Derek Jarman 9781526141323

Citation preview

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

BRITISH FILM

Derek Jarman

MUP_Wymer_00_Prelims

1

MAKERS

7/26/05, 9:53 AM

Brian McFarlane, Neil Sinyard series editors

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Allen Eyles, Philip French, Sue Harper, Tim Pulleine, Jeffrey Richards, Tom Ryall series advisers

BRITISH FILM MAKERS

already published Roy Ward Baker geoff mayer Jack Clayton neil sinyard Lance Comfort brian mcfarlane Terence Davies

wendy everett

Terence Fisher peter hutchings Launder and Gilliat

bruce babington

Joseph Losey colin gardner Carol Reed

peter william evans

Michael Reeves

benjamin halligan

J. Lee Thompson steve chibnall

MUP_Wymer_00_Prelims

2

7/26/05, 9:53 AM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Derek Jarman

BRITISH FILM MAKERS

Rowland Wymer

Manchester University Press manchester

MUP_Wymer_00_Prelims

3

7/26/05, 9:54 AM

Copyright © Rowland Wymer 2005 The right of Rowland Wymer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for isbn ean isbn ean

0 7190 5690 x hardback 978 0 7190 5690 1 0 7190 5691 8 paperback 978 0 7190 5691 8

First published 2005 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset in Scala with Meta display by Koinonia, Manchester

MUP_Wymer_00_Prelims

4

7/26/05, 9:54 AM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document For my mother

MUP_Wymer_00_Prelims

5

7/26/05, 9:54 AM

MUP_Wymer_00_Prelims

6

7/26/05, 9:54 AM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Contents

page viii x xi xiii

list of plates series editors’ foreword acknowledgements abbreviated references used in notes 1 Introduction: Renaissance Man in search of a soul

1

2 ‘Longing for paradise’: early life and short films

18

3 The dance of the sun on the water: Sebastiane (1976)

36

4 Anarchy in the UK: Jubilee (1978)

54

5 ‘Our revels now are ended’: The Tempest (1979)

70

6 ‘To me, fair friend, you never can be old’: The Angelic Conversation (1985)

83

7 ‘Red is just blue screaming’: Caravaggio (1986)

92

8 ‘Where in all of this is Love?’ The Last of England (1987)

110

9 ‘Dulce et decorum est’: War Requiem (1989)

122

10 The imitation of Christ: The Garden (1990)

132

11 The closet of the heart: Edward II (1991)

143

12 ‘Still homesick for the ice’: Wittgenstein (1993)

158

13 ‘I want to share this emptiness with you’: Blue (1993)

170

filmography select bibliography index

185 195 204

MUP_Wymer_00_Prelims

7

7/26/05, 9:54 AM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

List of plates

1 Mirrors are the doors by which Death comes: Luciana Martinez, Kevin Whitney, and Gerald Incandela (masked) in The Art of Mirrors. Courtesy of James Mackay page 49 2 The past meets the present in Jubilee: Elizabeth I (Jenny Runacre) and John Dee (Richard O’Brien) with the corpse of Lounge Lizard (Wayne County), overlooked by the Head of Mausolus. Courtesy of Howard Malin

49

3 Through a glass darkly in The Tempest: Prospero (Heathcote Williams) uses his magic staff, topped with a version of John Dee’s Hieroglyphic Monad and a magic mirror, to give Miranda (Toyah Willcox) a glimpse of her childhood. Courtesy of EuroLondon Films

49

4 The annihilation of the Renaissance in The Last of England: Spring’s boot comes down on the body of Cupid in Caravaggio’s painting of ‘Profane Love’. Courtesy of James Mackay 49 5 Art and authority: Soldiers posing for a painting in Imagining October. Courtesy of Basilisk Communications

50

6 The emotional and sexual tensions of difference and domination in Sebastiane: Sebastian (Leonardo Treviglio) removes the boots of Severus (Barney James). Photograph by Gerald Incandela. Courtesy of the British Film Institute

50

7 The selfsame soul in a different body: Paul Reynolds and Philip Williamson in The Angelic Conversation. Courtesy of the British Film Institute

51

8 The artist as Christ in Caravaggio: Christ’s head is replaced by that of Caravaggio (Nigel Terry) in the living tableau for ‘The Entombment’. Courtesy of the British Film Institute

51

9 The pity of war: Tilda Swinton grieves for Wilfred Owen in War Requiem. Courtesy of Euro-London Films

52

MUP_Wymer_00_Prelims

8

7/26/05, 9:54 AM

list of plates 10 You cannot travel on the path before you have become the path itself: The encounter with Christ (Roger Cook) on the road in The Garden. Courtesy of Basilisk Communications

ix

52

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

11 The nightmare of history in Edward II: Edward (Steve Waddington) meets his death (or dreams he does). Photograph by Liam Longman. Courtesy of Working Title TV Ltd 53 12 The cage(s) of language in Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein (Karl Johnson) and a parrot share their imprisonment. Courtesy of the British Film Institute

MUP_Wymer_00_Prelims

9

7/26/05, 9:54 AM

53

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Series editors’ foreword

The aim of this series is to present in lively, authoritative volumes a guide to those film-makers who have made British cinema a rewarding but still under-researched branch of world cinema. The intention is to provide books which are up-to-date in terms of information and critical approach, but not bound to any one theoretical methodology. Though all books in the series will have certain elements in common – comprehensive filmographies, annotated bibliographies, appropriate illustration – the actual critical tools employed will be the responsibility of the individual authors. Nevertheless, an important recurring element will be a concern for how the oeuvre of each film-maker does or does not fit certain critical and industrial contexts, as well as for the wider social contexts which helped to shape not just that particular film-maker but the course of British cinema at large. Although the series is director-orientated, the editors believe that reference to a variety of stances and contexts is more likely to reconceptualise and reappraise the phenomenon of British cinema as a complex, shifting field of production. All the texts in the series will engage in detailed discussion of major works of the film-makers involved, but they all consider as well the importance of other key collaborators, of studio organisation, of audience reception, of recurring themes and structures: all those other aspects which go towards the construction of a national cinema. The series explores and charts a field which is more than ripe for serious excavation. The acknowledged leaders of the field will be reappraised; just as important, though, will be the bringing to light of those who have not so far received any serious attention. They are all part of the very rich texture of British cinema, and it will be the work of this series to give them all their due.

MUP_Wymer_00_Prelims

10

7/26/05, 9:54 AM

acknowledgements

xi

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Acknowledgements

I owe a great deal of thanks to many people, and particularly to the following: Neil Sinyard for his patience and encouragement throughout; James Mackay for giving me access to some of Jarman’s short films and for answering numerous questions; Tony Peake for clearing up a number of factual problems; Keith Collins and the Jarman Estate for permission to quote from the unpublished papers held at the British Film Institute; György Szo…nyi for information about John Dee and Renaissance occult philosophy; and Brian Hoyle for his general knowledge about British art cinema and his help in locating some obscure films. I would also like to thank the following for reading sections of this book and making helpful comments: James Booth, John Hoyles, Bruce Woodcock, Melanie Williams, Paul Gilbert, Angela Leighton, Gabriele Griffin, Marta Minier, and Jo Gray. The following people have given me useful information or substantial help in a number of other ways: Lesley Coote, Suzanne Paul, Sarah Peverley, Martin Colebrook, Bethan Jones, Elaine Goodman, John Bernasconi, Glenn Burgess, Brian Birch, Claire Thomas, Katarina Korhec, Tony Dale, Richard Byrne, Rod MacDonald, and Ben Watt. I am grateful to the University of Hull and the Arts and Humanities Research Board for a period of study leave which enabled me to complete the book, and to the British Film Institute for giving me access to their Special Collection of Derek Jarman papers. Some of the material in this book has already appeared in a different form in the following places: Rowland Wymer, ‘Marlowe and Jarman: The Transformation of Edward II’, in Elizabethan Literature and Transformation, ed. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner (Tübingen: Stauffenberg Verlag, 1999), pp. 273–81; Rowland Wymer, ‘“The audience is only interested in sex and violence”: Teaching the Renaissance on Film’, Working Papers on the Web no. 4 (2002), www.shu.ac.uk/wpw/ renaissance/wymer.htm; Rowland Wymer, ‘“The essential pivot of our culture”: Derek Jarman’s Engagement with Shakespeare’, in Not of an Age, but for All Time: Shakespeare across Lands and Ages, ed. Sabine CoelschFoisner and György Szo…nyi, Austrian Studies in English (Braum Iler Verlag, 2004), pp. 295–310. I am grateful for permission to reproduce this material.

MUP_Wymer_00_Prelims

11

7/26/05, 9:54 AM

xii

acknowledgements

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lastly I must thank from the bottom of my heart Pauline, Elliott, and Imogen and apologise for all the time with them which I have sacrificed in order to complete this book.

MUP_Wymer_00_Prelims

12

7/26/05, 9:54 AM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Abbreviated references used in notes

At Your Own Risk

Derek Jarman, At Your Own Risk: A Saint’s Testament (London: Hutchinson, 1992; repr. London: Vintage, 1993).

BFI Jarman Collection

Jarman’s unpublished papers held in a Special Collection at the British Film Institute in two separately numbered sequences (I and II).

Chroma

Derek Jarman, Chroma (London: Century, 1994; repr. London: Vintage, 1995).

Dancing Ledge

Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge (London: Quartet Books, 1984; repr. 1991).

Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986). Kicking the Pricks

Derek Jarman, The Last of England (London: Constable, 1987); reissued as Kicking the Pricks (London: Vintage, 1996).

Modern Nature

Derek Jarman, Modern Nature (London: Century, 1991; repr. London: Vintage, 1992).

Smiling in Slow Motion

Derek Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, ed. Keith Collins (London: Century, 2000).

Queer Edward II

Queer Edward II (London: British Film Institute, 1991).

Up in the Air

Up in the Air: Collected Film Scripts (London: Vintage, 1996).

War Requiem: The Film

War Requiem: The Film (London: Faber and Faber, 1989).

MUP_Wymer_00_Prelims

13

7/26/05, 9:54 AM

MUP_Wymer_00_Prelims

14

7/26/05, 9:54 AM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction: Renaissance Man in search of a soul

1

The artist who goes inward most deeply – and it is a painful journey – is the artist who touches us most deeply, speaks to us most clearly. (Ursula Le Guin, The Language of the Night) We are all accomplices in the dream world of the soul. (Derek Jarman, Kicking the Pricks)

Before he died in 1994 Derek Jarman had achieved distinction in an astonishing number of different activities – as a film director, painter, writer, set designer, gardener, and political activist. He was a true ‘Renaissance Man’ in the colloquial sense of the word, as well as having a strong and permanent interest in the art, thought, and literature of the Renaissance. Even when dying from AIDS-related infections, he seemed to blaze with a ceaseless creative energy. ‘If I couldn’t make films I’d write, [i]f I couldn’t write I’d paint.’1 It is beyond the scope of this book to do justice to all of his achievements and I have not attempted to do so. Those who wish for more details about the full range of his activities are recommended to consult Tony Peake’s invaluable biography.2 My focus is on Jarman as a maker of films and I hope that the detailed analyses I give of the eleven feature-length films he made between 1976 and 1993 will convince the reader that he is the most interesting British film director of the last thirty years and a major figure in European and World cinema. His career was unique in many respects and there are no obvious immediate successors to him, but his influence continues to be apparent in a large number of recent films. The always-limited funding opportunities for his uncompromisingly personal form of art film have diminished even further in the ten years since his death,3 but there is a space where the art film merges with the mainstream in which recognisably Jarmanesque styles and preoccupations flourish. In such a space can be found Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992), which appropriates

MUP_Wymer_01_Chap 1

1

7/25/05, 4:58 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2

derek jarman

Tilda Swinton’s dance of despair from The Last of England (1987), and such provocative and visually striking engagements with Renaissance art and drama as Agnès Merlet’s Artemisia (1997), Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999), and Alex Cox’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (2002). Jarman’s influence is not confined to the art-house circuit, however. It also appears prominently within mainstream popular culture. The music video ‘Losing my Religion’ which Tarsem directed for R.E.M. in 1991, and which won six MTV awards, makes extensive reference to Caravaggio (1986) as well as less direct allusions to Sebastiane (1976). Nor is this influence confined to directors who might be presumed to have some ideological sympathy with him. It is not surprising that Gus Van Sant should pay tribute to Blue (1993) by including some seconds of otherwise imageless blue screen in Gerry (2002), but it is rather more remarkable that Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), made from a rightwing Catholic viewpoint, should appear to echo at least three Jarman films (Sebastiane, Caravaggio, and The Garden (1990)). This echoing can be seen not just in the potential homoerotic and masochistic implications of martyrdom, the use of street Latin with subtitles, or the Caravaggesque lighting of interiors. It also appears in the close-up of the large black crow who pecks out the bad thief’s eye, a non-Biblical detail which references a similar shot in Jarman’s own version of the Passion (The Garden) rather than anything in the Gospels or medieval legend. One good way of approaching Jarman’s films is through the investigation of a series of apparent paradoxes concerning him and his work. In many ways he was an extremely radical film maker, both in terms of form and content. His first feature film was in Latin and his last one contained no images. In between these, he made several films with no conventional narrative or dialogue (The Angelic Conversation (1985), The Last of England, War Requiem (1989), The Garden) and two (Jubilee (1978) and Edward II (1991)) which, like Sebastiane, scandalised many people with their representations of sex and violence. Yet he always insisted, with considerable justification, that he was the most traditional of directors, constantly in dialogue with the Western cultural canon (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Caravaggio, Wilfred Owen, Benjamin Britten, and, indeed, the Bible). When it was suggested that The Tempest (1979) might form part of an ‘alternative’ celebration of British Film Year in 1985, he angrily insisted ‘I’m NOT alternative’ and asked ‘What’s alternative about the Tempest? I don’t see how a film could be more British or for that matter more conservative.’4 He disliked the traditional reliance of ‘quality’ British cinema on adaptations from novels and plays yet, in addition to adapting Shakespeare and Marlowe himself, he saturated his films with literary references, from the Anglo-Saxon poem

MUP_Wymer_01_Chap 1

2

7/25/05, 4:58 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

introduction

3

The Wanderer to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and frequently made use of that most dangerous of cinematic techniques, the poetic voice-over. Another major paradox is that although his first choice of career was that of a painter, and although his films were always praised for their visual style (much of it achieved through set design and lighting), he retained a lifelong distrust of images. ‘Pray to be released from image’ his last film declares, and it goes on to tell us that ‘The image is a prison of the soul’. All his films give great pleasure to the eye but seem to be searching restlessly for something behind or beneath the surface. Despite sometimes being referred to as ‘the English Andy Warhol’,5 he loathed the deliberately ‘depthless’ style of postmodern art and called Warhol ‘a truly dead mirror’.6 He was never comfortable with the label ‘gay’, regarding it as both too stable and too self-satisfied, too concerned to present a ‘positive’ image. He preferred the more fluid and mobile term ‘queer’. ‘Positive images are an illusion, like commercials – they are not the stuff of art … The great queer artists dealt with negatives, this is why Pasolini and Genet will last long after Gay Times is forgotten in a world of false hope and illusion fed by adverts … To call Pasolini, or myself for that matter, ‘gay artists’ is foolish and limiting, one day maybe we will dispense with boundaries and categories. I was never gay, queer maybe, difficult certainly, with good reason.’7 His final assertion of (non)identity in Blue was ‘I am a Not Gay’. Yet he also claimed that he knew he was homosexual from the age of nine and believed firmly that ‘it is not possible to change people’s sexuality’.8 He was unashamedly auteurist in his conception of cinema. All his films carried the credit ‘A Derek Jarman Film’ or ‘Derek Jarman’s Film’ and he eventually came to believe that a highly personal form of cinematic expression was the only kind which mattered. ‘I cannot watch anything that is not based on its author’s life. Acting, camerawork, all the paraphernalia, bring me little pleasure without the element of autobiography.’9 Yet he was also deeply suspicious of individualism in both art and life: ‘One part of me hates the idea of the author, even though I recognise the importance of individual experience. But it is also important to understand that we are as related to one another as we are individualised. Individualism can be quite destructive because it indulges itself at the expense of other voices.’10 He developed ways of working which allowed the creativity of other people like Christopher Hobbs his designer, Simon Fisher Turner his music director, or Tilda Swinton his favourite actress the fullest possible expression. On set, he was the antithesis of the authoritarian director of cinema myth, the kind who cracks the whip over his performers in the manner parodied at the

MUP_Wymer_01_Chap 1

3

7/25/05, 4:58 PM

4

derek jarman

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

end of Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963). Sometimes he seemed hardly to care if he had an audience (‘The work is the end – whether it’s appreciated or not by an audience is not important’)11 or if that audience consisted only of an ‘inner circle’ of those who had actually worked with him on the film: The only audience I worry about is my collaborators on the film; everything, and everyone else, is outside the circle. Cinema audiences interest me no more than the tide of humanity that passes each day under my window in Charing Cross Road – I wish them well. Provided the cast approve of the finished result, find the experience of making the film a joy, I’m happy and wish for nothing more.12

Yet he was always very sensitive to bad reviews, was thrilled when a film as intimate and experimental as The Angelic Conversation attracted halfa-million viewers on Channel Four, and thought that film still had the power to move a mass of people to tears or laughter in the way that painting was now incapable of doing. ‘Painting has degenerated into an obscure, hermetic practice, performed by initiates behind closed doors. There is a remarkable lack of emotional force in modern painting. Who could shed a tear for it now? But you can weep at Pasolini’s Gospel According to Matthew, and Ricotta can make you laugh.’13 To the question posed by Mark Nash, ‘Who is the spectator of a Jarman film, or rather to whom are the films addressed?’,14 I would answer that they are addressed to a far broader range of people than Jarman’s own inner circle of friends and collaborators or the supposed niche market of ‘dykes, queens and queers who make up a typical Jarman audience’.15 They are addressed to anyone who believes in the cinema as art and in the cinema’s power to move. They are addressed to anyone, of whatever gender or sexuality, who is prepared to go on a journey, perhaps a painful one, in search of him or her self, and to become Jarman’s accomplice in ‘the dream world of the soul’.16 In the end, Jarman wanted his audience to become artists themselves, rather than merely spectators: ‘I would encourage audiences to leave the cinema and get on with their own film. I would encourage everyone to become an artist because it is an inward journey and not an outward one.’17 To understand rather better some of the paradoxes sketched out above, it will be very helpful to focus on Jarman’s lifelong preoccupation with the Renaissance.18 Of his eleven feature-length films, no fewer than six engage with some aspect of Renaissance art or history and this sustained interest provides the key to some of the questions of personal and national identity which are central to all his films, not just those with an explicit Renaissance content. In Chroma he tells us how as a

MUP_Wymer_01_Chap 1

4

7/25/05, 4:58 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

introduction

5

child he made countless drawings of the black and white Tudor houses which were pictured in G. M. Trevelyan’s English Social History, a book which gave him a very specific cultural and historical perspective.19 ‘For Jarman, Englishness meant the age of the first Elizabeth.’20 Elizabethan England was ‘our cultural Arcadia’, the source of ‘a dream of England’ against which he contrasted the horrors of an industrialised, globalised, Americanised modernity. Like most Englishmen prior to the end of the twentieth century, he elided English with British national identity in a seemingly unproblematic way. The Union Jack signifies England in both Jubilee and The Last of England since at the time he made those films, the flag of St George, the more precise signifier of Englishness, was then still the almost exclusive property of far-right political groups.21 This elision of English and British identity has a very long history and is apparent in Shakespeare’s reference to England as ‘this scept’red isle’ in John of Gaunt’s famous speech in Richard II. It is also apparent in the grammatical slip near the beginning of the Proclamation of 1603 that James VI, King of Scotland, was now also James I, King of England. The Proclamation declares that ‘the Imperiall Crowne of these Realmes aforesaid are [sic] now absolutely, wholly, and solely come to the High and Mighty Prince, James’.22 Despite Jarman’s deep interest in Shakespeare, he never fully grasped that Shakespeare was deeply affected by the complication of national identity which occurred in 1603 and whose consequences remain with us to this day. After 1603 references to England and the English tend to disappear from his plays and are replaced by references to Britain and the British.23 For Jarman, however, Shakespeare remained ‘English’ and ‘Elizabethan’, even in a late play like The Tempest (1611). At one stage Jubilee was to have included documentary footage of the violence in Northern Ireland but normally when Jarman is reflecting on ‘the state of the nation’, he is thinking of England rather than the British state or the United Kingdom. Even more precisely, he is thinking mainly of southern England and some of the ‘sacred’ places which appear in his films, such as the stone circle at Avebury or the cliffs at Dancing Ledge in Dorset. This ‘twilit’ England was under constant threat from the modern world and the most potent myths of national identity usually arise in response to a real or perceived threat. The enduring myth of Elizabethan England was founded partly on the defeat of the Spanish Armada and was revitalised by the threat of Nazi invasion in the 1940s. In At Your Own Risk Jarman wrote, ‘There was always a mythic past, for my generation it was the war’.24 The Tudor houses which he drew were elaborated into ‘A world of white turrets, spires and towers … above

MUP_Wymer_01_Chap 1

5

7/25/05, 4:58 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

6

derek jarman

which an aerial battle was fought. I think these drawings reflected my inner turmoil, the battle that had raged throughout my childhood, the bombers and air raid sirens, while down below was a threatened home. Home in black and white.’25 In The Last of England the devastation wrought by Margaret Thatcher’s social and economic policies is represented as a continuation of the Blitz as London burns before being reduced to rubble. If this habit of looking back to a lost Elizabethan arcadia sounds ‘conservative’, then that is because to some degree it is. Jarman’s hatred of Thatcherism was partly because her particular brand of Conservatism wasn’t actually conserving anything. Nevertheless, he remained deeply suspicious of the heritage industry, declaring an equal hatred for the way the Elizabethan past might be ‘used to castrate our vibrant present’.26 His historical films were always meticulously researched but always included startling anachronisms such as the frisbee in Sebastiane or the typewriter in Caravaggio which opened up the possibility of a living relationship between past, present, and future. ‘Without our past our future cannot be reflected, the past is the mirror.’27 As Michael O’Pray wrote: In the films there is an acute, even nostalgic sense of a centre having been lost but, paradoxically, there is also an urgent desire to innovate and shock. On account of this combination Jarman is part of a long line of English radicals whose work has embraced a form of Romantic conservatism – William Blake, William Morris and, much closer to his own aspirations and times, the film-maker Michael Powell.28

