bible
pageant hijacked by Pasolini. It brings
up – how couldn't it? – the vexed matter of how important gay themes are to a gay artist. Whenever he's away from a movie camera and/or near a TV camera,
Jarman loudly insists that he's a
champion of gay causes first and a filmmaker
or artist second. Sample pronouncement:
"The films are of no consequence
and no interest. They're only there
for other reasons: to encourage the debate
about law reform and to give a sense
of solidarity to people who may feel
isolated" But the more The
Garden hammers its gay themes,
the more it knocks right through
them to find a broader, louder, more
resonant anvil. There is a planetary pantheism here, as in all Jarman's best work. We sense it in the opening metafictions of The Garden's soundtrack, with the director's voice heard crying "That's all right! That's a brilliant rehearsal!" The film itself is to be just one mark on the canvas. We are here to celebrate, through the film, everything around the film. The process that brought it into being; the landscape that inspired and cradled it; the anything-goes input of its cast, including a rousing "Think pink" musical number by a girl resembling a demented Avon lady. Hardly surprising that Jarman insists, Warhol-like, that he merely guides the creative process while his Factory hands man the levers, watch the dials, make many of
the on-floor decisions. The Garden, he claims, was even edited in his absence (he was ill at the time). Perhaps Jarman believes in a Golden Age of creative togetherness. Or maybe he just realizes that every "personal" signature is written in sand and sooner or later someone will scuff over the traces. He himself has been written out of history more than once. When Ian Charleson starred in Chariots of Fire, the actor was persuaded at producer David Puttnam's
insistence to drop his credit in the
controversial Jubilee, in which he had also appeared, from his press filmography.
(Jarman was not among those sending
tributes when the actor later died
of AIDS.) And when Peter Greenaway
made Prospero's Books in 1989, in which Sir John Gielgud playing Prospero voiced all the roles, there was no acknowledgment of another piquant precedent.
In 1975 Derek Jarman planned a Tempest in which Sir John as Prospero
"was to have played all the
characters" (see Dancing Ledge,
published 1984). Sometimes it seems Jarman has all the brainwaves in British cinema and those who come after reap or steal the benefit. What matter. His legacy is rich enough, multiform enough already; and should Blue be his last film, it will also be his last act of
curious, moving, transcendent
self-annihilation. Beyond plagiarism;
beyond the curses of censors or the
grappling hooks of philistines. A film with no pictures, no story, no beginning, middle, or end.... Just an attempt to frame infinity. And to prove that it's a single color made up from all the colors of the earthly, finite world that Jarman has spent a lifetime loving and honoring. COURTESY T.P.
MOVIE NEWS. THIS ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE NOV-DEC 1993 ISSUE OF FILM COMMENT. ©HARLAN KENNEDY. All rights reserved. |
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