Moving outward from Elizabethan England to take in the whole of the European Renaissance we find that in some respects Jarman subscribed closely to the ‘myth’ of the Renaissance which was constructed in the nineteenth century by Jacob Burckhardt and others. In this account the Renaissance was an emancipation of the individual from the oppressive superstitions of medieval Christianity and its revolutionary philosophical moment was the revival of Platonism in fifteenth-century Florence. This new Hellenism, as celebrated by Walter Pater, J. A. Symonds, and Oscar Wilde, encouraged an aesthetic appreciation of the nude male body and a more positive attitude to same-sex love: ‘From the moment Lorenzo, who slept with boys, commissioned Ficino to translate Plato things changed. Neoplatonism was a manifesto for living, not something dead. The monotheistic dictatorship of Christ was over. You couldn’t burn fourteen-year-old boys for sodomy, as they did in the 1430s, after Lorenzo.’29 Jarman never abandoned this sort of rhetoric (these words were written less than two years before his death)

MUP_Wymer_01_Chap 1

6

7/25/05, 4:58 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

introduction

7

but it always coexisted with a deep distrust of the Renaissance as the birthplace of capitalism, destructive forms of individualism, and the commodification of art. ‘The spurious individualism of the Renaissance, which both engendered and was born of capital, is dying. An art which began by collaborating with the banks of the Medici ends in bankruptcy on Wall St. On the way, it destroyed the sublime anonymity of the Middle Ages and replaced it with stolen goods.’30 It sounds rather surprising to hear such a distinctively individual director as Jarman praising ‘the sublime anonymity of the Middle Ages’ but another of the cinema’s great auteurs, Ingmar Bergman, did exactly the same in his introduction to the script of The Seventh Seal, where he spoke of the individual as ‘the greatest bane of artistic creation’ and longed instead to be one of the anonymous medieval workers who had collectively built the great cathedral of Chartres.31 In Jarman’s Caravaggio the postmedieval tension between art as a spiritual manifestation and art as a product to be ‘bartered and sold’ is played out with particular subtlety and revolves round the ambiguous symbolism of gold. When examined closely, Jarman’s interest in the Renaissance looks at times more like an extension of medievalism. He writes in Modern Nature that, ‘For years the Middle Ages have formed the paradise of my imagination, the archaic half-smile on the Apostles’ lips at Chartres, the blisse [sic] that unlocks.’32 He did not greatly admire the major painters of the Italian Renaissance, finding in them an almost indecent interest in the flesh and contrasting them unfavourably with ‘the painters of the North’ such as Brueghel and Dürer whose inward and spiritual qualities connected them more closely with the late Middle Ages.33 The importance of the Renaissance for Jarman was not so much that it was ‘early modern’ but that it was pre-modern. Although its Hellenism emancipated it from medieval Christian repressiveness, it had not yet succumbed to the scientific revolution which would separate out astrology from astronomy, alchemy from chemistry. His denunciation of modern painting as ‘an obscure, hermetic practice, performed by initiates behind closed doors’ is a very interesting choice of words, since the word ‘hermetic’ is derived from one of the traditions of Renaissance occult philosophy which fascinated and strongly influenced Jarman, the corpus hermeticum. While Marsilio Ficino was translating Plato for the Medicis, he was also introduced to another group of ancient writings, believed to be by Hermes Trismegistus, who was identified with the Egyptian god Thoth and thought to have lived at the time of Moses. In fact these writings date from the early years of the Christian era and, when combined with NeoPlatonic texts and the Christianised version of the Jewish Cabala elaborated by Pico

MUP_Wymer_01_Chap 1

7

7/25/05, 4:58 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

8

derek jarman

della Mirandola, make up a body of ‘magical’ thinking which many during the Renaissance and long afterwards thought of as a secret source of true knowledge about the universe. At the core of this ‘occult philosophy’ was a belief in the hidden unity of all things both spiritual and material. One of its English practitioners was the mathematician, geographer, astrologer, alchemist, and converser with angels, John Dee, with whom Jarman identified more strongly than any other historical figure, with the possible exception of Caravaggio. Dee was motivated throughout his life by a desire for perfect knowledge of the world and, after failing to find it through mathematical and scientific investigations, turned first to alchemy and then to the use of mirrors and crystals. In his crystal ball, or ‘shewstone’, he hoped that he, or his accomplices, would be granted visions of angels, who would speak to him in the original unfallen language of Adam (the lingua adamica), since lost to all men except the fabled Enoch. One of Jarman’s major uncompleted projects was Dr. Dee – The Art of Mirrors and the Angelic Conversations, several draft scripts of which survive under different titles and which provided material for Jubilee as well as The Tempest and The Angelic Conversation. Jarman saw both Dee and himself in Shakespeare’s Prospero and was always anxious to distinguish this ‘virtuous’ interest in magic from the more sinister ‘black arts’ dabbled in by figures like Aleister Crowley and his cinematic disciple Kenneth Anger, who certainly influenced Jarman but of whom Jarman remained wary.34 I will return to the importance of mirrors for Jarman but first I wish to discuss the significance of a particularly important strand of this Renaissance magical thinking – the practice of alchemy. The search for the Philosopher’s Stone, which would transmute base metal to gold, was at one level a materialist, chemical project and on another level a spiritual quest during which prolonged meditation would reveal the secret correspondences between all things and their ultimate unity. Alchemy originated in the Greco-Egyptian culture of Alexandria around 300 BC and reached medieval Europe in the twelfth century AD via the Arab world. The emphasis by scholars like Frances Yates, whose books Jarman read, on the importance of Florentine NeoPlatonism and Hermeticism for the development of Renaissance magic, is now seen as underestimating the continuity with medieval magical thought and alchemical practices.35 As I have already said, what was important to Jarman about the Renaissance was often its medieval aspects. The Philosopher’s Stone, known also in its liquid form as the Elixir, united the four warring elements of earth, water, air, and fire into a fifth element, the quintessence. It also united the male and female principles,

MUP_Wymer_01_Chap 1

8

7/25/05, 4:58 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

introduction

9

and spirit with matter. Jarman’s knowledge about this historical quest for unity and perfection came initially through the interpretation of it by the psychologist Carl Jung in books like Psychology and Alchemy (1953), Mysterium Coniunctionis (1963), and Alchemical Studies (1967 [1968]). Jung saw the alchemical process as symbolising the progress towards an individuated Self, in which unconscious aspects of the psyche, such as the repressed ‘feminine’ element in men and the negative ‘shadow’ side of the personality, would no longer be projected onto others but would be integrated with the conscious mind into a new unity, represented by the Stone (the lapis). Jarman took such ideas extremely seriously and they influence all his films, not just the ones with obvious connections to the Dr. Dee scripts. He is still making use of alchemical symbolism in such late films as The Garden (which is also a meditation on Christ as an archetype of the individuated Self) and Blue. There is not space here to investigate the interesting question of why Jung has so little current status within critical and cultural theory and yet was enormously influential on many artists and writers of Jarman’s generation, particularly those interested in fantasy and science fiction. Such writers would include Ursula Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Ted Hughes, Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, and D. M. Thomas. I suspect that the answer is partly that critics, who seek to analyse, break down, and dissect works of art are more naturally drawn to theoretical paradigms such as Derridean deconstruction or some versions of Freudian psychoanalysis which assist those tasks. Artists, who seek to create something which must be apprehensible as a unity, however complex, are more likely to see value in Jung’s account of the difficult journey towards integration and individuation. Especially, one might add, those artists who see their creative work as part of that personal journey. ‘I went in search of myself’, said Jarman in The Garden, and he saw a similar journey and a similar struggle towards ‘unity of being’ in his favourite director, Pier Paolo Pasolini, a struggle to express and reconcile the divergent impulses which produced The Gospel According to St Matthew and Salò, two films to which Jarman repeatedly referred. J. G. Ballard also thought that, ‘The whole purpose of imaginative enterprise … is to find one’s real nature’36 and this points us to one of the central ambiguities of the alchemic quest, an ambiguity which makes it a brilliantly apt symbol of psychic development. On the one hand it represents a process of change and transformation but on the other it represents a search for something which is already there, an essential self. ‘The philosophic stone, the gold of the ancient alchemists, exists in all of us but is difficult to discover.’37 In the form of the Elixir, this quintessence is elusive, fluid, and mercurial whereas in the form of the

MUP_Wymer_01_Chap 1

9

7/25/05, 4:58 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

10

derek jarman

Stone it represents something enduring and stable: ‘betwixt the Elixer and the Stone there is this difference; for the Stone rejoyceth in unity and simplicity, but the Elixer in plurality’38 and ‘that alone is fixed and certain which is subject to change’.39 The first film which Jarman saw as a child, and which had an enduring appeal for him, was The Wizard of Oz (1939) and part of its appeal was that it represented a magical journey of transformation and self-discovery which ends where it began, back home. I suspect that something else which he liked about the film was that, although it does indeed provide a magical experience for its audience, it also shows a degree of scepticism about the nature of magical spectacle. The Alexandrian culture of the first centuries AD, the amalgamation of Hellenistic, Jewish, and Christian ideas which were the sources of Renaissance ‘occult philosophy’, also gave Jarman some of the sources for his distrust of images. Although NeoPlatonism usually argued that the appreciation of visible and earthly beauty was the first step on a ladder to intellectual beauty and an apprehension of spiritual truth, it remained haunted by Plato’s dismissal in The Republic of the world of appearance as only a deceptive illusion. The Jewish and Christian commandments against making ‘graven images’ were also elements within this Alexandrian culture. At the end of Blue, Jarman quotes an eloquent passage about the transience of all things from the Apocryphal ‘Wisdom of Solomon’, probably the work of a Hellenised Alexandrian Jew from the first century AD. Elsewhere in the same text, he would have found numerous warnings against the worship of images, including such resonant sentences as the following: ‘As for the illusions of art magick, they were put down, and their vaunting in wisdom was reproved with disgrace.’40 Jarman’s ambivalence towards images is closely linked to his ambivalence towards mirrors. Although Dee looked for divine truth in his dark mirror, the introspection necessary for a successful journey towards individuation could also be characterised more negatively as narcissistic self-absorption. Jarman was interested in Freud as well as Jung, and he was aware of the link made in psychoanalytic theory between homosexuality and narcissism, the claim that ‘homosexual object-choice originally lies closer to narcissism than does the heterosexual kind’.41 He did not necessarily reject this idea, nor Freud’s more general claim that narcissism is the foundation of all sexuality: ‘it is probable that this narcissism is the universal and original state of things, from which object-love is only later developed, without the narcissism necessarily disappearing on that account’.42 In consequence, there is evident in some of Jarman’s writings and films a strong anxiety

MUP_Wymer_01_Chap 1

10

7/25/05, 4:58 PM

introduction

11

about how self-absorption might degenerate into a state of narcissistic entrapment.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Narcissus is derived not from the name of the young man who met his death vainly trying to embrace his reflection in the crystal water, but from the Greek narkao (to benumb); though of course Narcissus, benumbed by his own beauty, fell to his death embracing his shadow … Narcissus, narcotics, benumbed retreat into the self.43

If one looks into the mirror long enough, one sees death, and in Jarman’s short film Arabia (1973), there is a repeated shot of a young man combing his hair and preening himself in front of a mirror, a shot in which his face is sometimes replaced with a skull mask. One obvious escape from the self-imprisonment of narcissism is to project an image of the self onto another, producing an idealised fantasy of a perfect relationship. Jarman’s films are filled with images of twins and doubles – of which the most striking instances are perhaps the incestuous twin brothers in Jubilee and the two young men who form a composite Christ figure in The Garden. Such a relationship accords very closely with the hyperbolic Renaissance rhetoric about friendship between men, which was mainly derived from classical sources such as Cicero’s De Amicitia, but which also, as Alan Bray has shown, had strong roots in Christian traditions.44 In such rhetoric, the friend was described as ‘another self’, ‘another I’, ‘the selfsame soul in a different body’ and all differences of wealth and status were erased in the assertion of an absolute equality.45 The two nearly identical young men in The Angelic Conversation perfectly embody such rhetoric to the extent that they cannot be separated out into the poet and fair youth of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (which are heard on the soundtrack) but are simultaneously objects of desire and objects of identification. Such a narcissistic blurring of desire and identification undoubtedly took place when the nine-year-old Jarman became entranced by the famous Nicholas Hilliard miniature of a lovesick young man in the pages of G. M. Trevelyan’s Illustrated English Social History.46 Jarman not only desired that young man with long silk-clad legs, posing languidly against a tree trunk, he wanted to be him. All such fantasies of an ideal relationship with ‘another I’ never quite exorcise the terror of loneliness and solipsism. The ultimate solipsistic nightmare would be something like the fate of John Malkovich when he enters the portal which leads into his own head in Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999). In the restaurant where he is dining, the waiters, the other customers, and even the chanteuse draped on the piano all wear his own face. However, the gaze into the mirror may be inter-

MUP_Wymer_01_Chap 1

11

7/25/05, 4:58 PM

12

derek jarman

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

preted more positively, and a crucial influence in this respect was Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1950) which plays ambiguously throughout with mirrors, doubles, introspection, and narcissism. Heurtebise, the enigmatic guide to the underworld, tells Orphée: I give you the secret of secrets. Mirrors are the doors by which Death comes. Look a lifetime in a mirror and you will see Death at work.

But in addition to creating some memorable shots – such as the one which immediately follows these lines – when his poet-hero seems narcissistically trapped by his own reflection, Cocteau constructs other and much more positive episodes when the mirror becomes the door to another world, the beginning of a journey towards full selfhood. This ambiguity about mirrors is captured in Jarman’s short film Sebastiane Wrap (1975), shot on location in Sardinia while he was making Sebastiane and also known as Sebastiane Mirror Film. In it, a sheet of some semi-reflecting material is repeatedly held up, sometimes reflecting blinding light back into the camera and sometimes permitting the viewer to look through it to a doorway or landscape beyond. The psychological implications of mirrors are probably expressed most fully in the various scripts of Dr. Dee – The Art of Mirrors and the Angelic Conversations. Described as ‘A Film Dialogue between Dr. John Dee, Queen Elizabeth and the Angel Ariel’, it takes its three speakers on a journey through mirrors towards ‘the still point of the world’,47 a state of psychological wholeness and balance. At the heart of the script is a story about Helios, the young sun god, which Jarman alludes to in several of his works (a version of it appears in Blue) and which has a good claim to be the most important of Jarman’s many personal myths and fables. Helios invaded the sacred city of Disc ‘attracted by the great beauty of the virgin Queen who ruled it, but lost in the mirror maze, the young sun god was maddened by his own burning reflections until he finally stumbled blinded from the Labyrinth and dived into the blue lake’.48 This loss of identity in the blue lake is less terminal than it seems because, in what becomes a sustained allegory about the continuing afterlife of the self in art, ‘the fish who swam in the lake were dyed gold; and the young god’s rays imprinted themselves on earth and from that time forth man discovered gold where the sun had caste [sic] his shadow’.49 Although Helios was for a time ‘lost in the mirror maze’ and ‘maddened by his own burning reflections’, Elizabeth I declares: ‘Yet all mirrors contain within them the sum of their reflections, they are a book wherein we may extract much knowledge, a gateway through

MUP_Wymer_01_Chap 1

12

7/25/05, 4:58 PM

introduction

13

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

which we may pass.’50 One of Jarman’s favourite hymns (it was sung at his funeral) was George Herbert’s ‘Teach me, my God and King’, which not only makes use of alchemical symbolism (‘This is the famous stone / That turneth all to gold’) but has the following verse: A man that looks on glasse, On it may stay his eye; Or if he pleaseth, through it passe, And then the heav’n espie.51

Making a similar point in a different language, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit argue that the ‘specular narcissism’ in Jarman’s films can be read positively ‘as the subject’s recognition that in approaching otherness, he is also moving towards himself. A non-antagonistic relation to difference depends on this inaccurate replication of the self in difference, on our recognising that we are already out there. Self-love initiates the love of others.’52 They go on to conclude that in Caravaggio in particular, homosexual desire can be seen as ‘a reaching out toward an other sameness’, towards a shared human identity, in the form of ‘an expansive rather than a self-enclosing narcissism’.53 The death which Jarman and Cocteau saw in the mirror was not just the threat of narcissistic entrapment. Mirrors also reflect the passage of time in each new wrinkle and the many lyrical moments in Jarman’s films are nearly always counterpointed by a melancholy awareness of the inevitable passing away of all things and the immanent presence of death in life. This was another point of contact between himself and the Renaissance, not so much the ‘High Renaissance’ of Italy in 1500 but the waning Renaissance of England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, when the plagues which regularly devastated London helped to create a highly death-conscious literature and culture. Donne’s arresting line ‘What if this present were the world’s last night?’ finds its way into Blue and Edward II ends with Marlowe’s ‘Come, death, and with thy fingers close my eyes’. Even when Jarman is being most hyperbolically lyrical about same-sex love, he cannot avoid sounding this note: ‘the procreative vegetable love is earthbound but the love of another man for a man or woman for a woman takes flight on Time’s winged chariot’.54 In Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress’, ‘Times winged chariot’ is the threat to love rather than its vehicle of transcendence, as Jarman well knew. It might have been natural to assume that this melancholy awareness of time and death dates from his diagnosis as HIV positive at the end of 1986. However, it was present from the beginning as an undercurrent in all his films. The contents of his home in an old

MUP_Wymer_01_Chap 1

13

7/25/05, 4:58 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

14

derek jarman

warehouse, which are revealed to us in the short film Studio Bankside (1972), turn out to include a large skull. In the prologue section to Jubilee a small skull is visible on the wall just behind John Dee. In The Tempest Ariel plays with a skull, making its teeth click and chatter in a grimly comic manner. In ‘Panic’, the video which Jarman directed for the Smiths as part of The Queen is Dead sequence (1986), he causes Morrissey to re-enact the famous moment in Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy when the Duke kisses a poisoned skull, only this time Morrissey appears to be sharing the smoke from a joint in an intimate manner, before recoiling in disgust. Although the tone of Jarman’s films is frequently melancholic, the threat which death poses for desire is sometimes modulated by an apparent desire for death. This can be difficult to distinguish from the longing for a loss of self in extreme forms of sex, the longing for a ‘selfshattering’ through the passive experience of sodomy, which Leo Bersani discusses in his famous essay ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’.55 Sometimes the self that is shattered seems to be the conscious male ego, meaning that a more truly individuated, because more fully androgynous self is thereby achieved: ‘When you overcome your own fear you understand that gender has its own prison. When I meet heterosexual men I know they have experienced only half of love.’56 Sometimes this longing is itself presented as compulsive to the point of being a form of selfimprisonment, as it is in Edward II. And sometimes the loss of self which is desired amounts to a repudiation of the entire process of individuation, the process which begins when an infant recognises that it has a body and will distinct from its mother. No one worked harder than Jarman at the task of becoming a true individual but, as he recognised, ‘It’s hard work carrying the weight of oneself around’.57 The dissolution of identity, which he both feared and desired, is normally represented in his films by the sea, and that is the last thing we hear on the soundtrack of his last film as we gaze at the undifferentiated, imageless blue screen. Leonardo da Vinci, the supreme embodiment of ‘Renaissance Man’, described this ‘desire of returning to the first state of chaos’ in the alchemical terms which Jarman himself was so fond of employing: ‘But this desire is the very quintessence, the spirit of the elements, which finding itself imprisoned with the soul is ever longing to return from the human body to its giver. And you must know that this same longing is that quintessence, inseparable from nature, and that man is the image of the world.’58

MUP_Wymer_01_Chap 1

14

7/25/05, 4:58 PM

introduction

15

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 Derek Jarman, At Your Own Risk: A Saint’s Testament (London: Hutchinson, 1992; repr. London: Vintage, 1993), p. 117. 2 Tony Peake, Derek Jarman (London: Little, Brown, 1999). There is also a good deal of useful information in Michael O’Pray, Derek Jarman: Dreams of England (London: British Film Institute, 1996) and Derek Jarman: A Portrait, ed. Roger Wollen (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996). 3 See John Hill, ‘The Rise and Fall of the British Art Cinema: A Short History of the 1980s and 1990s’, Aura 6:3 (2000), 18–32. Jarman’s difficulties in obtaining funding meant that he normally worked with tiny budgets. The total cost of his eleven feature films was only £3,270,000. 4 BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 11. 5 Take Ten: Contemporary British Film Directors, ed. Jonathan Hacker and David Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 231. 6 Derek Jarman, The Last of England (London: Constable, 1987); reissued as Kicking the Pricks (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 76. 7 Derek Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, ed. Keith Collins (London: Century, 2000), pp. 168–9. 8 BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 22, transcript of ‘A Discussion of Censorship and the Arts[,] Bloomsbury Theatre, 9th March 1988’, p. 5 of section dealing with questions from the floor. 9 Derek Jarman, Modern Nature (London: Century, 1991; repr. London: Vintage, 1992), pp. 102–3. 10 BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 12, typescript of a long autobiographical statement by Jarman, p. 4. 11 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 197. 12 Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge (London: Quartet Books, 1984; repr. 1991), p. 197. 13 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 10. 14 Mark Nash, ‘Innocence and Experience’, Afterimage 12 (Autumn 1985), 30–5 (p. 30). 15 Kate Chedgzoy, Shakespeare’s Queer Children: Sexual Politics and Contemporary Culture (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 212. 16 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 108. 17 Jarman in an interview with Simon Field and Michael O’Pray, ‘On Imaging October, Dr. Dee and Other Matters’, Afterimage 12 (1985), p. 48. 18 See David Hawkes, ‘“The shadow of this time”: The Renaissance Cinema of Derek Jarman’, in By Angels Driven: The Films of Derek Jarman, ed. Chris Lippard (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1996), pp. 103–16; John Simons, ‘Elizabethan Texts in the Work of Derek Jarman’, in Elizabethan Literature and Transformation, ed. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner (Tübingen: Stauffenberg Verlag, 1999), pp. 263–71; Jim Ellis, ‘Queer Period: Derek Jarman’s Renaissance’, in Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 288–315. 19 Derek Jarman, Chroma (London: Century, 1994; repr. London: Vintage 1995), p. 17. 20 Simons, ‘Elizabethan Texts’, p. 264. 21 The first occasion when the flag of St George became used much more widely was the finals of the 1996 European football championship. 22 Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. I, Royal Proclamations of King James I 1603–1625, ed. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 1. 23 According to Christopher Wortham, 435 of Shakespeare’s 460 references to

MUP_Wymer_01_Chap 1

15

7/25/05, 4:58 PM

16

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41

42 43 44 45

46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

derek jarman England and the English occur before 1603 while 49 of his 64 references to Britain and the British come after that date. See Christopher Wortham, ‘Shakespeare, James I and the Matter of Britain’, English 45 (1996), 97–122 (p. 107). Jarman, At Your Own Risk, p. 11. Jarman, Chroma, p. 17. Derek Jarman, Queer Edward II (London: British Film Institute, 1991), p. 112. Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, pp. 338–9. O’Pray, Dreams of England, p. 8. Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 162. It was in fact Cosimo de Medici who first commissioned Marsilio Ficino to translate the Platonic manuscripts. Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 235. Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal, trans. Lars Malmstrom and David Kushner (London: Lorimer Publishing, 1968), pp. 8–9. Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 207. Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 35. Within the discourse of art history, Caravaggio is normally classified as a Baroque rather than a Renaissance painter. Ibid., p. 190. See Nicholas H. Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion (London: Routledge, 1988). Re/Search 8/9 Special Issue on J. G. Ballard (1984), 159. BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 16. Lyndy Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 147. Ariel speaking in Dr. Dee – The Art of Mirrors and the Angelic Conversations, BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 3, Jubilee Item 2, p. 9. ‘The Wisdom of Solomon’ 17:7, in The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, with introduction and notes by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). This text is discussed further in the chapter on Blue (Chapter 13). Sigmund Freud, ‘The Libido Theory and Narcissism’, in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 476. Ibid., p. 465. Jarman, Modern Nature, pp. 17–18. Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003). See Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2002), pp. 3–5 and 40–1. For an account of this, see Jarman, Chroma, p. 17. The impact of the picture would undoubtedly have been heightened by the fact that it is one of only four colour plates out of a total of one hundred and twenty-eight. Typescript of Dr. Dee – The Art of Mirrors and the Angelic Conversations, [p. 27], BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 3, Jubilee Item 2. Ibid., [p. 24]. Ibid. Ibid., [p. 25]. George Herbert, ‘The Elixir’, in Selected Poems of George Herbert, ed. Gareth Reeves (London: Heinemann, 1971), p. 106. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio (London: British Film Institute, 1999), p. 72. Ibid., p. 80. BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 22, in section headed ‘January 10 Fucking Secrets’. Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, October 43 (1987), 197–222. See also

MUP_Wymer_01_Chap 1

16

7/25/05, 4:58 PM

introduction

17

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998). 56 Jarman, At Your Own Risk, p. 32. 57 Quoted in Peake, Derek Jarman, p. 413. 58 Leonardo da Vinci, Literary Works, ed. Jean Paul Richter, 2 vols (London: Phaidon, 1970), vol. 2, p. 242. I am grateful to James Booth for this reference.

MUP_Wymer_01_Chap 1

17

7/25/05, 4:58 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Longing for paradise’: early life and short films

2

Towards the end of his life, Jarman said in an interview that ‘all creativity has its roots in one’s childhood’.1 A little earlier he had written in Kicking the Pricks that, ‘In all home movies is a longing for paradise’.2 His own ‘home movies’, the more than sixty films he made from 1971 onwards (nearly all in super-8), whether they recorded the activities of his friends or used technical innovations to attempt cryptic forms of symbolic expression, were all highly personal productions. At one level, they can be seen as endeavours to recapture or redeem elements of his lost childhood, when some of his happiest moments had been the evenings when his family had watched the short films made by his grandfather and father.3 When Jarman wrote of the ‘longing for paradise’ in home movies, he also asked, more ominously, ‘Where is the serpent lurking?’, reminding us that the roots of creativity are found as much in the conflicts and traumas of family life, as in its more idyllic moments. Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman was born on 31 January 1942. He was later to write, ‘I was born with sirens wailing, bombs fell through my childhood.’4 His father, Lance, was a New Zealander, whose grandfather had emigrated from Devon at the end of the nineteenth century. Lance came to England in 1928 and immediately joined the RAF but, despite an extremely successful career, never felt entirely ‘at home’ in his adopted country. After his father’s death, Jarman was able to recognise in him his own anxieties about being simultaneously both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ mainstream English society: ‘In a way he became more English than the English, yet at the same time he hated them.’5 As a child, he had found his father remote and authoritarian and subsequently blamed this partly on the psychological damage caused by the many dangerous bombing missions which he had flown during the war. The lifelong desire to repair this failed relationship is probably one of the factors behind the frequent eroticisation of men in uniform in Jarman’s films.6 It is also evident in the ‘Face to Face’ interview with Jeremy Isaacs in 1993, when

MUP_Wymer_02_Chap 2

18

7/25/05, 4:59 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

early life and short films

19

Jarman said, ‘I think before he died we’d really become really rather staunch friends.’ This contradicts other accounts Jarman has given of his father’s last years but the repetition of ‘really’ bears witness to the continuing strength of this (impossible) desire for reconciliation. Jarman’s mother Elizabeth (‘Betts’) was warm, lively, beautiful, and with artistic inclinations, and it is clear that Jarman identified much more strongly with her than with his father. The nature of his unconscious feelings for her can only be surmised, but in his diaries we find the somewhat surprising remark, ‘I love old women, in other circumstances I would have married an older woman.’7 One of the few Jarman films to convey an intensely heterosexual eroticism is the early short Miss Gaby (1972). In it a naked young man, somewhat infantilised by being shown blowing bubblegum and licking an ice cream topped with a cherry and whipped cream, watches an extremely glamorous woman in a green satin dress applying make-up and nail varnish. The filming establishes her unmistakably as an object of desire but the distinction between desire and identification breaks down when she gives the youth a necklace to wear and puts her own lipstick on his lips before kissing him. Jarman was fully aware that his family background conformed to a psychoanalytic cliché about the genesis of male homosexuality but he typically converted this ‘problem’ into a positive advantage: ‘It’s the classic fag’s father. Thank God they exist, and thank God I had one. After all, childhood only lasts to puberty, then one has the rest of one’s life to enjoy oneself unravelling the damage. It’s the most distressing sight to see happy families, nothing good can come of them.’8 His 1976 script for a film, which was never made, about the heretical Egyptian Pharoah Akhenaton – sometimes seen as the first person in human history to have left evidence of their inner life – is another version of the Helios legend, but this time told as part of a more explicitly Oedipal family drama. Amenhotep III, like the father of Oedipus, casts out his infant son soon after birth but is then displaced when Akenaten (in Jarman’s spelling) returns to Thebes ‘not for revenge, but to know my father and mother’.9 After the death of Amenhotep, Akenaten makes love to his sister Nefretiti but is stung by a scorpion and tended in his delirium by his mother Tiye. The footage of AKENATEN’S delirium is printed scarlet and consists of the following images: Queen TIYE making love to AMENHOTEP. A CHILD exposed under the blinding sun. The sun. AKENATEN kissing his mother in close up until the blood runs over his face.10

MUP_Wymer_02_Chap 2

19

7/25/05, 4:59 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

20

derek jarman

Shortly afterwards Akenaten makes love to Tiye but the psychological implications of the story become almost impossibly complex when she gives birth to twin sons, with one of whom Akenaten later falls in love. Nevertheless, the central mythic (and historical) core of the narrative remains the rejection by Akenaten of the traditional pantheon of Egyptian gods headed by Amonra, whose name incorporates part of his father’s name, for a new monotheistic worship of the solar disc, Aten, a word which forms part of his own name. He claimed himself to be ‘alone, the living Aten’ and abandoned Thebes for a new ‘city of the sun’, Akhetaten. Jarman’s background notes to the script record that the psychoanalyst Karl Abraham saw in the religious reforms of the historical Akhenaton ‘a rebellion against the father or, more properly, against the memory of the father’.11 His father’s RAF postings meant that ‘home’ was constantly changing in the years after the war. Sometimes it was in bleak and anonymous air force accommodation surrounded by barbed wire, at other times – as in the villa and garden by Lake Maggiore or the Elizabethan manor house at Curry Mallet in Somerset – it was in idyllic settings which acquired enormous mythic potency. It was at Lake Maggiore that, aged 4, he was taken cycling and rowing by the handsome young Davide, who was his ‘first love’. ‘This love was my great secret. If only this innocent idyll could have continued. But after a brief summer we left for Rome.’12 After a return to England, his schooling followed the typical pattern of private education for a boy of his background, attendance at a ‘prep’ school (Hordle in Dorset) from the age of 8, followed by entry at 13 into a minor public school (the nearby Canford). At Hordle, when he was 9, occurred an incident which Jarman in his autobiographical books repeatedly claimed had cast a shadow over the whole of his young life. He had climbed into the bed of another boy but had been discovered by the headmaster’s wife, beaten, and then reprimanded in front of the whole class. ‘That day a childhood idyll died in the bells and sermons, the threats to tell our parents and derision; and we were shoved into the wilderness they had created, and commanded to punish ourselves for all time.’13 The lasting trauma this incident caused Jarman is undeniable but the precise facts and their interpretation are more difficult to establish. In Dancing Ledge Jarman says that he and his friend ‘were cuddling each other’ to alleviate some of the loneliness of life at boarding school and calls it a ‘wholly innocent affair’.14 In At Your Own Risk he writes more defiantly that, ‘I was unsuccessfully trying to fuck the boy in the bed next to mine’15 and there is a persistent unresolved tension in his films and writings between an ideal of romantic friendship and the actualities

MUP_Wymer_02_Chap 2

20

7/25/05, 4:59 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

early life and short films

21

of penetrative sex. An even more mysterious episode involving sex, pain, and public humiliation – an episode about which Jarman himself never wrote – took place years later at Canford. According to Tony Peake, this ‘involved him being cornered by a group of his contemporaries, held down, stripped, then brought to public orgasm by the stroking of a feather duster up and down the length of his [penis]’.16 At Hordle, Jarman’s primary escape from the brutalities and banalities of boarding-school life had been through long walks along the Dorset coast and the keeping of a small garden. At Canford, with the encouragement of an exceptional art master, Robin Noscoe, he developed a strong interest in painting and spent many happy hours in a special ‘art shack’, situated a long way from the main school buildings. He was also lucky in his English teacher, Andrew Davis, and his previously rather mediocre school performance began to improve considerably. He became determined to follow a career as a painter and was accepted by the Slade School of Art to start a course there in the autumn of 1960. However, his father was extremely anxious for him to gain a ‘proper’ qualification and agreed to support him at the Slade, only if he first completed a university degree. As a result, in October 1960 he went up to King’s College, London, to read English, History, and History of Art. This broad-based degree was very suited to his development as a serious artist, giving him a range of cultural and historical reference which is apparent in all his films. The English part of it was a (necessarily) cut-down version of the standard ‘Beowulf to Virginia Woolf’ syllabus, though in Jarman’s case the more appropriate end markers would be the Anglo-Saxon poems The Wanderer and The Dream of the Rood and the modernist poetry of Yeats and Eliot. In the centuries between, his favourite authors would have included Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Milton, Blake, and Arnold, rather than any novelists. He worked hard at university, reading widely, painting a good deal, and generally leading a fairly austere and sexually chaste life. On graduating with a respectable degree in 1963, he took up a place at the Slade and things started to change. The art-school world which he entered was at the leading edge of the massive cultural changes which swept Britain in the 1960s. As a friend of the painters David Hockney and Patrick Prockor and the fashion designer Ossie Clarke, he was at the centre of a revolutionary art scene which both fuelled, and was fuelled by, revolutions in popular music and sexual behaviour. Jarman wrote in Dancing Ledge that ‘The Gregorian chant was put back into its sleeve and replaced by the Who and the Stones.’17 In fact, his own stance of engaging with the new whilst never abandoning the traditional was more precisely musically embodied by

MUP_Wymer_02_Chap 2

21

7/25/05, 4:59 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

22

derek jarman

such 1960s phenomena as the Electric Prunes’ Mass in F Minor (1967), in which the Catholic Latin Mass was adapted by David Axelrod to rock rhythms and accompanied by the rasp and whine of electric guitars.18 The American Pop Art which enthralled so many of his fellow art students often seemed vacuous to him, precisely because it had no meaningful relation to the past. Sexual intercourse began for Jarman in 1964, one year after Larkin’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’. As in Larkin’s poem, Jarman saw it as ‘rather late for me’, though he rapidly tried to make up for his slow start. Although recognising many of the changes taking place both nationally and in his own life as liberating, he could be extremely sardonic about the impact of the heady art-school scene on his own inner psychological development. The next thing I learnt was that I had to become an individual, individuate, become myself; you can only do this alone; I was doing this quietly and quite well even at eighteen. Then I went to the Slade, where I joined up with millions of the fuckers who were being taught to become themselves; I joined the crowd, it was crowded being an individual.19

One thing about which he would not have been ambivalent was the opportunity for an art-school student in that period to acquire a wonderful cinematic education. Instead of being restricted to the recent British and American films playing commercially in London, he was able to see films by all the great European directors – Eisenstein, Dreyer, Ophüls, Renoir, Cocteau, Buñuel, Fellini, Visconti, Antonioni, Pasolini, Bergman. In some cases, the prints were brought into the country especially for the course on world cinema which Thorold Dickinson, the director of Gaslight (1940), taught at the Slade.20 At the same time, it had become possible to see, at semi-private venues, the work of American underground film makers like Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, and Andy Warhol, which could be screened without a British Board of Film Censors Certificate as long as the general public were not admitted. Jarman’s own films do not seem to emerge naturally out of the history of British cinema but they are steeped in other traditions – the European art film and the American experimental underground – to which he was thoroughly exposed during his formative years. At the Slade, he started to spend more and more time in the theatre department, designing miniature sets for Timon of Athens, Volpone, and Huis Clos, as well as for two ballets – Stravinsky’s Orpheus and Prokofiev’s The Prodigal Son. It was this work which led to his first major commission after graduating from the Slade in 1967, designing the sets

MUP_Wymer_02_Chap 2

22

7/25/05, 4:59 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

early life and short films

23

and costumes for a new ballet Jazz Calendar, which Frederick Ashton was choreographing for the Royal Ballet. When this opened at the Royal Opera House in January 1968, there was lavish critical praise for Jarman’s designs and this led to a similar offer from Sir John Gielgud to work with him on a production of Don Giovanni, which he was directing for the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company. Jarman’s career as a designer was looking meteoric at this stage but, like all meteors, it burnt up rapidly and fell to earth. The comprehensive failure of this production, and the criticism directed in particular at his designs, brought about a change of direction. He withdrew somewhat from the social scene in which he had been involved for the previous five years and moved into the first of a number of converted warehouses on the south bank of the Thames which he occupied throughout the 1970s, and where he was able to paint in relative peace and quiet. The fluctuation between his need for the social, sexual, and artistic stimulus of other people and his need to be alone for prolonged periods, in order actually to create anything worthwhile, was a pattern which recurred throughout his life. It is represented, with an element of parody, in the speeded-up footage from Sloane Square (1974–76) of his friends appearing and disappearing in the Sloane Square flat which, from 1967 onwards, Anthony Harwood had generously allowed him to use whenever he wanted. Sometimes the room appears bleak and empty, a fraction of a second later it is filled with people, then in another fraction of a second it is empty again. Within two years of his partial retreat into painting, he was drawn back into the excitements and pressures of another highly collaborative project. This time, however, it was not a false start but the beginning of his career in film. A chance meeting with a woman on a train in January 1970 led to an offer from Ken Russell to design the sets for The Devils (1971), a lurid dramatisation of politically manipulated religious and sexual hysteria in seventeenthcentury France, based on historical events as mediated through Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudun (1952) and John Whiting’s play The Devils (1961). Despite Jarman’s youth and complete lack of experience in films, Russell saw him from the start as a kindred spirit and the two worked very closely together on the design of a gigantic set at Pinewood Studios which would recreate the city of Loudun, its cathedral, and its convent. Both Jarman and Russell had a liking for authentic period details that would seem anachronistic to the uninitiated (such as round spectacles of the type worn by John Lennon or green lipstick) but both were also determined that visual and thematic considerations would prevail over literal historical accuracy. The white, impersonal, semi-abstract designs

MUP_Wymer_02_Chap 2

23

7/25/05, 4:59 PM

24

derek jarman

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

which Jarman produced were a creative but faithful actualisation of Russell’s ideas, which had been sparked off by his reading of Huxley’s book: One sentence from Huxley always stuck in my mind. ‘The exorcism of Sister Jeanne was equivalent to a rape in a public lavatory.’ The image of the public lavatory, the impersonality of it all, stayed in my mind. That’s why I went for white tiles for the Convent. I was also struck by the impersonality of the workers’ underground city in Metropolis. I modelled Loudun basically on that architecture … The city was a white symbol of new-found pride and independence.21

The people of Loudun in the 1630s doubtless thought of themselves as ‘modern’ but their modernity coexisted with a regressive barbarism which could easily be manipulated and which would eventually destroy their society and its dreams. The parallels with the twentieth century hardly needed to be made any more explicit and the set design was crucial in liberating the film from some of the limitations of periodpiece costume drama. It was also crucial, in conjunction with the fine performance of Oliver Reed as the priest Grandier, in establishing an over-all aesthetic coherence which the film’s anarchic energies and abrupt changes of tone were constantly threatening to disrupt. Russell greatly valued Jarman’s contribution to The Devils and he employed him again as a designer for Savage Messiah (1972), a film about the early-twentieth-century French artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and, a decade later, for a production of Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress which he directed in Florence in 1982. The Devils remained a key film for Jarman’s own cinematic development, a permanent reminder of how historical material could be treated provocatively, transgressively, and with tremendous visual flair. The combination of extreme acts of violence with much lighter, ‘camp’ moments recurs in many of his films, most notably Edward II, but Jarman’s control of tone is generally a good deal more secure than Russell’s, though he was happy enough to borrow directly from particular episodes of The Devils. The ‘rape of Christ’ sequence, which was cut from the film’s original release and believed lost for thirty years, undoubtedly influenced the Westminster Cathedral sequence of Jubilee in which ‘the twelve apostles fuck Christ’. The Devils was also a permanent reminder of the appalling pressures and extravagances of big-budget film making. The cost of the sets alone, over a million pounds, was roughly equivalent to the total budget for Jarman’s first six feature films. He emerged from his year’s work on The Devils both exhausted and exhilarated, feeling that his old life of

MUP_Wymer_02_Chap 2

24

7/25/05, 4:59 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

early life and short films

25

painting had been destroyed forever: ‘After the intense pressure under which a film is made, it [painting] seemed undemanding – and the isolation in which it was pursued, enervating’.22 On the other hand, he had no desire to become permanently part of the industrial system of production which characterises commercial cinema. The resolution of these artistic and psychological dilemmas occurred when Marc Balet, an American student visiting London in 1972, showed Jarman his super-8 camera.23 Kodak had developed and marketed the super-8 camera as an easyto-use improvement on the standard 8mm camera which was normally employed at the time by amateur film makers to make ‘home movies’. The new camera, which first went on sale in 1965, had features such as an automatic light meter which would not normally be associated with high artistic ambition. Many of Jarman’s short films, such as Studio Bankside (1972), Andrew Logan Kisses the Glitterati (1973), Miss World (1973), Duggie Fields at Home (1974), Sloane Square (1974–76), or Ulla’s Fete (1976), conform to some of the norms of the home movie, being records of places he lived in, friends he knew, and parties or events at which he was present. One can get a good feel for the nature of this material by watching Glitterbug (1994), the hour-long montage of footage taken between 1972 and 1986 which Jarman helped to select shortly before his death and which was edited by Andy Crabb and David Lewis to a score by Brian Eno. It seems natural to make a rough distinction between the ‘people, places, and events’ type of film and the more self-conscious attempts to create highly symbolic, magical, and dreamlike short films in a variety of styles, some of which were influenced by the work of Kenneth Anger. These are the films which make up the ‘Art of Mirrors’ suite and which became the building blocks for the fifty-minute In the Shadow of the Sun (1974–80). They are Tarot (or the Magician) (1972–3), Journey to Avebury (1973), Garden of Luxor (1973), Red Movie (1973), The Art of Mirrors (1973), Ashden’s Walk on Mon (1973), Death Dance (1973), Burning of Pyramids (1973), Arabia (1973), Sulphur (1973), and Fire Island (1974). As many of the titles suggest, there is a strong vein of occult symbolism running through the sequence, expressed through images of masked figures, ritual actions, mirrors, skulls, Tarot cards, pyramids, standing stones, and fire mazes. Any clear distinction between these films and the more typical ‘home movies’ soon starts to break down the more closely one looks at them. The domestic footage of Studio Bankside is punctuated by repeated close-ups of a light bulb filament which resembles a fiery hieroglyph. Conversely, the ritual actions in ‘The Art of Mirrors’ suite are filmed in

MUP_Wymer_02_Chap 2

25

7/25/05, 4:59 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

26

derek jarman

Jarman’s own surroundings, with his friends playing the various parts (for instance, Death in Death Dance is Christopher Hobbs in a white sheet and skull mask). The series of static shots of the English countryside which make up Journey to Avebury seem relatively straightforward but succeed, through the warm, golden glow which pervades them, and the movements of grass and trees which they capture, in giving the landscape a magical life. His recording of apparently mundane events was rarely straightforward, and involved, no less than the ‘magick’ films, a battery of filming and editing techniques with which he was constantly experimenting. These included the use of speeded up footage, slowed down footage, time-lapse photography, rapid pans and zooms, deliberate camera shake, deliberate moves in and out of focus, extreme close-ups, shots into a mirror or other light source, rapid montages, refilmed images, and superimpositions. Three of these techniques, in particular, are worth further comment. The Nizo super-8 camera which Jarman began using in 1972 had a button which enabled the film maker to shoot at different speeds. Jarman developed a favourite technique of shooting at only three or six frames per second, something which would result in manically jerky movements if screened at a normal speed, but when projected at the same slowed down rate created a more languorous, dreamlike effect. If these projected images were then refilmed, outlines began to lose their definition and colours their natural quality, increasing the distancing from external reality. Michael O’Pray has described the effect of these combined techniques with considerable eloquence: The refilming and original shooting speed allowed Jarman a control over the imagery which produced a strong painterly texture and pulsating rhythm. The grainy streaked colour effect is like a strong broad brushstroke, and assisted by the degeneration effect of re-filming the colours are often softened and suffused. The rhythm is one which Jarman describes, aptly, as like a ‘heart-beat’ – sensual, dream-like and erotic. The slowing down of film, the freeing of a shot is a means of eroticizing not only people and their gestures but also objects themselves. The most mundane action[s], the turn of a head, movement of the lips in speech, natural blinking, take on an ‘otherness’, transforming the everyday into an almost heroic and highly wrought expressiveness.24

The use of these two techniques in Gerald’s Film (1975) turned his friend Gerald Incandela’s casual exploration of a ruined Victorian boathouse into something both delicately sensual and melancholic, effects which were increased by the use Mahler’s Fifth Symphony on the soundtrack, the same music which is heard repeatedly in Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971). Much about Gerald’s Film, including its shots through the

MUP_Wymer_02_Chap 2

26

7/25/05, 4:59 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

early life and short films

27

diamond panes of leaded windows, strongly anticipates The Angelic Conversation (1985), Jarman’s fullest development of this particular style of filming. A third favourite device, used later in some of his feature films as well as in the shorts, is to shine light into a mirror which then reflects it straight back into the camera, temporarily blinding the viewer with excessive brightness but also, because of the way the automatic exposure on the Nizo tried to compensate for this, paradoxically darkening the rest of the screen. This effect is repeatedly used in what was Jarman’s own favourite among his super-8 films, The Art of Mirrors (1973), and part of its attraction for him was its ambiguous significance. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit have, mistakenly in my view, argued that the use of this technique is coercive: ‘He [Jarman] blinds us not in order to re-direct us, but as the ultimate nihilistic expression of his directorial power.’25 If one were to accept this analysis, then Jarman would be replicating the behaviour of one of his most feared teachers at Hordle, a Miss Nichols: ‘If you so much as stirred in your sheets, blinding lights would flash in your face; and somewhere, invisible behind them, she would subject you to a ruthless interrogation.’26 In fact, in so far as these moments of blinding have negative connotations, they allude primarily to the blinding mirrors of the Helios story, the blinding mirrors of narcissistic entrapment. However, and with deliberate paradox, they also produce transcendent moments of ‘materialbased abstraction’,27 moves from matter towards pure spirit of the kind found in the monochrome blue paintings of Yves Klein and Jarman’s last film Blue. The simultaneous brightness and darkness generated by the workings of the Nizo camera also enacts the dualisms at the heart of some of the philosophical and theological traditions which interested Jarman, such as Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism, and the interpretation of these traditions by Jung. ‘Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light.’28 There is a critical consensus that Jarman’s early short films were crucial to his development as a director but there is less of a consensus about how valuable they are as autonomous works of art. There remain a number of major obstacles to studying them as carefully as they deserve and arriving at confident aesthetic judgements. The first of these is the sheer number of titles. James Mackay, to whom Jarman bequeathed his entire super-8 archive, lists sixty-two films made between 1972 and 1983, not including the twelve volumes of extra footage assembled into a continuous montage by means of semi-random cut-up methods and labelled ‘It Happened by Chance’. Many of the films exist in different versions and with different titles, creating almost insuperable cata-

MUP_Wymer_02_Chap 2

27

7/25/05, 4:59 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

28

derek jarman

loguing problems. The most definitive filmography so far published is the one in Tony Peake’s biography of Jarman. This was compiled with the help of Michael O’Pray and James Mackay but still contains the occasional error, such as the listing of Jarman’s very first film, Electric Fairy, made in 1971 on 16mm, as ‘lost’, when a print still survives. Although some of the super-8 films were released on video and some are now starting to appear as DVD extras, most of them remain relatively inaccessible, though a few have been transferred to 16mm and deposited in national archives. Judgements about these films are further complicated by the fact that it is not always clear at which speed they should be projected29 or what the soundtrack should be. Like most ‘silent’ films they attain their full expressiveness only when accompanied by music and Jarman used to experiment with different musical settings when screening them for his friends. The absence of soundtracks on the current DVD super-8 releases is in one way a pity, but allows the viewer to replicate Jarman’s own modus operandi. Jarman himself could be very modest about the artistic merits of these super-8s, valuing them more for their personal significance than their technical originality. Towards the end of his life, it felt more important to him to have captured the smile on the face of a dead friend than to have invented a new cinematic language and the closing sequences of Glitterbug (1994) express this personal dimension very movingly. However, one should not be too quick to assent to this viewpoint since he said similar things about his entire cinematic output: ‘The only real thing I like about my films is that it is possible to see my dead and dying friends in all the nooks and crannies, and I like that. It’s wonderful.’30 He never lost his initial enthusiasm for The Art of Mirrors, the feeling which he expressed in Dancing Ledge that ‘At last we have something completely new’, something which could only have been achieved on super-8.31 In the programme notes for a National Film Theatre retrospective on his super-8s, he said that it was the only one of his more self-consciously contrived shorts to get beyond contrivance and called it ‘the most extreme dream film ever made, even more extreme than Kenneth Anger’.32 The appropriate way to think of these films is obviously as lyric poems in contrast to the narrative and dramatic forms taken by most cinema. Their brevity is integral to their effect and any extension to feature length would normally require the introduction of elements of conflict requiring resolution and a stronger sense of narrative progression if they were to hold an audience’s attention over a prolonged time span. From a very early stage Jarman had the ambition of combining footage from the ‘Art of Mirrors’ suite into a larger structure and carried out a

MUP_Wymer_02_Chap 2

28

7/25/05, 4:59 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

early life and short films

29

series of refilmings which created up to seven layers of superimposition and a film lasting fifty minutes. This process was complete by 1974 but it was not until after Jarman had met James Mackay, the most energetic and enthusiastic champion of all his more experimental work and subsequently the producer of The Angelic Conversation, The Last of England, The Garden, Blue, and Glitterbug, that money was raised in 1980 to blow the footage up to 16mm and add a soundtrack by Genesis P-Orridge’s avant-garde band Throbbing Gristle. The resulting work, titled In the Shadow of the Sun, was screened at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival, alongside a short piece called TG Psychic Rally in Heaven, comprising footage of the band in concert, refilmed to the point of nearabstraction, and intercut with grainy black-and-white images from an old film of Dante’s Inferno, which are less easily discernible than the fuzzy outline of a large penis which is glimpsed near the beginning. When the soundtrack of the same concert was later released on an LP by Throbbing Gristle, the sleeve notes explained that the music and the use of words from John Dee’s Enochian (adamic) language were designed to integrate conscious and unconscious mental levels, though the effect is closer to an all-out assault on the senses.33 The title of In the Shadow of the Sun was derived from a seventeenthcentury alchemical text where the phrase ‘the shadow of the sun’ appears as one of the many synonyms of the Philosopher’s Stone.34 Jarman’s fondness for the phrase, which occurs in other contexts in his writings, is doubtless because of its dualistic integration of light and darkness and also, perhaps, because of its punning Oedipal significance. In the script of Akenaten, which is closely related to the Egyptian thread of imagery in the ‘Art of Mirrors’ suite, Amenhotep says, ‘I wish to know more about the shadow of my son which troubled the water’, before he is displaced and does indeed end up in the shadow of his son.35 There is no doubt that In the Shadow of the Sun is a difficult film to engage with initially. The multiple superimpositions created through refilming have a tendency towards abstraction and the lack of obvious narrative structure or progression demands a different kind of attention from the viewer to the sort normally given to films of this length. When Oscar Wilde wrote in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray that ‘All art is at once surface and symbol’, he was warning of the dangers of going too quickly beneath the surface to look for the symbol. Many of Jarman’s own comments on the film emphasise the importance of its surface texture. ‘The images of In the Shadow of the Sun are fused with scarlets, oranges, and pinks. The degradation caused by the refilming of multiple images gives them a shimmering mystery/energy like Monet’s ‘Nympheas’ or haystacks in the sunset.’36 He complained that ‘The first

MUP_Wymer_02_Chap 2

29

7/25/05, 4:59 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

30

derek jarman

viewers wracked their brains for meaning instead of relaxing into the ambient tapestry of random images.’37 Poets and poetic film makers have often wished their readers or audiences to relax their insistence on being given an immediate ‘meaning’, so that they might be given a fuller (and finally more meaningful) aesthetic experience. However, the words ‘ambient’ and ‘random’ concede too much and are misleading in relation to Jarman’s creative practices. The lure and promise of a deeper meaning, of something beneath the surface, is always present in his work, demanding a closer level of attention than the invitation to treat the film as visual wallpaper unfortunately implies. To give one simple example, the paper-bag mask which he uses in a number of the super-8s has, in this film, been turned up at the top corners to suggest, in silhouette, the jackal-headed Egyptian deity Anubis, whose role was to conduct the souls of the dead to their judge in the underworld. In Britain the tendency has been to regard In the Shadow of the Sun as an eccentric and marginal work (it has been much better received by European audiences). Yet Jarman’s methods in this film are closely analogous to the way a culturally central text like The Waste Land was written. Autonomous lyric passages are reworked, welded together, and overlaid with other material to form a barely discernible structure which takes the shape of a spiritual quest and makes use of cryptic imagery which includes occult symbolism linked to the Tarot cards. Whether the quest has reached a successful conclusion or not is left in doubt. The passage of time and acres of commentary have served to normalise Eliot’s poem and caused us to forget how strange and fragmentary it really is. In the case of Jarman’s film we are still at a relatively early stage of response to it, though the lack of irony or wider social reference in the film is always going to make it seem a much more limited work of art. Jarman usually maintained a clear distinction in his own mind between film as ‘art’ and film as ‘product’ but this distinction was eroded a little during the 1980s when his inability to gain funding for Caravaggio drove him to seek whatever work he could get and led to him making promotional music videos for a number of bands and singers including Orange Juice, Bryan Ferry, the Smiths, Bob Geldof, and the Pet Shop Boys. His first venture in that direction had been a film he had made in 1979 to promote Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English album. This was shot on super-8 and 16mm before being blown up to 35mm for cinema release and Jarman undoubtedly saw it as a genuinely creative project, in which he was able to use favourite images from his super-8s, including masked figures, flashing mirrors, and dancers round a fire, as well as newsreel footage of nuclear explosions, marching troops, rioting crowds, burning buildings, Hitler, and Stalin. Kenneth Anger was again

MUP_Wymer_02_Chap 2

30

7/25/05, 4:59 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

early life and short films

31

an important influence, though not just the Anger of the ‘magick’ films but the Anger of Scorpio Rising (1963), a ‘biker’ film which had constructed an elaborate montage of images (including those of Christ and Hitler) to the accompaniment of thirteen pop songs. It is a characteristic of postmodern culture that the avant-garde is rapidly recycled as a mass product, a phenomenon which Jarman had commented on extensively in Jubilee. The launch of the American MTV channel in 1981 created an insatiable market for music videos, including those which featured rapidly edited montages of weird and apparently disconnected images. When Jarman acquired a video camera in 1983 he found himself, for the first time, in a situation where his nonnarrative style of filming might have actual commercial potential. He began working with a number of young film makers who had been inspired by his own super-8 work – such as John Maybury, Cerith Wyn Evans, Richard Heslop, and Chris Hughes – and who saw the expanding video market as a liberation from the potential sterility of officially funded formalist experimentation. The most substantial works to emerge from these activities were the three-film sequence The Queen is Dead which he directed for the Smiths in 1986 (with the assistance of Richard Heslop and John Maybury) and the eight films which he made for the Pet Shop Boys which were to be used as back projections during their 1989 concerts.38 Some of the imagery and editing techniques from The Queen is Dead found their way into The Last of England, while the work for the Pet Shop Boys not only financed The Garden but influenced the use of video matte effects in that film. The experience he gained in creating and cutting a film to fit a particular piece of popular music was also transferable to classical works, as evident in his film of ‘Depuis le Jour’ (from Gustave Charpentier’s opera Louise) which he contributed to Aria (1987) and, most importantly, in his film of Britten’s War Requiem. Nevertheless, Jarman remained permanently uncertain about the enduring artistic value of these music films: ‘Music video is the only extension of the cinematic language in this decade [the 1980s], but it has been used for quick effect, and it’s often showy and shallow.’39 His comments on the Pet Shop Boys back projections veered from the wildly enthusiastic (‘Effects like these will never have been seen on film before’) to the curtly dismissive (‘video wallpaper’).40 His normal artistic practice was to encourage the creativity of other people in ways which served his own vision, but with these promotional films his own vision was always going to be of secondary importance, something he was also extremely anxious about in relation to War Requiem. Meanwhile, what is perhaps the most impressive, and certainly one

MUP_Wymer_02_Chap 2

31

7/25/05, 4:59 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

32

derek jarman

of the most accessible, of Jarman’s shorter films, Imagining October (1984), came about almost by accident.41 It derived from a trip to the Soviet Union he made in 1984 as part of a small group of independent British film makers who had been invited by the Soviet Union of Cinematographers to show their work in Moscow and Baku. Jarman used his Nizo camera to take some evocative monochrome footage of the massive Stalinist architecture, the ‘Gothic skyscrapers’ and monuments, which dominated Moscow, as well as more intimate shots of people he met in the streets of Baku, a town in Azerbaijan by the Caspian sea, on the periphery of the Soviet Empire, which ‘had the leisurely air of an Edwardian resort’.42 Back in London, and needing to have a film ready within weeks to show at the London Film Festival, he combined these images with scenes he filmed on video in full colour of the artist John Watkiss painting five young men in British army uniform, grouped by a red flag. The third strand of the film was provided by a series of angry and overtly didactic titles attacking the politics and culture of Thatcher’s Britain. Some of the slogans are ‘intentionally simplistic’43 but, mixed in with scraps of Blake’s poetry and played off against the images from Moscow, Baku, and the artist’s studio, the overall effect is challenging and enigmatic. The title and date of the film point immediately to some of its unresolved tensions. At one point it was going to be called ‘Imaging October’, since that was the month when Jarman was actually filming in the Soviet Union but his deep-seated suspicion of images (the ‘falseimaging’ of ad-men is repeatedly denounced in the film) led him to substitute the more resonant word ‘Imagining’. This makes it clearer that the ‘October’ of the title is also a dream of the Bolshevik revolution to be set off against the equally potent nightmare of ‘1984’. The three main strands of the film all relate to the problem of the artist in society, which is obviously something which deeply concerned Jarman on a personal level but is also part of a much larger question about the individual and the collective. The film begins with Jarman seated in Eisenstein’s chair and we are encouraged to think of the different pressures to which different societies subject creative artists. There is the censorship of the state (at one point we see where Trotsky’s name has been inked out of Eisenstein’s personal copy of Ten Days that Shook the World, the book on which he based his film October). But there is also the censorship of capital (the ‘Ad-men false imaging / The new British cinema’ were not interested in films which challenged anything). Oppressed by both East and West, Jarman ‘thought of another cinema[,] a cinema of imagining[,] a cinema of soul not subject to the censorship of capital or dogma’.44

MUP_Wymer_02_Chap 2

32

7/25/05, 4:59 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

early life and short films

33

However, the artist is not simply a victim of one of these two forms of censorship but is also implicated in various forms of power relationship. Jarman wrote in Dancing Ledge, ‘I distrust all figures of authority, including the artist’.45 The scenes with John Watkiss and the soldiers not only allude to the co-opting of the artist by the state but also dramatise the faintly sadomasochistic erotic tension that exists between the artist and his models. The soldiers seem somnolent, almost sullen at times, as they pose for Watkiss and strip off their shirts, and their resistance to his gaze carries its own sexual charge. Jarman recalled that his hero Pasolini had ‘directed Salò in immaculate suits while he put the cast through every imaginable degradation’.46 If one were to concentrate on the film’s intertitles, its verbal text, then it would come across as a furious outburst against Thatcherism and consumer capitalism, even if the role of the artist in contemporary society remained somewhat problematic. However, Jarman was quite definite that he ‘didn’t attempt to make the film reflect the text. The text disrupts the perspective, and the images play against each other’.47 The dominant tone is in fact one of a tender, ironic, melancholy for the dying of the Soviet dream. There was a certain prescience about this, given that Gorbachev had not yet come to power, but the use of monochrome and heroic choral music undoubtedly gives the Soviet images an archaic and nostalgic feel. This was partly because the Soviet Union of the 1980s reminded Jarman of the Britain of the 1940s and 1950s. ‘One always has a nostalgia for one’s childhood and of course mine was in the fairly austere 1950s, before American consumerism completely invaded this country, before the supermarket if you like. And I saw in the Soviet Union all the elements of that world.’48 What is being mourned in the film is another lost paradise, a failed dream of collective endeavour, a failed dream of community. Faced with the alternatives of a decaying Stalinist state or an Americanised, Thatcherite Britain in which ‘there is no such thing as society’, Jarman opted for his own ‘private solution’: ‘Sitting in Eisenstein’s study / With a home movie camera / Imagining October / A cinema of small gestures.’ This intertitle does not in fact quite capture the nature of his solution. It throws too much emphasis on him as an individual artist and, in any case, to occupy Eisenstein’s chair could hardly be said to resolve the problem of the individual and society. A fuller understanding of Jarman’s ‘private solution’ can be derived from his explanations of how he moved from painting to film. ‘The world of the paintings was sterile, an empty world. I made empty spaces with geometric forms and suddenly these people came in and disrupted it. And that was the cinema.’49 When this disruption took place on the industrial scale of The Devils, it

MUP_Wymer_02_Chap 2

33

7/25/05, 4:59 PM

34

derek jarman

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

was as alienating as the loneliness of an artist’s studio. But in the form of filming which Jarman developed for himself, working with small, portable cameras in his own surroundings with small groups of friends, a dream was reborn. ‘What I found in film was community. I discovered my world in film.’50 It was paradise regained.

Notes 1 Take Ten: Contemporary British Film Directors, eds Jonathan Hacker and David Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 231. 2 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 54. 3 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 114. 4 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 109. 5 BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 12, typescript of a long autobiographical statement by Jarman (part of which appeared in Kicking the Pricks), p. 2. 6 When Michael O’Pray put this point to Jarman in an interview, he agreed with it. See Dreams of England, p. 35 and Kicking the Pricks, p. 107. 7 Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 251. 8 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 122. 9 Akenaten, in Derek Jarman, Up in the Air (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 19. 10 Ibid., p. 20. 11 BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 15, Item 7. 12 Jarman, At Your Own Risk, p. 15. He also refers to Davide as his ‘first love’ in Kicking the Pricks (p. 19) and Modern Nature (p. 11). 13 Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 51. 14 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 49. 15 Jarman, At Your Own Risk, p. 20. 16 Peake, Derek Jarman, p. 53. 17 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 67. 18 The album achieved limited cult status after the ‘Kyrie Eleison’ was used on the soundtrack of Easy Rider (1969). 19 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 75. 20 See Peake, Derek Jarman, pp. 112–13. 21 Ken Russell talking to Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Three cuts and you’re out’, Sight and Sound 7:10 (October 1997), p. 69. The analogy with ‘a rape in a public lavatory’ also influenced the amount of echo which the composer Peter Maxwell Davies used in his disturbing soundtrack: ‘I realised with that marvellous set that Derek created, that this has got to sound as if it’s taking place in a public toilet’ (‘Hell on Earth’, Channel Four documentary on The Devils, 25 November 2002). 22 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 105. 23 The date of this meeting with Marc Balet is sometimes given as autumn 1970 but Tony Peake has established from Balet himself that it took place in the early summer of 1972. This means that Jarman’s first super-8 film Studio Bankside must also be dated 1972 and that the 16mm Electric Fairy is probably Jarman’s very first film. 24 Michael O’Pray, ‘Derek Jarman’s Cinema: Eros and Thanatos’, Afterimage 12 (Autumn 1985), p. 9. 25 Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio, p. 59. 26 Modern Nature, p. 39. 27 O’Pray, Dreams of England, p. 66.

MUP_Wymer_02_Chap 2

34

7/25/05, 4:59 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

early life and short films

35

28 The Taoist saying which gave Ursula Le Guin the title of one of her most famous novels. 29 The Bolex projectors which Jarman used could run at either 18, 12, 9, 6, or 3 frames per second. Some of the films are labelled with their correct running speeds, some of them not. 30 Hacket and Price, Take Ten, p. 260. 31 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 124. 32 BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 56, Item 3. 33 BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 41, Item 7. 34 O’Pray, Dreams of England, p. 76. Michael O’Pray says that the alchemical text is The Names of the Philosophers Stones and that it was published in 1652 by Gratacolle William. The title and author have been slightly garbled and the text is not easy to locate because it was published as one of Five Treatises of the Philosopher’s Stone and the main author given in catalogues is Afonso (i.e. Alphonso) V, King of Portugal, 1432–81, who was responsible for two of the treatises. The fifth treatise is ‘The names of the Philosophers Stone’ by William Gratacolle (whose real name apparently was William Gratarole) and the phrase ‘the shadow of the sun’ appears (twice) on p. 66. The date printed on the book is 1652 but it was actually published in 1651. I am grateful to György Szo…nyi for helping me locate these details. 35 Akenaten, in Jarman, Up in the Air, p. 11. 36 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 129. 37 Ibid. 38 The Queen is Dead sequence is available on The Smiths: The Complete Picture (1992). Seven of the eight Pet Shop Boys films were released on Projections (1993), along with excerpts from Garden of Luxor and Studio Bankside which were set to two further Pet Shop Boys songs. Ironically the one 1989 film which was omitted from Projections, ‘Nothing is Proven’, was described by Jarman at one point as the ‘only good one’ (Modern Nature, p. 189). 39 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 12. 40 Jarman, Modern Nature, pp. 93 and 190. Jarman would probably have been pleased to learn that the Pet Shop Boys have themselves produced a musical soundtrack for Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. 41 It is not currently very accessible in a literal sense, having yet to appear on either video or DVD. 42 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 95. 43 Jarman in an interview with Simon Field and Michael O’Pray, ‘On Imaging October, Dr. Dee and Other Matters’, Afterimage 12 (1985), p. 44. 44 BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 4. 45 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 241. 46 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 197. 47 Ibid., p. 103. 48 ‘On Imaging October, Dr. Dee and Other Matters’, p. 45. 49 Ibid., p. 47. 50 Ibid., p. 49.

MUP_Wymer_02_Chap 2

35

7/25/05, 4:59 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The dance of the sun on the water: Sebastiane (1976)

3

Jarman’s first feature-length film was remarkable in many ways and in at least three respects was virtually unique at the time for a commercially distributed picture. Its tiny budget of £30,000 was raised entirely from private sources, it was made in Latin, and it contained explicit representations of homosexual desire. Although its style and subject matter are recognisably and centrally Jarmanesque, it is the only one of his feature films over which there were open conflicts about where the credit should go for its authorship. The initial idea for a film on the early fourth-century Christian martyr, whose body, gracefully and erotically pierced by arrows, became a favourite subject for Renaissance and Baroque painters, came from a close friend of Jarman’s, Patrik Steede, with whom he twice visited Italy and saw many of the Sebastian paintings at first hand. Steede was a complex and slightly sinister personality whose sadomasochistic imagination had been nourished by an incident in his childhood when his mother had ‘chained him to a meat hook and whipped him with a riding crop’ so that ‘there was not one moment when the thrill of being whipped by his mother was not uppermost in [his] mind’.1 Steede worked intermittently on a script between 1972 and 1975 but, according to Jarman, was someone who ‘always had plans but never fulfilled any of them’,2 and when James Whaley, a London Film School graduate, offered to become Jarman’s producer and raise the necessary money, Jarman decided to go ahead without his former collaborator who was now living in New York. This caused a rift with Steede which never really healed and for which Jarman continued to feel a degree of responsibility. Whaley was joined by his friend Howard Malin, the two of them constituting the ironically named ‘Megalovision’ production company, and Jarman’s lack of film experience then caused him to invite Paul Humfress, a BBC film maker, to help with the direction and editing. Although Humfress was an invaluable assistant in many ways, the

MUP_Wymer_03_Chap 3

36

7/25/05, 5:00 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

sebastiane

37

relationship was not an easy one and Jarman resented having to concede a co-credit for direction. This was the only time in his career that he was forced to do this, although his poor health during the 1990s meant that his last films were in fact heavily collaborative projects. In any case, the layout of the Sebastiane titles subverts this concession since before we reach the co-credits for direction and script (the latter assigned equally to James Whaley), we have already been told that we are watching ‘Derek Jarman’s Film’. His intensely proprietorial feelings are even more strongly conveyed in a joky draft of the titles which exists in his unpublished papers: ‘JARMAN FILMS PRESENT / SEBASTIANUS / FROM AN ORIGINAL IDEA BY DEREK JARMAN / SCRIPT BY DEREK JARMAN / DESIGNED BY D. JARMAN / COSTUMES BY D. JARMAN (PARIS) / DIRECTED BY DEREK JARMAN AND PAUL HUMFRESS / ADDITIONAL DIALOGUES BY JARMAN’.3 The decision to make the film in Latin was often defended by Jarman as a form of realism which helped him to bypass the problem of stilted and unconvincing dialogue which often plagued the traditional historical film. The Latin certainly makes a major contribution to the peculiar tonal shifts, facilitating the moves from religious solemnity to schoolboy humour and back again. There are the elevated hymns of Sebastian to his God but also the subtitling of ‘Oedipus’ as ‘motherfucker’, playful Latinised allusions to Cecil B. de Mille and Fellini, and a more extended joke about Mary Whitehouse. The bored soldiers play with some black beetles in the sand, personifying them as women engaged in rough sex with each other. One beetle, christened ‘Maria Domus Alba’, is described in fearsome terms as the ‘leader of the Vestal Virgins’ and ‘The terror of civilisation’ before she is overpowered by another beetle called ‘Sappho’. This is undoubtedly amusing but in a draft version of the film’s opening scene there was a more pointed gibe at the formidable Secretary of the National Viewers and Listeners Association. As the Emperor Diocletian orders the killing of Christians, a character named, once again, ‘Maria Domus Alba’ shrieks with vindictive delight, ‘Kill them! Strangle them! Stone them! Another! Bring on another!’ and points out Sebastian himself, crying ‘He’s a Christian! Kill him as well!’.4 Whereas Jarman saw modern-day Christians like Mary Whitehouse as vicious persecutors, he was always able to identify imaginatively with Christ himself and his early followers as victims and outcasts. The Latin jokes, along with the beatings, homosexual horseplay, and romantic ‘crushes’, give the remote Roman military garrison something of the air of a traditional English public school,5 where of course inventive macaronic humour often flourished (‘Caesar adsum jam forte /

MUP_Wymer_03_Chap 3

37

7/25/05, 5:00 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

38

derek jarman

Brutus aderat / Caesar sic in omnibus / Brutus sic in at’).6 In at least one respect, however, Jarman was very careful to protect his protagonist from ribald jokes. The expected Latin form of the saint’s name, and the form which appears in some of the draft titles for the film, would be Sebastianus. Jarman must have decided at some stage that this was too close to a ‘Carry On’ type of innuendo to serve as the title of a serious film about homosexual desire and converted it to the vocative Sebastiane (‘O Sebastian’). As well as helping to suggest that Sebastian himself is an object of worshipful address, the change also appears to give a feminine form to the name. The Sebastian of history was martyred by the Roman Emperor Diocletian in about 300 ad as part of the last great persecution of Christianity before Constantine established it as the official religion of the Empire. According to legend, he was a Captain in the Palace Guard who tried to help other Christians and was ordered to be shot to death with arrows. He miraculously revived, with the help of a woman called Irene, only to be later beaten to death with clubs and thrown into the main public sewer. Although a popular medieval saint, whose ‘resurrection’ caused him to be frequently invoked against the plague, his modern iconographic status derives from the many Renaissance paintings showing him as a handsome beardless youth tied to a tree or pillar and pierced by several arrows. Some of this aesthetic and erotic appeal overlaps with that of depictions of the crucifixion but painters felt freer to give Sebastian a more classical appearance so that these pictures became, among other things, a way of satisfactorily integrating the Christian and the Hellenistic. Vasari tells of one painting by Fra Bartolommeo which had to be removed from its church because of its impact on female viewers7 but, since the late nineteenth century, St Sebastian has predominantly been a focal point of same-sex desire and ‘has emerged as the very distillation in art of an emotionally and politically fraught homosexual persona’.8 Jarman’s remarks about his own films are always interesting but they can sometimes be seriously misleading, particularly when uttered long after the film was made. In At Your Own Risk he wrote, ‘Sebastian, the doolally Christian who refused a good fuck, gets the arrows he deserved. Can one feel sorry for this Latin closet case?’, the implied answer obviously being ‘No’.9 In the same book, he also said that the film ‘didn’t present homosexuality as a problem and this was what made it different from all the British films that had preceded it’ and that he made it ‘so that young men could have an option: the doors were opened into another world’.10 On this account, the audience would be emotionally distanced from the repressed protagonist and the heart of

MUP_Wymer_03_Chap 3

38

7/25/05, 5:00 PM

sebastiane

39

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the film would be the idyllic love play of Adrian and Anthony. Michael O’Pray, in what is generally one of the best readings of Sebastiane, did indeed find the hero ‘too passive and empty to engage our sympathies’11 but I would argue that the complexities of the Sebastian persona in modern literature, photography and painting were very well suited to Jarman’s exploration of his own complicated psychology, allowing numerous possibilities of identification and precluding any simple message about the delights of homosexual love. As Richard A. Kaye writes: Beginning in the twentieth century, Sebastian became, pre-eminently, the homosexual as beleaguered, existential hero. Far more problematically, he has come to stand for the supposedly sado-masochistic nature of same-sex eroticism. While generations of men of homosexual inclinations have understood Sebastian as a homoeroticised icon, for others he has denoted a homosexual Eros that is menacingly narcissistic and suicidal. In a paradox that goes to the heart of the saint’s continuing resonance, contemporary gay men have seen in Sebastian at once a stunning advertisement for homosexual desire (indeed, a homoerotic ideal), and a prototypical portrait of [a] tortured closet case.12

Richard Dyer has similarly identified St Sebastian as one of the sources of the ‘sad young man’ stereotype in representations of homosexuals during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.13 Throughout the film Sebastian is very much the outsider, marked off from the other soldiers by his religion, and frequently seeking to be alone. His intense inner life is more important to him than the company of others, even when they offer friendship or love rather than just rough camaraderie. In many ways, even in his doggedly maintained celibacy, he is someone in whom Jarman would have recognised aspects of his own youth. ‘At 21 I could have made a good monk’, he wrote, ‘and had no problems being celibate. Quite a few of my friends thought I would take orders.’14 Towards the end of an adventurous sexual life, he was still ready to concede that ‘celibacy can be very radical especially same-sex celibacy’15 and although deeply resenting the suggestion that he had used his HIV positive status to pose as a martyr, he rather enjoyed his investiture as St Derek of Dungeness by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and was happy to use the playful subtitle A Saint’s Testament when he published At Your Own Risk. As a spiritually intense outsider whose own sexuality is enigmatic but includes a masochistic component, Sebastian was an ideal persona through whom Jarman could explore some of his major preoccupations – narcissism and the individuated self, love and pain, the spirit and the flesh, the Christian and the pagan – and bring them to a form of reconciliation. The film’s opening scene is set in Diocletian’s palace, at a party given

MUP_Wymer_03_Chap 3

39

7/25/05, 5:00 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

40

derek jarman

on 25 December ‘to celebrate the birth of the sun’. The slight jolt we experience when we realise that Christmas Day has been given over to the worship of a solar deity helps prepare us for some of the film’s central ambiguities. The vivid grotesqueries of this scene owe something to Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) and much of the outrage generated when Channel Four screened Sebastiane in 1985 was focused on these opening minutes. Yet Jarman’s remark in Dancing Ledge about ‘the vicious decadence’ of Diocletian hardly suggests an endorsement of the spectacle even if he did wish to bring it ‘vividly to life’.16 In fact he is working within a venerable cinematic tradition and we are told later in the film that the orgies in Satyricon ‘weren’t a patch on old Mille’s [Cecil B. de Mille]’. Dominating the scene is an erotic dance by Lindsay Kemp and his troupe, which begins with a close-up of Kemp’s grotesquely made-up face, his tongue quivering lasciviously, and ends with simulated ejaculations from the giant phalluses of the dancers, showering him with milky fluid. His face, in an inverted close-up, now expresses an ecstatic loss of self, parodically anticipating Sebastian’s own martyrdom. This unstable mixture of attraction and repulsion is also present in the horrific execution of a Christian, the executioner sinking his teeth into the neck as Isabella does to Kent in Edward II. Whatever erotic charge this spectacle might carry for some of the audience, one hardly has to be a Christian to sympathise strongly with Sebastian’s principled protest, the protest which leads to his reduction to the ranks and banishment to a frontier outpost. After the frenetic excitements of this opening scene, the film settles into a quite different rhythm, which it maintains to the end. In a minimalist Sardinian landscape of sand, sea, sky, a ruined cottage, and one ancient watchtower, the small group of soldiers while away their time of exile in a place where there is ‘Nowhere to go, no one to fight, nothing to do’. The lack of narrative impetus is characteristic of all Jarman’s films but here is arguably a form of realism, capturing a feature of military life which the cinema often chooses to neglect in its commitment to violent action. The film’s languid rhythms may also owe something to the fact that hardly enough footage had been shot in Sardinia to permit conventional editing into a feature-length picture, so that Paul Humfress ‘had to cut the film as slowly as possible’.17 The first scene in the camp is of Sebastian washing himself at dawn, watched intently by the Captain Severus, whose name combines Roman plausibility with obvious sadomasochistic connotations. The camera lingers lovingly on the hero’s body, his arms above his head in a manner which anticipates the posture of his death, and the repeated shots of the watching Captain seem to establish his viewpoint as dominant and

MUP_Wymer_03_Chap 3

40

7/25/05, 5:00 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

sebastiane

41

Sebastian as the object of his (and our) desiring gaze. Yet the voice-over consists of Sebastian’s address to his God, making him the ecstatic subject of desire and the sensuality with which he runs his hands over his own body has a narcissistic dimension which dissolves the subjectobject distinction. Most importantly, Sebastian is no longer the beardless, ‘classical’ young man whom we saw in Diocletian’s palace; he now has a short, dark beard giving him a much more Jewish and Christ-like appearance, and a particularly strong resemblance to the Jesus of Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew. Jarman apparently hesitated before asking Leonardo Treviglio to play Sebastian ‘as he seems so melancholic’ and the choice confounded the producer James Whaley who had ‘an image of Sebastian which is out of GQ – sexy and musclebound’ and who repeatedly poked fun at the beard.18 If Jarman had simply sought to imitate closely the Renaissance paintings which inspired him, he would have insisted that Treviglio shaved off his beard, but this would have sacrificed much of the visual and conceptual tension between the ascetic, Christ-like Sebastian and the golden-haired Severus, his Apollonian counterpart. When one of the soldiers is wounded in mock combat (the wound is in the neck, recalling the violence of the opening scene), Sebastian refuses to fight further and rides away on his own. Leaving the others to indulge in their rough games, he stares into a rock pool, once more addressing his God. It is left ambiguous whether he is gazing at his own reflection or that of the sun in the water, and it hardly matters. The image is one of an intense and narcissistic spirituality in which transcendence is only achieved through self-absorption, far from the company of other men. On returning to camp, Sebastian’s defiance is punished with a flogging, which he endures stoically, though his body is marked with realistic bloody weals. The erotic potential of this is increased in a number of ways. As the sounds of the flogging continue on the soundtrack, the soldiers gaze lasciviously at the Roman equivalent of a Page Three girl and the line ‘Severus is really bashing the meat this evening’ punningly equates the beating with masturbation. When the two lovers Adrian and Anthony settle down under the blankets together, we continue to hear the rhythmic impact of the whip, representing both sexual intercourse and its punishment, and perhaps distantly alluding to the traumatic incident in Jarman’s childhood when he climbed into another boy’s bed at school and was beaten for it. Beneath the suspended figure of Sebastian are a number of grunting pigs and when Max, the coarsest and roughest of the soldiers, throws them their swill, he tips the remainder of the bucket over Sebastian, beginning a series of identifications between the saint and this

MUP_Wymer_03_Chap 3

41

7/25/05, 5:00 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

42

derek jarman

‘unclean’ animal. The choice of a pig rather than the lamb which one might have expected emphasises the martyr as a despised outcast rather than noble innocent and thus strengthens the possibilities of homosexual identification. A new day dawns with some horseplay in the dormitory involving fake erections, generating a series of visual puns on the idea of ‘getting up’ in the morning. This scene is an intentionally crude and carnal counterpart to Sebastian’s poetic address the previous morning to the young God rising. After some further rather desultory attempts of the soldiers to amuse themselves, we reach one of the film’s key scenes which I think is integral to an understanding of Jarman’s sexual psychology but not quite in the way it is usually analysed. Adrian and Anthony, whose names suggest the famous classical lovers Hadrian and Antinous, make love in a prolonged and idyllic manner among the rocks and in a pool, first in real time and then in slow motion. Jarman was undoubtedly proud of the fact that he had made available to a large audience some unashamedly positive images of homosexual lovemaking of a kind which had previously only been seen in underground films like Pink Narcissus (1971). Yet despite the extended celebration of young male bodies and the brief glimpse of an erection (only visible if the film is projected in Academy ratio), there is arguably an absence of real erotic intensity. Face-to-face, hand-in-hand, then splashing happily in the water, the two men are romantically tender with each other but never seem likely to engage in an actual sex act which would disrupt the narcissistic mirroring by introducing images of dominance, submission, and difference. If either of these lovers were to bend over for the other or ‘go down’ on him, it would be less easy to see them as twin souls, equal to the point of being self-identical. The element of evasion here is detectable in the allusion to Hadrian and Antinous, since these famous lovers were far from being equals in age, rank, or appearance. The Emperor Hadrian was 54 when the beautiful Antinous drowned in the Nile at the age of 20 and the dynamics of their relationship would have been much nearer to that of Diocletian and Sebastian than to Jarman’s idealised ‘twins’, Adrian and Anthony. The slight blandness of this lovemaking (The Sunday Telegraph unsympathetically described it as being ‘in the lyrical manner of a toothpaste advertisement’)19 is accentuated by intercutting it with an interchange between Severus and Sebastian taking place nearby. Here the erotic tensions of difference and domination are immediately apparent as the blond, long-haired Captain in full armour orders the dark, crouching Sebastian to pull off his boots and twice lays a hand on his head in frustrated desire. Angered by Sebastian’s continued intransigence,

MUP_Wymer_03_Chap 3

42

7/25/05, 5:00 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

sebastiane

43

Severus then orders Adrian and Anthony to stake him out in the sand, exposing him to the glare of the noonday sun. They hammer in the pegs, like the nails driven into Christ at his crucifixion, and make no protest. It was always an illusion that they were somehow detached from the world of power, inequality, and pain. Spreadeagled in the sun, Sebastian stares upward and begins to mutter deliriously. The point-of-view shots directly into the blazing sun are rendered more mystical by electronic music and the enigmatic appearance of a boy with a leopardskin, bearing a branch, who is silhouetted against the sun’s disc as he moves in a circle. As Sebastian continues to mutter, it becomes clear that the God whom he has poetically addressed on two previous occasions is to be imaged in solar terms rather than as the bearded Christ figure whom he himself resembles: He is as beautiful as the sun This sun which caresses me is His burning desire. He is Phoebus Apollo The sun is his burning kiss.

These lines are spoken immediately following intercut scenes of a pig hunt which reaches its climax when Severus stabs the pig with his long spear. The editing identifies Sebastian with the pig and confirms the paradox that the God in whose name he resists the sexual advances of Severus has an Apollonian beauty which resembles that of Severus himself. Psychologically, if not carnally, Sebastian surrenders masochistically to something radically different and other, finding ecstasy as he does so. By contrast, the narcissistic twinning of Adrian and Anthony seems to offer a more superficial pleasure and its limitations are echoed in Sebastian’s relationship with his Christian friend Justin (played by Richard Warwick, whose performance on the parallel bars was one of the homoerotic highlights of Lindsay Anderson’s If ). The tender and caring Justin, who is bearded like Sebastian, tries to shield his friend’s face from the sun but is told, ‘Justin, you don’t understand. Take it away’ and the final shot is of the pig’s blood staining the sand, with a number of spears stuck round it. At night, the agon between Sebastian and Severus continues and this time the Captain is able to force cries of pain from his prisoner as he rubs sand into his sunburnt body in a manner as sensual as it is cruel. When Sebastian once more refuses to make love, Severus draws his sword and it seems for a moment that he will kill him but he only cuts the ropes tying him to the ceiling before slumping down in defeat and despair. In his tunic, without armour, he becomes for the moment a

MUP_Wymer_03_Chap 3

43

7/25/05, 5:00 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

44

derek jarman

feminised figure as the real power is seen to lie with the apparent victim. Although the figure of St Sebastian in art is normally seen as encouraging masochistic identification, here his resolute chastity makes him, like the Petrarchan mistress, a powerful cause of others’ abjection. Before Severus tries for the last time to make Sebastian yield, there are several scenes which alternate between depicting a rough, collective masculinity, which is erotically inflected, and exploring the more soulful, private and ‘feminine’ relationship between Sebastian and Justin, who are starting to resemble each other more and more. The famous bath-house scene, which overlays languorous close-ups of the young soldiers soaping, scraping and preening themselves with Max’s gravelvoiced lament for the old days when men were men and Nero employed Christians as human torches, is succeeded by Sebastian dancing for Justin his special little ‘dance of the sun on the water’, a dance which symbolically unites the masculine and the feminine. When told he dances like a god, he says ‘Not like a god, Justin, but for God’ and when Justin then asks if Severus understands his dance, he is told he does, strengthening the metaphoric equivalence of God, sun, and Severus. Max, who with his scarred face and black leather nosepiece is a somewhat grotesque embodiment of conventional masculinity, then enacts a raucous parody of how the ‘Christian whore’ Sebastian ‘danced’ with the Captain. In this literally brutal performance Sebastian is represented by a young pig and the delicate dancing movements are converted to crude rump presentations. The harsh, mocking laughter of the soldiers is succeeded by an immense tranquility, as Sebastian and Justin sit on a rock together in the midst of the sea, listening to the whisperings of a seashell they have found. Shot in near-silhouette against the blue sea, the two men are quite hard to tell apart and the fact that a seashell returns only echoes to the ear of the listener adds to the implication that the intimacy between them has a narcissistic component. This scene is really the spiritual equivalent of the lovemaking between Adrian and Anthony and can equally be read as a form of idealised self-absorption rather than an encounter with the real and difficult otherness of another person. As in the earlier scene, the idyll is brought to an end by violence and Sebastian comes close to being drowned by Max when he intervenes in some rough horseplay. As night falls again, the soldiers begin drinking heavily and Severus becomes more and more angry and frustrated. Stripping down to his tunic, he once more appears a rather feminine figure in his misery, before a desperate aggression reasserts itself and he threatens to rape Sebastian, ripping his shirt from his shoulders before saying pathetically

MUP_Wymer_03_Chap 3

44

7/25/05, 5:00 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

sebastiane

45

‘I love you’. Shot from below, his long fair hair glinting like the sun’s corona, he looks like a god indeed but it is the prone Sebastian who is psychologically dominant as, with a cruel satisfaction he tells him, ‘You’ll never have me’. In drunken despair Severus then wrecks the room and the scene ends with the camera closing in on two flickering flames from the oil wicks, one of which soon goes out. For the third and last time in the film, a reveille is sounded from the top of the stone watchtower and the day of Sebastian’s martyrdom dawns. He sits Christ-like with a crown of twigs in the midst of a flock of goats as the amplified noise of their bells increases to drown out every other sound. He looks as peaceful as Balthazar dying amid the flock of sheep at the end of Bresson’s Au Hasard, Balthazar (1966) but the substitution of goats for sheep implies he is a scapegoat rather than a sacrificial lamb and is a more muted version of the repeated identifications of him with the ‘unclean’ pig. While a bored soldier skewers a bee on a stick, breaking off its wings, a cloaked figure wearing a crown of thorns crawls past like Christ on the Via Dolorosa. It turns out to be another of Max’s parodies and he promptly fastens the crown of thorns on Justin who is already bleeding from several wounds, cradling him in a posture which resembles the pietà. This conversion of Justin into a Christ figure at the very point when Sebastian is about to complete his own imitation of Christ is one of the most peculiar features of Jarman’s ending but it is fully coherent with the symbolism of the rest of the film and with key moments in his other films, most notably the splitting of Christ into two young men in The Garden. The final scene involving Sebastian’s death by arrows is, of course, what the audience has been most anxious to see and Jarman goes some way towards giving it the expected erotic impact. By tying the saint’s hands high above his head, he imitates the famous Guido Reni painting (c. 1615) which had such an arousing effect on the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, leading to his first orgasm and, much later in life, to having himself photographed in the same pose. As Mishima’s autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask makes clear, the erotic appeal of the picture does not simply lie in its depiction of the taut, suffering body of a handsome youth but in a specific interest, both masochistic and narcissistic, in the exposed armpits. These two openings, tufted with the hair which signifies sexual maturity, are an obvious way of feminising the male body, giving it further orifices which can be penetrated. There is a trick shot in Cammell and Roeg’s Performance (1970), one of the few modern British films which Jarman admired, in which an extreme close-up of a (closed) armpit causes it momentarily to resemble a vagina. In Mishima’s novel, the protagonist becomes obsessed with the armpits

MUP_Wymer_03_Chap 3

45

7/25/05, 5:00 PM

46

derek jarman

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

of his older schoolfriend Omi before achieving, by means of the image of St Sebastian, a narcissistic identification with the object of his desire. Ever since becoming obsessed with the picture of St Sebastian, I had acquired the unconscious habit of crossing my hands over my head whenever I happened to be undressed. Mine was a frail body, without so much as a pale shadow of Sebastian’s abundant beauty. But now once more I spontaneously fell into the pose. As I did so my eyes went to my armpits. And a mysterious sexual desire boiled up within me … Summer had come and, with it, there in my armpits, the first sprouts of black thickets, not the equal of Omi’s it is true, but undoubtedly there. Here then was the point of similarity with Omi that my purposes required. There is no doubt that Omi himself was involved in my sexual desire, but neither could it be denied that this desire was directed mainly toward my own armpits.20

The completion of this displacement of desire requires that at least one arrow should bury itself in an armpit and Jarman follows Reni in depicting this. (In fact, the cover of the Tartan video copy increases the resemblance to the painting by subjecting the film image to a left-toright transposition so that the arrow is now embedded in the left armpit in each case.) The sexual nature of the scene is also enhanced by having some of the archers nude while others remain in armour and by some shots from the side which emphasise the graceful curve of the saint’s body against the post. Yet much of the filming, quite deliberately, eschews physical eroticism in favour of something more abstract and dreamlike. There is considerable use of long and medium shot and, most importantly, until the final few seconds when electronic music is used, the soundtrack consists of nothing more than the sighing of the wind. There is no whirr of arrows through the air, no thud of impact, no cries of pain, no voices of the soldiers. The absence of synchronised sound means that it is sometimes difficult to correlate the firing of an arrow with any immediate physical consequence, though closer attention reveals that all seven arrows do indeed find their target. The final, fatal shot through the neck comes from Sebastian’s Christ-like mirror image, Justin, who, despite being near death himself, is forced by Max to help hold the bow. This would seem to complete the fatal circle of narcissism which is detectable in Mishima’s response to St Sebastian and which is implicit in many of Jarman’s idealised same-sex couples. However, the final few seconds of the film suggest something more positive. If the God to whom Sebastian gives up his being closely resembled himself, then he would remain forever incomplete and unsatisfied, fixated by his own reflection. But the God he worships is

MUP_Wymer_03_Chap 3

46

7/25/05, 5:00 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

sebastiane

47

always imaged as a sun god, a blond Apollonian figure, Hellenistic and masculine, who is the complementary opposite of the dark, ‘feminine’, Judaeo-Christian figure that he is. In the strange and wonderful last image of the film, shot with a wide-angle lens directly into the sun and apparently from Sebastian’s point of view though in fact from a higher position as if he were Christ looking down from the cross, Sebastian is mystically united with his opposite and achieves an ecstatic and transcendent individuation. In Jungian psychology, both the sun and Christ are archetypal images of the individuated Self but in a paradoxical way, which Jung himself understood very well, they are also incomplete images, each needing to integrate with a complementary other. The symbolic union of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ principles which takes place here is given further expression by the view in the far distance of the dazzling play of the sun upon the water, the subject of Sebastian’s earlier dance. We seem a long way from the frank sensuality of the Renaissance paintings and Jarman later lamented that undue attention to the overtly sexual aspects of his film prevented audiences from responding to the inner psychological drama being enacted: ‘Sex cut across the reading in all the viewers’ eyes: they saw a naked, handsome man, they did not see him as a spirit.’21 As a spirit, Sebastian opens himself up to his God, who is the sun, who is Severus, and finds a completeness which he could not have achieved with his Christ-like twin Justin, who is scarcely visible in the final shot as he lies bleeding on the ground. Yet this triumphant union of the Apollonian with the Christian can also be seen as less than complete because it takes place entirely at the spiritual level. Sebastian has remained celibate and a whole dimension of human existence, what might be called the Dionysiac, has been repressed. To this extent, the ending is a tragedy as well as a triumph and the Jungian synthesis of opposites becomes vulnerable to a Freudian critique which would reaffirm the importance of the body. Lindsay Kemp’s quivering tongue and sperm-splattered face cannot entirely be ‘spirited away’, though the film comes surprisingly close to doing so, making it, as Richard Kaye points out, ‘curiously orthodox in its approach to its subject’22 and making the outrage which greeted its showing on Channel Four in 1985 harder to understand. The Catholic priest who came up to Jarman after the premiere at the Locarno Film festival ‘and said how much he had enjoyed the film, particularly the Latin’23 probably had a better understanding of its spiritual dimension than Mary Whitehouse, whose letter of complaint to the Independent Broadcasting Authority (dated 2 December 1985) was firmly focused on the flesh. Sex, it could be said, cut across her reading of the film to the exclusion of all else.

MUP_Wymer_03_Chap 3

47

7/25/05, 5:00 PM

48

derek jarman

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 95. Ibid., p. 93. BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 3, Item 3. Ibid., Box 3, Item 2b. Tony Peake makes this point in Derek Jarman, p. 217. I.e. ‘Caesar ’ad some jam for tea / Brutus ’ad a rat / Caesar sick in omnibus / Brutus sick in ’at.’ Cited in Nigel Spivey, Enduring Creation: Art, Pain and Fortitude (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001), Chapter 5, ‘Vasari and the Pangs of St Sebastian’, p. 99. Richard A. Kaye, ‘Losing his Religion: Saint Sebastian as Contemporary Gay Martyr’, in Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 86–105 (p. 86). Jarman, At Your Own Risk, p. 83. Ibid., pp. 83 and 29. O’Pray, Dreams of England, p. 84. Kaye, ‘Losing his Religion’, p. 87. Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 77–8. Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 46. Jarman, At Your Own Risk, p. 31. Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 155. Ibid., p. 161. Dancing Ledge, p. 144. David Castell, Sunday Telegraph (31 October 1976). Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask, trans. Meredith Weatherby (London: Peter Owen, 1998, repr. 2001), p. 88. Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 255. Kaye, ‘Losing his Religion’, p. 98. Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 162.

MUP_Wymer_03_Chap 3

48

7/25/05, 5:00 PM

49

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

1 Mirrors are the doors by which Death comes: Luciana Martinez, Kevin Whitney, and Gerald Incandela (masked) in The Art of Mirrors.

2 The past meets the present in Jubilee: Elizabeth I (Jenny Runacre) and John Dee (Richard O’Brien) with the corpse of Lounge Lizard (Wayne County), overlooked by the Head of Mausolus.

3 Through a glass darkly in The Tempest: Prospero (Heathcote Williams) uses his magic staff, topped with a version of John Dee’s Hieroglyphic Monad and a magic mirror, to give Miranda (Toyah Willcox) a glimpse of her childhood.

4 The annihilation of the Renaissance in The Last of England: Spring’s boot comes down on the body of Cupid in Caravaggio’s painting of ‘Profane Love’.

MUP_Wymer_04_Pix

49

7/25/05, 5:01 PM

50

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

5 Art and authority: Soldiers posing for a painting in Imagining October.

MUP_Wymer_04_Pix

6 The emotional and sexual tensions of difference and domination in Sebastiane: Sebastian (Leonardo Treviglio) removes the boots of Severus (Barney James).

50

7/25/05, 5:01 PM

51

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

7 The selfsame soul in a different body: Paul Reynolds and Philip Williamson in The Angelic Conversation.

8 The artist as Christ in Caravaggio: Christ’s head is replaced by that of Caravaggio (Nigel Terry) in the living tableau for ‘The Entombment’.

MUP_Wymer_04_Pix

51

7/25/05, 5:01 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

52

9 The pity of war: Tilda Swinton grieves for Wilfred Owen in War Requiem.

10 You cannot travel on the path before you have become the path itself: The encounter with Christ (Roger Cook) on the road in The Garden.

MUP_Wymer_04_Pix

52

7/25/05, 5:01 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

53

11 The nightmare of history in Edward II: Edward (Steve Waddington) meets his death (or dreams he does).

12 The cage(s) of language in Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein (Karl Johnson) and a parrot share their imprisonment.

MUP_Wymer_04_Pix

53

7/25/05, 5:01 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Anarchy in the UK: Jubilee (1978)

4

The relative success of Sebastiane (it ran for sixteen weeks at the Gate Cinema in Notting Hill before transferring to two other London cinemas and a number of provincial venues) encouraged Jarman, Whaley, and Malin to attempt the impossible once more and make another independently financed feature film. The starting point for Jubilee was Jarman’s fascination with Jordan, a girl who worked at the King’s Road clothes shop owned by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood and who embodied the emerging punk style which the shop was busy promoting. She had appeared briefly, with a strikingly anachronistic blonde punk haircut, in the opening scene of Sebastiane as Mammea Morgana, the famous prostitute who ‘has slept her way from Bath to Rome’, and Jarman now wanted to make a semi-documentary film about her and her London milieu. In pursuit of this idea, he managed to take some of the earliest surviving footage of the Sex Pistols as they performed at a 1976 Valentine’s Day party. The extract which appears (uncredited) in Julien Temple’s The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle (1980) has a nervous and chaotic energy which matches the music, using many extreme close-ups and rapid pans, as the band crash through ‘Johnny B. Goode’ despite Johnny Rotten’s inability to remember the words. The sequence ends with the drummer Paul Cook picking his nose and Rotten exclaiming ‘Oh fuck! It’s awful!’. By 1977, the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, punk had spread beyond a handful of clubs and bands in London and New York and was starting to look like a complete new youth culture in the making. Jarman was persuaded to move beyond his plan for a super-8 film about Jordan and to write the script for a fictional feature-length film which would capture the aggressive iconoclasm of punk which, in England, had found a convenient, if temporary, target in the complacent patriotism with which Elizabeth II’s twenty-five years on the throne were being celebrated. There are many different stories which can be told about the

MUP_Wymer_05_Chap 4

54

7/25/05, 5:15 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

jubilee

55

punk phenomenon and most of them are present in one form or another in Jubilee. Whereas the energies of previous rock music had grown out of the unparalleled post-war prosperity of Western society, in which teenagers had become affluent enough to constitute a new market, the energies of punk were obviously, in part, a response to the economic recession which followed the huge rise in oil prices engineered in 1973 by the OPEC cartel, a recession which sent unemployment figures soaring and hit school-leavers particularly badly, convincing many of them that they had ‘no future’. The British Labour Government seemed to have lost control of the economy, being unable to stem either monetary inflation or the rise in unemployment, and was forced to beg for loans from the International Monetary Fund. ‘Healey’s Budget Strategy in Ruins’ declares a newspaper headline in Jarman’s film. Yet if one is persuaded by influential commentators like Greil Marcus, Jon Savage, or Sadie Plant, punk was as much a protest against ‘success’, an angry critique of consumer capitalism with deep roots in anarchist philosophy, as it was a symptom of economic failure.1 Certainly Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols’ manager, and Jamie Reid, the graphic artist who created the famous image of the Queen with a safety pin through her lips, were both familiar with the ideas of the Situationists, the small group of artists and intellectuals whose anarchist slogans appeared all over Paris during the upheavals of May 1968. De Gaulle himself, when reasserting his control of France in the following month, had recognised that the May riots and sit-ins had not been a ‘normal’ political protest but a symptom of much deeper discontent: ‘This explosion was provoked by a few groups in revolt against modern society, against consumer society, against technological society, whether communist in the East or capitalist in the West – groups, moreover, which do not know what they would put in its place, but which delight in negation.’2 Any young punk in the 1970s who screamed ‘No’ to the illusory satisfactions of consumerism (‘Your future dream is a shopping scheme / But I want to be anarchy’) was arguably re-enacting the Situationist critique of contemporary culture, whether consciously or not. Jarman certainly empathised with the furious rejection of ‘the society of the spectacle’, a society in which, as J. G. Ballard put it, ‘ Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography’.3 The ‘anyone can do it’ philosophy of punk rock also echoed his own attitude to film-making. By simply picking up a guitar or a super-8 camera, one could become an artist, free from previous preconceptions about what counted as good technique, free from the demands of the money men, and more concerned with the moment of

MUP_Wymer_05_Chap 4

55

7/25/05, 5:15 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

56

derek jarman

creation than the finished product. However, Jarman was seriously out of sympathy with some of the arbitrary and philistine attacks on previous art which were part of the punk stance (one of his favourite directors, Fellini, appeared in a long list of ‘Hates’ on an early punk Tshirt). His own quarrel with the present always led him to look for vital resources from within the traditions of Western art rather than to a declaration of war against those traditions. He was also presciently cynical about the ease with which angry protests against commodification could themselves be commodified, ‘anarchy’ itself becoming just another brand label. As Borgia Ginz, the ‘evil impresario’ says at the end of Jubilee, ‘They all sign up in the end one way or another.’ Jarman’s ambivalence about where all this violent youthful energy was heading resulted in an extremely interesting film, deliberately ugly in places, and very uncomfortable to watch, a film which, he tells us in the published script, ‘always upset people’.4 Its picture of a murderous gang of female punks who are eventually absorbed into an all-powerful media empire seemed, to Vivienne Westwood, like a ‘betrayal of punk’ and, in the eyes of Conservative MPs, a disgraceful incitement to mob violence. Although Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit have written that ‘most of [Jarman’s] work is complicit with the punk nihilism of Jubilee’,5 my own view is that it stands rather apart from the body of his films. Even in The Last of England, which is in some ways an obvious companion piece, the despairing view of ‘the state of the nation’ is conveyed through the kind of mesmeric visual poetry which is deliberately avoided in much of Jubilee. Instead we are subjected to an onslaught of deliberately discordant signs, including large amounts of written text (often in the form of graffiti), which are hard to take in quickly, creating an anxious feeling of semiotic overload. The deliberately jarring use of the written word within a visual medium also anticipates the polemical effect achieved by some of Jarman’s final paintings, in which abstract colours are overlaid by furious, ironic scrawls like ‘Fuck Me Blind’ and ‘Dead Sexy’. Jarman himself came to feel that the film was too loud and hectoring in its style, but its calculated semiotic assault, frequently cacophonous soundtrack, and ‘raw’ performances from untrained actors like Toyah Willcox and Adam Ant, meant that it ‘captured the mood of Punk England better than anyone could have predicted’,6 and, along with the two Julien Temple films about the Sex Pistols, Lech Kowalski’s D.O.A. (1981), and Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue (1980), it remains one of the key cinematic representations of the period. The most obvious way in which the film distances itself from punk culture is its use of framing scenes involving Queen Elizabeth I, John Dee, and the Angel Ariel. This material derives from the scripts Jarman

MUP_Wymer_05_Chap 4

56

7/25/05, 5:15 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

jubilee

57

was working on in late 1975 which show Elizabeth and Dee in their old age holding philosophical discussions and being shown, with the help of Ariel, some of the secrets of the universe. The historical Dee, as mentioned in Chapter 1, had sought knowledge through mathematics, alchemy, mirrors, crystal balls, and the famous conversations with angels in order that he might rise towards the divine level. In Jubilee his spirit Ariel can afford him only a melancholy and prophetic vision of urban dereliction and social breakdown – the London of 1977. Elizabeth I, who had looked hopefully into the ‘shewstone’ with Dee at the beginning of the film, is reduced to pleading pathetically, when confronted with the brutal murder of a transvestite rock star, ‘Spirit Ariel, we would have knowledge of God. Where is God? Is God dead?’ The most obvious function of the sixteenth-century characters and settings is to form an idealised contrast to the ‘waste land’ of the present, in the way that T. S. Eliot had evoked ‘Elizabeth and Leicester beating oars’ on the ‘sweet Thames’ as a counterpoint to the polluted industrial river flowing through twentieth-century London. Such a contrast was certainly part of Jarman’s scheme and his unpublished papers contain the note: ‘Elizabeth in virgin white, is to be shown a shadow world, which is a black contrast to the optimism and ideals of her own time – a world in which the stream of Renaissance humanis[m] has run dry.’7 The note is slightly misleading because although Elizabeth’s white dress does indeed contrast strikingly with the black clothes worn by Bod, the leader of the punks, the primary lighting contrast is between the shadowy, twilit world of the Elizabethan past and the garish ‘overlit realm’ of the 1970s. The opening scene in Dee’s garden at Mortlake seems underexposed and its bluish tint, like the blue flash of light which accompanies the appearance of Ariel, has Jungian connotations of the spiritual in opposition to the flaming red hair of Mad, the pyromaniac punk girl, or the red polythene sheets used to suffocate the lover of Crabs, which suggest untamed instinctual energies. Further obvious contrasts are effected through the soundtrack (breaking waves and the cry of gulls against the roar of flames and the rattle of gunfire) and shifts in linguistic register. The speech of Elizabeth and Dee is exaggeratedly archaic, employing rare words like ‘antimony’ and ‘alexipharmic’, oldfashioned forms of the possessive (‘the devil, his kingdom’), and periodic sentences (‘Such an abstract never before I spied’) whereas the most notable feature of the punks’ language is the liberal use of the word ‘fuck’. The deliberately constructed nature of this contrast becomes even more obvious when one thinks of how forceful and ‘modern’ Marlowe’s authentic Elizabethan language often seems in Edward II.

MUP_Wymer_05_Chap 4

57

7/25/05, 5:15 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

58

derek jarman

The pattern of strong oppositions between past and present is certainly there but from the very beginning it is complicated, if not wholly subverted, by a number of interesting details. Ominous rumbles of thunder are heard in the Elizabethan prologue and the dwarf servingwoman probably seems gratuitously grotesque to audiences whose sense of Elizabethan reality has been shaped by Hollywood. In fact Elizabeth I did keep a dwarf lady called Thomasina in her court from 1578 onwards,8 though Jarman’s use of such a figure is a way of disrupting any comfortable historical distance by inserting a punk icon into the world of 1597. Helen Wallington-Lloyd was a close friend of Malcolm McLaren and a highly visible presence on the punk scene of the 1970s. She was later to have a major part in The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle as the attentive recipient of McLaren’s stream of cynical advice about how to succeed in the music business. The ‘huge spectral hunting dogs’ which accompany her in the first scene of Jubilee increase the sense of oddity and disproportion and convey an air of menace which anticipates the terrifying feral dogs who roam the streets near the punk commune in Penelope Spheeris’s Suburbia (1984). Past and present become even less distinct as the Elizabethan characters cease to be mere spectators but take a significant part in the action. The dwarf woman steals a pair of dark glasses, one of the film’s consistent signifiers of postmodern cool, from the corpse of Elizabeth II, replicating the way the Kid (Adam Ant) removed a similar pair from a car crash victim in the film’s first contemporary scene. If we had not noticed it earlier, we now become aware that the virginal white dress of the first Elizabeth has two artificial red flowers pinned to it, linking her to the lurid carnal pleasures and plastic flower gardens of 1977. The film’s last scene, with Elizabeth and Dee walking along the Dorset cliffs as light begins to fade, restores the idealised distance of the Elizabethan past but, paradoxically, only by showing the characters mourning their own lost past. In earlier drafts of the script the Elizabethan scenes were dated as 1577 to parallel the Jubilee year of 1977. By moving them to 1597, the date given in the published script, Jarman was going back to his original conception, in the unrealised Dr. Dee project, of Elizabeth and Dee conversing together in old age.9 In 1597 Elizabeth would have been 64 and Dee 70 but for most of the film Jarman chooses to ignore this, representing them as still in their prime, a potent and magical counterweight to the decadent present.10 Here, however, at the end of the film, there is an elegiac tone as they recall the conversations of their youth. When Dee assures Elizabeth that she is still ‘the balm against all melancholy’, she replies wistfully ‘Ah, but I was young then’, though the line does not appear in the published script. The Elizabethan

MUP_Wymer_05_Chap 4

58

7/25/05, 5:15 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

jubilee

59

past we look back to with a sense of irretrievable loss was itself looking back in sadness, if not anger. Needless to say, however nuanced it might have been, Jarman’s belief that the essence of what it meant to be English could be located in the first Elizabethan age was simply incomprehensible to his punk contemporaries. ‘I am supposed to see old Elizabeth’s England as some state of grace?’ asked Vivienne Westwood incredulously in the middle of her lengthy critique of the film in an ‘Open T-Shirt to Derek Jarman’.11 During the remainder of this chapter, rather than systematically describe the various adventures of Bod (Jenny Runacre), Mad (Toyah Willcox), Crabs (Little Nell), and Amyl Nitrate (Jordan) as they alternate between bored games in their Southwark HQ and murderous rampages on the streets of London, I wish to explore the ambiguities of Jarman’s relationship to punk culture in relation to three specific topics – national identity, violence, and authenticity. Jubilee often seems to be complicit with punk’s iconoclastic assault on the traditional symbols of British identity – the Union Jack burns, the Queen herself is robbed and killed, red-white-and-blue Jubilee knickers are given away as a bingo prize, Amyl breaks her Winston Churchill mug, ‘Rule Britannia’ is given a heavy rock accompaniment and performed as a camp cabaret turn, and Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ is heard during a bisexual orgy in the crypt of Westminster Cathedral. Yet the tone is frequently as much despairing as it is irreverent and Jarman’s ambiguous stance not only distances him from any simple-minded punk aggression, it helps to expose contradictions within punk itself. Amyl Nitrate’s grotesque performance of ‘Rule Britannia’ is probably the film’s most memorable set piece. Dressed in a Union Jack microsmock, plumed helmet, black underwear, and green stockings, Amyl struts and pouts her way through the song in an exaggeratedly ‘sexy’ manner, using her trident like a pole dancer and fluttering a fan of pink feathers in the manner of a stripper. At one point, Hitler’s voice and the sound of hysterically cheering crowds are heard and Amyl proceeds to goose-step across the stage. Later, the whine of dive bombers and the roar of explosions punctuate the anthem. It would obviously be possible to interpret the whole sequence as ridiculing British patriotism and equating it with fascism as the Sex Pistols had done (‘God save the Queen / the fascist regime’) and indeed Vivienne Westwood approved of this particular sequence because she thought it was saying that ‘nationalism is vile’.12 The flaunting of the swastika by some punks (who included Sid Vicious and Siouxie Sioux), as well as being the most economical means of achieving a guaranteed shock effect, expressed a refusal to sign up to one of the key components of modern British identity – the comforting

MUP_Wymer_05_Chap 4

59

7/25/05, 5:15 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

60

derek jarman

story of heroic self-sacrifice in a just war. When the King’s Road shop owned by McLaren and Westwood was renamed ‘Seditionaries’ at the end of 1976, it was decorated with large photographs of the bombing of Dresden, which was beginning to be seen as a British war crime that eroded any previous sense of moral superiority over the Nazis. In complete contrast to this iconoclasm, Jarman, the son of a bomber pilot, never scorned the sacrifices made by his parents’ generation, and the evocation of the war in the ‘Rule Britannia’ sequence, rather than equating British nationalism with fascism, is a means, like the Elizabethan scenes, of recalling a lost period of authentic national identity which can be contrasted to the sleazy and fake forms of patriotism circulating in the year of the Queen’s Jubilee. Although Amyl Nitrate’s performance is a camp parody of patriotic sentiment, the look on her face is one of tragic intensity rather than that of an irreverent clown. The published script describes her as ‘shell-shocked’ and her performance as a ‘vision of disaster’13 while the sound of dive bombers causes her to look anxiously upward. The sense of something valuable being threatened or lost is as strong as any feeling of subversion and this is only confirmed by the fact that this is ‘England’s entry for the Eurovision Song Contest’, an event which notoriously dissolves any national musical distinctiveness into a bland and vacuous homogeneity. The last point helps one to understand how punk music itself might involve a reassertion of threatened national identity as well as an iconoclastic assault on its symbols. The cover of the Clash’s first LP, perhaps the most important British punk album after the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, shows three members of the band as tough-looking young men with short hair and drainpipe trousers, lounging threateningly in an alleyway. One of them has a Union Jack prominently displayed on the breast of his dark shirt and there is nothing obviously parodic about its deployment. If punk was a revolt against the current form of the music industry, then it was a revolt against an American-dominated global empire and thus inevitably had a nationalistic dimension. ‘America’s dead. It’s never been alive’, declares Mad as she burns a postcard of New York in the café scene. For the same reason, the Who, the 1960s band who in their early phase most closely anticipated the amphetamine-fuelled aggression of punk, chose to have themselves photographed draped in a Union Jack. If punk was uncertain, even incoherent, in its manipulation of national symbols (the leftwing Clash look uncomfortably like supporters of the National Front on the album cover), Jarman was more calculatedly ambiguous and never more so than in his use of Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ at the beginning of the orgiastic disco sequence in Westminster Cathedral.

MUP_Wymer_05_Chap 4

60

7/25/05, 5:15 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

jubilee

61

When, at the height of the First World War, Hubert Parry put Blake’s words to the stirring tune with which we are familiar, he was creating an alternative national anthem which was taken up enthusiastically by the Women’s Institute and became a regular feature of the Last Night of the Proms. Its capacity to signify a relatively traditional form of national unity was to be exploited by Hugh Hudson in Chariots of Fire (1981), a film which Jarman loathed: ‘Your product, some muscular Christianism and jingoism, crypto-faggy Cambridge stuff set to William Blake’s “Jerusalem” – a minor poet who wrote this popular football hymn’.14 The dismissive words conceal some of the real reason for Jarman’s outrage – that Blake was one of his favourite artists and that his radical vision of a truly ‘alternative’ national destiny based on total personal and sexual liberation had been hijacked by the Establishment. A manuscript note in the Jarman archive at the British Film Institute in fact dedicates Jubilee to William Blake in the course of an outburst against materialism and in favour of art and the imagination: This film is dedicated here to all those who secretly work against the tyranny of marxists Fascists trade unionists maoists capitalists socialists etc who have conspired together during the [C]20th to destroy the diversity and holiness of each life in the name of materialism art degraded imagination denied war governed the nations For William Blake15

It is worth noting that in the list of people ‘who have conspired together … to destroy the diversity and holiness of each life in the name of materialism’, the word ‘monarchists’ is deleted in the manuscript. Despite the governing symbolism of Jubilee, Jarman knew very well deep down that the monarchy and its supporters were not his greatest enemies. It is also worth noting that many trade unionists and socialists have been happy to claim ‘Jerusalem’ as their anthem, its dream of national liberation being sufficiently metaphoric and cryptic to appeal to the conventional left as well as to anarchists and rightwing patriots. When, in the summer of 2001, the musical director of Cheadle Parish Church caused controversy by refusing to play the hymn at a wedding, the reason given was that it was ‘too nationalistic’, which might seem an odd objection from the Church of England. However, when his rector supported the decision, he gave as further justification the fact that ‘Blake appeals to the protoatheists and the proto-socialists’.16 What all this means is that ‘Jerusalem’ is a truly national anthem since all shades of political and religious opinion can find within it their own vision of England. It also means that there can be no straightforward answer to how it signifies in Jarman’s

MUP_Wymer_05_Chap 4

61

7/25/05, 5:15 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

62

derek jarman

film when it initiates ‘The Temple of Heavenly Delight’ sequence. Arranged to a disco beat, it plays over images of an androgynous mauve-lit Christ figure (Lindsay Kemp) being crowned with thorns, groped by a forest of outstretched hands, and swooning in masochistic ecstasy as he had done at the beginning of Sebastiane. A trickle of blood oozes from the corner of his mouth. Is this a piece of punk aggression directed at a much-loved national hymn or a fulfilment of its authentic Blakean meaning? (It may be significant that Westminster Cathedral is a Roman Catholic church and therefore, for Blake, representative of a particularly authoritarian and un-English form of Christianity.) The sense that something precious, rather than being asserted is actually being debased, only becomes definite following the arrival of Borgia Ginz in his Rolls Royce, a close-up of the winged figure on the bonnet economically imaging the false ‘liberation’ he offers. Wearing dark glasses and a crucifix and introduced as ‘The man who picked up the thirty pieces of silver and made the movie you saw on TV’, he declares, in between bursts of villainous laughter, that ‘Progress has taken the place of heaven … It’s like pornography, better than the real thing.’ The orgiastic disco then continues but ‘Jerusalem’ has been replaced on the soundtrack by ‘Wargasm in Pornotopia’, and ‘Christ’ and his disciples are now mingled with a motley group of dancers who include upperclass toffs, policemen, punks, and a mitred bishop. In comparing Jubilee with the ‘heritage’ films of the 1980s and with Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels (1991), Jim Ellis has written interestingly about the ‘erotics of citizenship’ and the part that desire plays in establishing a national identity.17 The sublimated homoeroticism of films like Chariots of Fire (‘crypto-faggy’ in Jarman’s words) is a means of bringing outsider figures like the Jewish athlete Harold Abrahams into the national community: ‘we invest in the character erotically, and he becomes an Englishman’.18 Julien’s Young Soul Rebels, set like Jarman’s film in 1977, ends with a Utopian vision of black, mixed race, working-class, and gay characters dancing together – members of a new nation. It might seem that Jarman’s disco/orgy should work in a similar way – it is certainly inclusive enough in terms of its participants – but it is constantly being disrupted by outbreaks of violence, mainly involving the good-looking young policemen. Any residual sense of authentic Blakean intensity (‘Christ’ and his disciples are now in extremes of sexual ecstasy and covered in blood and sweat) is undermined by details like the telephone seen draped over the back of one of the dancers and by the suspicion that the whole thing is a manufactured media event rather than a spontaneous ‘happening’. It is, as Borgia Ginz says, ‘like pornography, better than the real thing’ and Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ has

MUP_Wymer_05_Chap 4

62

7/25/05, 5:15 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

jubilee

63

indeed been perverted, though in a quite different way from that which would be claimed by its more conservative admirers. In Jubilee Jarman’s own romanticism is normally expressed only through a sense of loss, as in the last scene with Elizabeth and Dee on the Dorset cliffs or the super-8 sequence of Jordan performing, to the plaintive sound of violins, a graceful ballet dance round a bonfire of books. He seems to share punk’s suspicion that the sexual liberation of the 1960s had failed to liberate anything else and had created only Pornotopia, rather than the New Jerusalem envisaged by Blake. From Jarman’s point of view, this is partly because the celebration within hippie culture of the revolutionary potential of sexual love was almost always in exclusively heterosexual terms. ‘Love snuffed it with the Hippies’, declares Bod, and Jarman seems to take a grim relish in the way that the attempts by Crabs to find true love (‘For a moment I thought he might be the one’) are ruthlessly deconstructed by the other female punks: ‘you’re just a faded collage of Penthouse and True Romance’. Her dream of marriage and kids is finally demolished by the Molotov cocktail which kills her policeman lover and incinerates his suburban garden. Jarman’s other reason for sharing punk culture’s scepticism towards the idea that ‘Love is all you need’ is that hippie pieties seemed to ignore the element of violence in many people’s sexuality, including his own. The primarily masochistic interest in scenes of eroticised violence between men which is evident in many of his films, from Sebastiane onwards, is converted into something more detached and cold in Jubilee as both men and women become victims of the predatory female punks. The murder of Happy Days, Crabs’s unlucky one-night stand, is explicitly sexualised by the use of a rapist mask and handcuffs, but the dumping of his body, wrapped in red polythene sheets, on the muddy Thames foreshore, brings his death nearer to the bleakness of actual murder and removes it from the realm of erotic fantasy. Likewise, whereas Bod herself is clearly sexually aroused by her strangling of the transvestite Lounge Lizard (‘What a taste. What a buzz’), these feelings are unlikely to be shared by the audience, as a disgusting pink froth bubbles from his mouth and a metronome ticks away his last seconds of life. Women are the primary instigators of violence in this film (one of Jarman’s acknowledged influences was Valerie Solanas’s notorious SCUM manifesto)19 and this generates more critical and ironic forms of representation than were evident in Sebastiane. When Mad carves the word LOVE into Bod’s back and sprinkles salt on the wounds it seems to be largely because there’s nothing better to do at the time and any intensity in the scene is soon dissipated by the search for the salt (‘I can’t

MUP_Wymer_05_Chap 4

63

7/25/05, 5:15 PM

64

derek jarman

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

find any salt … Is it behind the HP [sauce]?’). There was no such diminution of affect when Severus rubbed sand into Sebastian’s wounds. Jarman’s relatively cold and detached depiction of these scenes of sexual violence is part of his generally critical attitude to the violence he saw in punk culture. In an interview with Clive Hodgson which formed part of the Programme Notes for a National Film Theatre screening of Jubilee, he said: Those people were posturing violence, they were singing about it, they were writing violent things, but one knows that when it actually happens – and it happens to you – you can have sung about it forever, but it is going to be a completely different thing. This was what I wanted very much to underline in the film, because there was a climate of intellectual violence – ‘Dada’ violence – and that sort of thing can very easily become the forerunner of the real thing.

Whereas some of the victims of the punk gang – two policemen, the Queen herself, and a ‘rich bitch’ who had earlier been seen on the arm of Borgia Ginz – might be seen as legitimate targets by advocates of revolutionary violence, others appear to have been selected on a wholly random basis. ‘I want to destroy the passer-by’ sang Johnny Rotten and the first assault we see is carried out against an anonymous woman who is inferentially the mother of the baby in the burning pram which comes into shot as the camera pulls back from her crumpled figure on the pavement. There is probably an allusion here to what was then regarded as the most shocking scene of violence in modern British theatre, the stoning to death of a baby in a pram by bored youths in Edward Bond’s Saved (1965). The waitress in the ‘Kaylamity Kafe’ is also a manifestly inappropriate choice of target in any ‘class war’. Although the assault on her is not fatal (‘For a moment I thought you would kill her’ ‘Just a dress rehearsal’), she is left weeping uncontrollably and the tomato ketchup which covers her face is almost indistinguishable from blood. Jarman could empathise with the anger in punk but he rejected its nihilistic tendencies, which he chose to exemplify by these acts of mindless (‘Dada’) violence. As Jon Savage put it: ‘Punk began as hostile and became nihilistic in the deepest sense. Although it had had a moral intent, it became convoluted and clouded by the violence, the shock tactics, and the cynicism.’20 Something of an exception to what I have been saying is a scene near the end of the film which caused particular offence – the murder of the policeman by Mad and Amyl. Here the victim is not random – he had participated in the shooting of the twin brothers Angel and Sphinx and the brutal murder of the Kid – nor is his death treated unemotionally.

MUP_Wymer_05_Chap 4

64

7/25/05, 5:15 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

jubilee

65

Most of the complaints occurred, however, not when the film was originally released in 1978 but when it was screened by Channel Four in November 1985, more than three years after it had first acquired the television rights. It was an accident of timing, over which Jarman had no control, that only weeks before the transmission, PC Keith Blakelock had been horribly murdered by a mob during the Broadwater Farm riot. Even without this coincidence, the scene would undoubtedly have disturbed cinema or television audiences used to being entertained by more stylish and sanitised forms of violence. Jarman amused himself by imagining two children, obviously experienced viewers, complaining bitterly about Jubilee winning an Oscar for sex and violence: ‘An Oscar for sex and violence for that! … It’s a fucking con, wot we want is … films … with all American boys bashing the brains out of wogs so you can leave the cinema cheering. None of this grim stuff that leaves you feeling sick and puts you off.’21 The policeman is surreptitiously urinating behind a warehouse and is thus in a particularly vulnerable situation when he is ambushed by Mad and Amyl. After they blind him with spray from a perfume bottle, they punch and kick him savagely, his own cries of pain mingling with Mad’s screams of rage. She then calls for a razor and whereas the published script has her shouting ‘I’m going to kill him!’, in the film she actually says ‘I’m going to castrate him!’. This is what appears to happen before she slumps weeping against the body of the mutilated and dying man and we register, perhaps for the first time, that the words painted on the back of her overalls (and those of all the punk women) are from Norman Bates’s last speech in Psycho about people thinking he wouldn’t hurt a fly. To those who accused Jarman of encouraging murderous anarchy, he replied that, ‘the girl cries when she has killed the policeman. It’s nasty, I admit, but she cries because life is even more desolate after she’s done it than before.’22 Her rage and subsequent weeping carry all the charge of Jarman’s own violently contradictory feelings towards male authority figures. Men in uniform were always both agents of repression and objects of desire for him, and in earlier drafts of the script, the killing of Angel by the police had been preceded by a violent anal rape (the Cop ‘Fucks the daylights out of [him] in the photobooth and cuts him to pieces’).23 At one level, Mad weeps with Jarman because a virile young man has been needlessly destroyed, but the sexual feelings generated by this violence are acknowledged in the brief and paradoxical glimpse of a semi-erect penis as the supposedly castrated and dying policeman rolls over onto his front, a moment which seems to have escaped the attention of the censors (or anyone else for that matter).

MUP_Wymer_05_Chap 4

65

7/25/05, 5:15 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

66

derek jarman

In a film where almost everything is tainted with artificiality, Mad’s rage and despair comes across as very ‘real’ and the question of authenticity is central to Jarman’s film as it was to punk itself. Johnny Rotten’s performances were electrifying precisely because his anger seemed so genuine. As Pete Townshend of the Who said of him: ‘This is a bloke, with a brain on his shoulders, who is actually saying something he sincerely believes is happening in the world, saying it with real venom, and real passion.’24 Yet once such venom and passion proved marketable, they inevitably assumed the status of a repeatable performance, to be turned on and off at will. In Annie Griffin’s spoof documentary Spunk (1997), Seamus Webb, the leader of the eponymous punk band, is described as ‘the angriest man in pop music’. In the recording studio, he turns to his producer and asks, ‘D’you want me to start off sort of … livid, or just sort of … miffed?’25 Sid Vicious apparently once said, ‘I hate films because people have to act parts in them. Play people who they’re not’26 yet seemed oblivious to the way he had been manipulated into acting out a familiar rock-and-roll script, one that was to end in his death. The two Julien Temple films manage between them to capture this unresolved contradiction in punk, The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle cynically celebrating Malcolm McLaren’s manipulative powers, whilst The Filth and the Fury (2000) puts more emphasis on the raw intensity of the Sex Pistols themselves. Like the Situationists earlier, punk culture saw ultimate authenticity as leading to a collapse of the distinctions between art and life, fantasy and reality. In a truly Utopian society, there would be no distinction between artist and audience, no need of the ‘tricks’ of art, no need finally for art itself as a separate category. This view is articulated early on by Amyl Nitrate in one of the film’s key speeches. A bizarrely hybrid figure, who wears a genteel twin-set and pearls in combination with a spiky punk haircut and grotesque ‘futurist’ face paint, she lectures us as follows: Our school motto was ‘Faites vos desires réalités’, make your desires reality. Myself, I preferred the song, Don’t Dream it, Be it. In those days desires weren’t allowed to become reality, so fantasy was substituted for them. Films, books, pictures. They called it art, but when your desires become reality, you don’t need fantasy any longer or art.

Jarman’s own methods of film-making seem to owe something to these ideas and his first draft of the Jubilee script has a note on the ‘method of construction’ which reads: ‘the film unites Super 8 found footage and fabricated film so that the documentary and art film are confused[,] art and life become synonymous’.27 Yet in the final film he did not use ‘found footage’ and the notion that violent action might be more

MUP_Wymer_05_Chap 4

66

7/25/05, 5:15 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

jubilee

67

‘authentic’ than art was one that he took great pains to distance himself from. Amyl tells us that her heroine was Myra Hindley, the Moors murderer, because she knew how to make her desires reality, she was an artist. And at the end of the film another ‘artist’ who was able to make his desires reality, Adolf Hitler, is discovered, along with the remaining punks in Borgia Ginz’s mansion, muttering in German that he was ‘greater than Leonardo’. ‘They all sign up in the end one way or another’, even, or perhaps especially, those who claimed to break through the barriers separating art and life. Except they don’t all sign up. A significant character is missing from the final gathering in Borgia’s stately home and that is Viv, represented as the one true artist in the film. She and her friends, the incestuous twin brothers Angel and Sphinx (whose names connote esoteric wisdom), were closely associated with the gang of punks but in fact constituted a separate grouping, eschewing the violence eagerly pursued by the others. The emptiness of her room connotes an austere integrity rather than a void and her scene in bed with the brothers constitutes a brief idyllic moment, its shadowy blue light recalling the opening scene in the Elizabethan garden. Her name is not genderspecific, she looks androgynous, and in the second draft of the script she is described as ‘an artist[,] butch[,] she is possibly a man’.28 Rather than seeing her and the twin brothers as representing the basis of an alternative community, it seems reasonable to view them as a composite version of Jarman himself, the artist who stands alone and whose need for love can sometimes seem disturbingly narcissistic and inner-directed. Male and female characteristics are united within a single figure and the twins gaze lovingly into each others’ eyes, captivated by their own ‘reflection’. This is an individualism which is close to solipsism but it enables Viv to retain her artistic integrity and avoid being swallowed up by the media empire. Although, in both the script and the film, she declares that ‘painting’s extinct’, in the film she adds that ‘art isn’t’. And Jarman’s own film proves her right. When Viv’s namesake Vivienne Westwood accepted an OBE in 1992, Jarman found further confirmation that he had been right to be cynical about the whole punk movement: ‘our punk friends accept their little medals of betrayal, sit in their vacuous salons and destroy the creative’.29 Yet the authentic artistic individuality which he asserted so strongly against the sell-out represented by punk could be found within punk itself and I would like to conclude with some words from John Lydon, freed from his role as ‘Johnny Rotten’, which, in their paradoxical claim to an identity which is utterly individual and yet wholly ‘English’, could be Jarman himself speaking:

MUP_Wymer_05_Chap 4

67

7/25/05, 5:15 PM

68

derek jarman I’m an individual. I’ve always appreciated myself as such. I don’t want to particularly fit into any community other than my own self-made image. I am English. I am probably the absolute English person … I am myself, an English individual. One who does not need a royal family.30

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 See Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (London: Faber, 1991); and Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London: Routledge, 1992). 2 Quoted in Marcus, Lipstick Traces, p. 32. 3 J . G. Ballard, Introduction to the French edition of Crash (1974), reprinted in the Triad/Panther English paperback edition of 1985, pp. 5–9 (p. 5). 4 Jarman, Up in the Air, p. 43. 5 Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio (London: British Film Institute, 1999), p. 59. 6 Savage, England’s Dreaming, p. 377. 7 BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 13. 8 C. C. Stopes, Shakespeare’s Environment (London: Bell, 1914), ‘Elizabeth’s Fools and Dwarfs’, pp. 269–75. 9 In the Dr. Dee scripts the date is given as 1600. 10 Elizabeth’s actual appearance in 1597 was described as follows by the French ambassador: ‘As for her face, it is and appears to be very aged. It is long and thin, and her teeth are very yellow and unequal, compared with what they were formerly, so they say, and on the left side less than on the right. Many of them are missing so that one cannot understand her easily when she speaks quickly’ (André Hurault, Sieur de Maisse, Journal 1597–98, trans. and ed. G. B. Harrison and R. A. Jones (London: Nonesuch Press, 1931), pp. 25–6). 11 Quoted in Jarman, At Your Own Risk, pp. 86–8 (p. 87). 12 Ibid., p. 88. 13 Jarman, Up in the Air, p. 57. 14 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 112. 15 BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 3, Jubilee Item 4c. 16 For the original news item and subsequent comment see the Guardian (9, 10, and 11 August 2001) and The Times Higher Education Supplement (17 August 2001). 17 Jim Ellis, ‘The Erotics of Citizenship: Derek Jarman’s Jubilee and Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels’, Southern Quarterly, 39: 4 (2001), 148–60. 18 Ellis, ‘The Erotics of Citizenship’, p. 151. 19 SCUM stood for ‘The Society for Cutting up Men’. Valerie Solanas became famous for shooting Andy Warhol in 1968. 20 Savage, England’s Dreaming, p. 196. 21 BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 13. 22 Interview with Cynthia Kee, London Magazine (1986), p. 127. BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 9. 23 BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 4, Jubilee Item 5. 24 Quoted in Marcus, Lipstick Traces, p. 1. 25 This short film was made for Channel Four as part of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins, the relevant one here being ‘Wrath’.

MUP_Wymer_05_Chap 4

68

7/25/05, 5:15 PM

jubilee Savage, England’s Dreaming, p. 389. BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 4, Jubilee Item 5. BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 4, Jubilee Item 6. Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 151. Interview with John Lydon, DEF II, BBC2 (1988).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

26 27 28 29 30

MUP_Wymer_05_Chap 4

69

7/25/05, 5:15 PM

69

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Our revels now are ended’: The Tempest (1979)

5

Although Jarman discussed further projects with James Whaley and Howard Malin, his relationship with them was cooling and they declined any involvement in the first steps he was taking towards making a film about the Baroque painter Caravaggio. He therefore formed a new production company with Guy Ford and Mordecai Schreiber with the intention of realising a longstanding ambition to film Shakespeare’s Tempest, but no real funds were raised until Jarman met Don Boyd, who had found a loophole in the tax system which would allow investors in a film to write off their money as a loss against tax, turning what is normally a considerable gamble into something virtually risk-free. Jarman was told that if he could complete a film by the end of the tax year in April 1979, he could have £150,000, a small sum in relation to mainstream cinema but three times the budget of Jubilee. Jarman already had a script of The Tempest on which he had been working since 1974 and a deal was quickly concluded. Jarman’s strong interest in Shakespeare was in some respects entirely normal and predictable for someone of his social background and education. As a middle-class man born in 1942 who was educated at fee-paying schools, King’s College, London, and the Slade School of Fine Art, his attitudes were formed before there was any serious questioning of the literary canon, any serious suggestion that Shakespeare was not absolutely central. He had an early childhood memory of his mother standing on the kitchen table reciting long passages from Henry V which she had learned at school1 and his own education gave him a good deal of exposure to Shakespeare’s plays, including the chance to design the set for a school production of Julius Caesar, in which he himself played Casca.2 His use of a white bust of Caesar, placed centre stage throughout the action, anticipated one of the most striking features of the mise-en-scène he created for The Tempest, a play which he was to study as a set text during his undergraduate degree.

MUP_Wymer_06_Chap 5

70

7/25/05, 5:15 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the tempest

71

However, his interest in Shakespeare went well beyond what might have been predicted and amounted at times to a deep personal identification with him as a fellow artist with a ‘queer’ sexuality, who was struggling to preserve the integrity of his vision within a highly commercialised medium. An important aspect of this identification was that Jarman saw both Shakespeare and himself as ‘conservative’ and backward-looking artists, and thus representative of a general English cultural tendency: ‘Our culture is backward-looking and always has been. Shakespeare is backward-looking. What interested me is that Elizabethan England is our cultural Arcadia, as Shakespeare is the essential pivot of our culture.’3 The paradox whereby the period we look back to as a ‘cultural Arcadia’ was itself yearning anxiously for a lost security and stability comes out clearly in some unpublished remarks of Jarman about the initial success of The Tempest, which was premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival in August 1979, soon after the election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister: The film seemed to please everyone. It is an image of the times. The look of the film parallels but does not copy the extravagance of the new romantics, who in their turn reflect the deep insecurity of our time and the conservatism it has engendered. I would hate to equate the Tempest full of forgiveness and maturity with the politics of Thatcher’s infantile regime. Yet they are symptoms of the same recession. [A]fter all Will Shakespear[e] was an arch conservative Elizabethan politico, and although Elizabethan England seems like bedrock now, it was in fact a time of enormous insecurity.4

Jarman took from the writings of Frances Yates the idea that when Shakespeare wrote The Tempest in 1611 he was a belated ‘Elizabethan’ looking back nostalgically to the previous reign rather than a committed Jacobean celebrating James I, the patron of his company, as a learned prince seeking European peace through dynastic alliances, an interpretation which now seems rather more plausible. When Jarman made his film, Shakespeare was not seen as having the strong box-office potential that he acquired in the 1990s, following the success of Branagh’s Henry V (1989). The versions of Shakespeare directed by Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier in the 1940s and 1950s had achieved ‘classic’ status but had not inspired many imitators and the few major productions in the intervening years were mainly of the tragedies.5 Although there had been eight silent versions of The Tempest, there had been no previous sound film unless one counts a number of television productions, one of which in 1960 had rather surprisingly cast Richard Burton as Caliban.6 To some extent Jarman was entering uncharted territory by filming this particular play but he was very aware

MUP_Wymer_06_Chap 5

71

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

72

derek jarman

of the problems of transposing Shakespeare to the screen. In the Programme Notes for a screening of The Tempest at the London Film Festival in 1979, he wrote: ‘I have always felt that Shakespeare translates rather badly into film. There is a great rift between the artificiality of stage conventions and the naturalism of film settings.’ His own settings could hardly be called naturalistic but he was extremely anxious that they should neither conflict with the poetry nor merely ‘illustrate’ it, but allow ‘the verse to breathe’. The interior scenes for this story set on a Mediterranean island were filmed in the ruined wing of Stoneleigh Abbey, a Warwickshire country house, and the exterior ones near Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland, opening up the play’s psychological aspects by refusing any travel brochure literalism. ‘For the Tempest we needed an island of the mind, that opened mysteriously like Chinese boxes: an abstract landscape so that the delicate descriptions in the poetry, full of sound and sweet airs, would not be destroyed by any Martini lagoons.’7 Jarman undoubtedly succeeded in creating something genuinely atmospheric and fully cinematic but whether he ‘allowed the verse to breathe’ is more debatable. His ruthless cutting and rearranging of the text was certainly justified but it was the way the surviving lines were spoken which attracted most criticism. Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre was an art form which was far more dependent on the power of the spoken word than modern cinema. Welles and Olivier had represented two quite different approaches to this problem, with Welles subordinating Shakespeare’s language to his own visual poetry while Olivier retained a more theatrical and declamatory verbal style. There is no doubt that Jarman was more attuned to the Wellesian manner. Of Olivier’s Richard III (1955) he wrote scathingly, ‘Thirty years on it looks like a mincing fairy tale for kids, full of posturing and sidelong glances’.8 Olivier’s performance in Stuart Burge’s Othello (1965) was an even more egregious example of how a thrilling stage performance could appear showy and meretricious on film (in contrast, the Welles Othello (1952) looked stunning but was handicapped by the poor quality of the soundtrack which muffled the verse). Jarman in fact deliberately avoided seeing The Tempest in the theatre so that his own imaginative response to Shakespeare’s words was not compromised by someone else’s interpretation. Whereas most British reviewers found a good deal to admire in Jarman’s film (‘dreamlike’, ‘haunting’, and ‘magical’ were some of the favourite adjectives), it is significant that two of the most hostile notices came from well-known literary critics, Frank Kermode and Peter Ackroyd, who both disliked the way the verse was spoken. According to the latter, ‘when the cast do speak these antique lines, it is in a

MUP_Wymer_06_Chap 5

72

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the tempest

73

deliberately flat and uninspired manner – as though they were providing a peripheral commentary on Derek Jarman’s unique vision’.9 Kermode laid down as a general rule that: ‘The director must understand [the language] and teach it to his actors. If he cannot do that he had much better avoid the text of the play entirely.’10 He went on to give specific examples of when he thought the actors, as in many school and college productions of Shakespeare, had memorised lines without understanding their grammar or meaning, though he exempted from his criticism Heathcote Williams’s Prospero: ‘the one fine thing in the film, a low-key but extremely musical performance, beautifully spoken amid the garblings, gabblings and whispers of the others’.11 It was especially ironic that one of Jarman’s few bad reviews should have come from Frank Kermode, since his film was heavily indebted to the interpretation of The Tempest to be found in Kermode’s New Arden edition of 1954, the edition which Jarman would probably have used as a student. For both Kermode and Jarman Prospero is primarily a learned ‘white magician’ whose powers over the natural world are derived from his knowledge of NeoPlatonic, Hermetic, and Cabalistic philosophical traditions rather than a colonialist whose domination of Caliban reflects European attitudes to American Indians, an interpretation which was becoming dominant about the time Jarman’s film was made. The understanding of The Tempest as a play about the New World has a long history, beginning with the discovery by Edmund Malone in 1808 that Shakespeare’s sources included accounts of the wreck in 1609 of a ship bound for Virginia.12 The specifically colonialist reading only gained real momentum following the publication in 1956 of the English translation of Octave Mannoni’s Psychologie de la Colonisation (1950) with the new title of Prospero and Caliban. By the 1980s this allegorisation of the play had effectively become the norm in American academic criticism but Jarman’s film seems sublimely indifferent to this. John Dee, Renaissance occult philosophy, and Jungian psychology were of much greater interest to him and, in so far as he might have seen The Tempest as a political play, his statement that ‘Britain was the magic isle’13 anticipates a number of recent articles, including one of my own, which argue that the play’s concerns with the origins of civilisation, power, and legitimate authority relate more to reflections about the emergence of ‘Great Britain’ following the accession of a Scot to the English throne in 1603 than to the first English attempts to establish a colony in the New World.14 One thing which cannot be said of Jarman’s film is that its focus is ‘unabashedly gay’, though this is precisely what the editors of the Arden Third Series Tempest do say.15 It is true that the film has a number of ‘queer’ and ‘camp’ elements, such as the famous masque of dancing

MUP_Wymer_06_Chap 5

73

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

74

derek jarman

sailors, but these do not amount to a consistent homosexual reading of the play and Jarman was anxious to avoid one, cutting Ariel’s line ‘Do you love me, master? No?’ (4.1.48) precisely because ‘with my reputation they’d expect it [to be emphasised]’.16 As in the play itself, there is the sense of a good deal going on below the surface but a deliberate avoidance of direct statement. The disturbing sexual violence which is so explicit in Edward II here lurks in the shadows, only becoming visible in brief moments, such as when the naked Ferdinand is humiliated and shackled or when, in a flashback scene, Sycorax is shown controlling Ariel with a collar and chain. The extent of this repression can be glimpsed by an odd remark in the unpublished papers. In the midst of describing how topical The Tempest must have been for its Jacobean audience, Jarman interjects the sentence ‘It was Shakespeare’s Salo!’, one of his many allusions to the notorious Pasolini film adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom.17 It is clear from what I have been saying that, for Jarman, The Tempest was not a play about colonial encounters but an introspective psychodrama, a journey, like that in Cocteau’s Orphée, through the mirror and into the depths of the self.18 This is even more obvious in an earlier draft of the script in which a mad Prospero, confined to prison by his brother, plays out all the parts: ‘confined to his cell he is a prey to delusions of power and regrets, but he is able to stage a form of redemption in himself’.19 In a note on this version, Jarman makes clear that his psychological reading of the play includes an unambiguous identification of Prospero with Shakespeare: the play is Shakespeare’s most personal and internalised comment on his condition, and by allowing Prospero to realise all the parts of the play the loneliness of the old poet at odds with the society in which he lives, and the introspective nature of the work is preserved.20

The actual film is a less obvious and less extreme continuation of this initial conception. With its shadowy, candle-lit interiors and strangely abstract monochrome exterior shots, it seems to exist in no-place and no-time, a true ‘island of the mind’. Yet the strong, idiosyncratic performances of Toyah Willcox as Miranda and Jack Birkett as Caliban mean that the overall impression is considerably less solipsistic than Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991), in which John Gielgud does indeed ventriloquise nearly all the parts.21 Jarman’s casting decisions were, as usual, governed as much by practical and financial considerations as by any sense of who would be ‘ideal’ for each role, but they had an intuitive logic which was much stronger than first appeared. To many people it seemed like a deliberate piece of iconoclasm to cast Toyah Willcox, the punk singer who had

MUP_Wymer_06_Chap 5

74

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the tempest

75

played the violent pyromaniac Mad in Jubilee, as Shakespeare’s innocent and chaste heroine. Yet Willcox has said that when she first came down to London in the late 1970s, she was completely unsocialised and sexually inexperienced: ‘I’d never been out, I was still a Virgin. I didn’t know what a man was.’ Jarman ‘was like a father figure to me, and I was all on my own’.22 It is obvious that Jarman, who of course identified closely with Prospero, did not have to look very far for his Miranda and, despite her difficulties with Shakespeare’s verse, Willcox was able to project a childlike, pre-social quality which was apt for her lonely island upbringing. The fact that she was ‘slightly afraid of Heathcote because of his knowledge’ was also very fitting.23 One of the most crucial decisions for any director of The Tempest is how to represent Caliban. Much of the power of the play as a literary text derives from its ambiguities, or even self-contradictions, about his nature and appearance, but in the theatre or cinema definite decisions have to be taken which limit the imaginative play of possibilities. On the stage he has most frequently been represented as the ‘wild man’ of medieval and Renaissance romance and pastoral, an American Indian, or as something non-human, either amphibious or apelike. These theatrical traditions tend to conventionalise his otherness, making it less disturbing and mysterious. At one point Jarman himself had a relatively straightforward conception of Caliban as ‘the natural islander black and very beautiful’,24 but his eventual choice of Jack Birkett, the blind actor who worked with Lindsay Kemp’s troupe and who had appeared as Borgia Ginz in Jubilee, was an inspired way of restoring a sense of real strangeness. A hulking, bald figure of indefinable racial origin, with a Northern accent and bad teeth, he seems more like an overgrown child than a colonial subject or an apeman and his outbursts of anger have a child’s mixture of petulance and emotional intensity. He does not conform to any of the familiar and stable categories of otherness and so is able to remain truly ‘other’. Because Willcox and Birkett, together with some of the other actors, had appeared in Jubilee, Jarman’s radically reshaped Tempest has sometimes been described as a punk subversion of Shakespeare. Yet in his hands Shakespeare’s play emerges as a poetic meditation on magic, art, psychological transformation, the transience of life, and the approach of death – a very traditional view in many respects. If one is to take Jarman at his word, he saw it also as a play which is centrally about forgiveness: The concept of forgiveness in The Tempest attracted me; it’s a rare enough quality and almost absent in our world. To know who your enemies are, but to accept them for what they are, befriend them, and plan for a happier future is something we sorely need.25

MUP_Wymer_06_Chap 5

75

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

76

derek jarman

These lines were the starting point for Jim Ellis’s interesting argument that the film strives to articulate ‘a possible version of the nation, a happier future’, with the concluding masque functioning as the prime agent of social reconciliation and redemption, rather than the ‘forgiveness’ of Antonio which, as in Shakespeare’s text, is coldly and grudgingly enacted.26 Jarman himself could find it very hard to forgive those whom he believed had wronged him. In the original typescript of Kicking the Pricks, he wrote that the incident when he was punished for climbing into another boy’s bed at school had inflicted ‘wounds that will never be forgiven’, though he later deleted the last three words and replaced them with ‘never heal’.27 However, unlike Ellis, I do not see ‘forgiveness’ as really central to Jarman’s film, unless one is thinking of a process of self-forgiveness, ‘the violence you have to traverse before making peace with yourself’ as Jarman put it once.28 More than anything else, Jarman’s Tempest is a truly ‘magical’ film which manages to make most stage productions look overly literal and leaden-footed and which eludes most of the traps set by academic criticism.29 Both Jarman and the actor playing Prospero, the poet Heathcote Williams, were seriously interested in the Renaissance occult philosophy which influenced the play. They believed in the magic. Jarman’s own early-seventeenth-century English edition of Cornelius Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia was used as a property and Jarman followed Frances Yates in seeing Prospero as a recreation of John Dee, who had died in 1609 shortly before The Tempest was written.30 In Jubilee Jarman had already signalled this connection by changing the name of one of the real Dee’s angelic spirits from Uriel to Ariel and by giving him some lines from The Tempest. At the centre of Jarman’s film is the psychological journey of a figure who is simultaneously Dee, Prospero, Shakespeare, and Jarman himself and who, as embodied by Heathcote Williams, appears more youthful and virile than one might have expected. In all drafts of the script Prospero, despite his musings on transience and death, is thought of as being in his thirties – the same age as Jarman at the time – though in some versions there are also framing scenes involving an older Prospero. The most explicit allusion to John Dee is the fact that Prospero’s magic staff is topped by a modified version of Dee’s Hieroglyphic Monad, a graphic symbol which he invented to express the unity of everything, since all letters, numbers, and geometric shapes could be generated from it.31 Jarman retains the sun-and-moon-like conjunction of circle and semicircle and the crossshaped intersection of straight lines. The sun-circle has become a ‘glass’, in Renaissance terms both a mirror and a lens, through which Prospero can peer deep into the nature of the world as well as into

MUP_Wymer_06_Chap 5

76

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the tempest

77

himself. Omitted are two semicircles representing the fire sign Aries – and hence the process of alchemical transmutation – and a framing oval representing the ‘Egg of the Philosophers’, the vessel in which the alchemical processes take place. The magic staff features prominently in a number of shots, with obvious symbolic force, but there are other, less obtrusive, allusions to the alchemical mysteries of growth and rebirth. Caliban’s slavering enjoyment in sucking raw eggs appears to exemplify his ‘gross’ and ‘earthy’ nature but there is one remarkable shot of him lifting an egg to his mouth where the egg is briefly silhouetted against the flames behind him, creating a powerful alchemic emblem. It is also significant that the candles on the floor of Prospero’s cell appear to be arranged in the shape of a bird. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Jarman’s interest in alchemy and Renaissance occult philosophy had been prompted by his readings of Jung who, rather than dismissing these things as pre-scientific aberrations, had interpreted the alchemists’ preoccupation with material and spiritual transmutation and their search for a lost unity in psychological terms.32 Jarman was quite open about the fact that he saw Shakespeare’s play in this way but although his film is indeed ‘Jungian’, it does not, in my view, finally accord with Jung’s account of maturation and individuation. There are many indications in the film’s opening minutes that its primary orientation is a psychological one. The storm noises which are heard over the credits turn imperceptibly into Prospero’s breathing and the blue monochrome footage of a ship in heavy seas is intercut with shots of him dreaming in his bedchamber. His amplified breathing, which is heard at various points throughout the film, has an edge of nightmarish disturbance about it and reminds one of the sound effects employed in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) when the astronaut Bowman approaches the primitive core of the malfunctioning computer HAL. Prospero’s face is partially covered by a veil from which he tries to free himself, as if seeking to penetrate the ‘veil’ of appearance in search of a deeper reality. It also suggests the caul, or foetal membrane, which if found on the head of a new-born baby was believed to have magical properties and, specifically, to act as a charm against drowning. The repeated cries of ‘We split! We split’ enact a nightmare of psychic disintegration rather than showing Prospero as in full magical control of the storm scene. At times, the bedchamber itself takes on the same monochrome look as the ship at sea, eroding the distinction between dreamer and dream. When there is a cut to Miranda in her bedroom, the sighing on the soundtrack continues, drawing her into her father’s dreamworld. She initially buries herself under the covers like a frightened

MUP_Wymer_06_Chap 5

77

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

78

derek jarman

child before emerging again and placing her fingers to her mouth in another childlike gesture, which Jarman found expressive enough to use again in later films. A low-angle shot of Prospero striding towards his study, looking virile and purposeful, suggests agency and control, but Ariel turns out to be a weary and deathly-pale figure and the study is dominated by a bust of Mausolus, the man whose tomb gave us the word ‘mausoleum’. Frequently juxtaposed with Prospero, the bust has a metonymic relationship with him, functioning like his death mask.33 A fully Jungian reading of Shakespeare’s play or Jarman’s film would focus on the process of individuation in Prospero, the process whereby the conscious and unconscious are brought into a better relation, projections of repressed aspects of the self onto the outer world and other people are withdrawn, and full selfhood is achieved.34 This is what happens in Forbidden Planet (1956), a science fiction adaptation of The Tempest in which the monsters which threaten the characters in their ‘new world’ turn out to be ‘monsters from the id’ of the Prospero figure, Professor Morbius. In such a Jungian reading, Caliban is a projection of Prospero’s repressed shadow side and the most important line of the play would be ‘this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine’ (5.1.275–6). It is interesting that Jarman cuts this line from his film and that is a good clue to the fact that his emphasis falls somewhat differently. For him, the crucial line would probably be ‘Our revels now are ended’ (4.1.148). I would argue that, for him, the play is centrally about childhood, the loss of childhood, the loss of the imagination, and the approach of death rather than about any positive psychological growth or adaptation. Throughout the film the childish behaviour of Miranda, Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo is constantly emphasised. There are many moments of uncontrollable giggling, face pulling, and poking out of tongues. When Caliban is reprimanded, he bends over as if to be spanked, then defies Prospero by making a farting noise. Ferdinand and Miranda play gleefully at battledore and shuttlecock, while Ariel uses his hands to act out the playground game of Scissors-Paper-Stone. A naked, vulnerable Ferdinand is found in a foetal position, Trinculo clings pathetically to Caliban like a child, and an adult Caliban is shown in flashback suckling at the breasts of his mother Sycorax. One of the film’s key properties is a rocking-horse which signifies that Miranda has not entirely left the nursery but which, as in D. H. Lawrence’s short story ‘The Rocking Horse Winner’, starts to become highly sexualised. First Ariel, then Miranda, mount the horse while reciting lines taken from the betrothal blessing, giving their rocking movements an undoubted sexual connotation.

MUP_Wymer_06_Chap 5

78

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the tempest

79

At the heart of the film is the idea that Prospero can still remain in touch with his own ‘lost childhood’, still remain fully alive, as long as Miranda remains a child herself. The betrothal to Ferdinand is the moment when she finally grows up and joins the adult world and in Shakespeare’s play this is the completion of Prospero’s project, the happy ending. But not for Jarman. The adult world she is to join in the final scene is represented by the court party, here dressed in comic opera versions of ecclesiastical and military costumes (the adult world as a child might see it) and still trapped in the frozen, death-like postures into which Prospero’s spell has cast them. Jarman does not attempt any crude subversion of the anticipated marital bliss – there is nothing like the grotesque wedding sequence in The Last of England – but there are quiet undertones of melancholy. The confetti of rose petals soon comes to resemble autumn leaves and in a 1978 draft of the script, Jarman commented acerbically, ‘Ferdinand and Miranda lived happily ever after[,] a state only attained by flowers and vegetables’.35 The interlude of dancing sailors, one of the film’s most memorable moments and one which calls forth delighted laughter from Miranda, is the first scene in the film to be fully lit and its evocation of Gilbert and Sullivan operas and Hollywood musicals is a playful breach of generic decorum which temporarily throws off the weight of the world and all its expectations. It is a brief ‘camp’ childish gesture of liberation and defiance in the face of the grimly inevitable adult destiny of heterosexual marriage. It is closely parallel to the moment in Edward II when the young Prince Edward, wearing ear-rings and high heels, dances on top of the cage holding the imprisoned Mortimer and Isabella, joyless exemplars of a deadening heterosexuality. Jarman is aware, however, that such gestures, though momentarily exhilarating, cannot hold back time, death, and the adult world. The dancing sailors are succeeded by Elizabeth Welch, as the goddess of the masque, singing the blues number ‘Stormy Weather’. Although this is a warmly inclusive moment – she even gets what looks like a spontaneous smile from the actor playing Sebastian – it is deeply tinged with melancholy and not just a melancholy at the prospect of future parting but a melancholy about the whole process of growing up and pairing off. It may be an overly subjective response on my part, but the penultimate word in the line ‘Since my man and I ain’t together’ is so indistinctly sounded that I can equally hear it as ‘Since my man and I been together / It’s been raining all the time’, an interpretation which finds some support from Toyah Willcox’s claim that, when watching the dancing sailors, she was trying to convey through her expression the thought, ‘These are all good looking men [,] what am I doing with this creep!’36

MUP_Wymer_06_Chap 5

79

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

80

derek jarman

The end of Miranda’s childhood also signals the end of Prospero’s imaginative life and in the final scene we encounter him as a lonely, sleeping figure in a dark and deserted ballroom, strewn with confetti like fallen leaves. He doesn’t release Ariel by an act of will. Ariel slips away unnoticed while he sleeps and the implication is that, as we grow older, the imagination slips from us and we die inside: ‘ so the ending of the Tempest which seems optimistic for Prospero must also be the destruction of his own inner life’.37 All that is left is to face the inevitability of death, not so much in the positive and adaptive manner of someone who has achieved Jungian individuation, but in an impassive, Stoic, ‘classical’ manner. As ‘Our revels now are ended’ is heard on the soundtrack, we see the sleeping Prospero in close-up, his features immobile and framed so that his head is cut off at the neck, giving him a close resemblance to the bust of Mausolus which adorned his study and which was his perpetual reminder of death. When, shortly after Jarman’s HIV positive diagnosis in 1986, he deliberately broke ‘Prospero’s wand, Dee’s hieroglyphic monad’, the magic staff which had been used in the film, this was not a repudiation of his previous identification with Prospero-Shakespeare but rather a confirmation of it and, like Shakespeare, he was to die just after his 52nd birthday. His last recorded words before he lost all power of speech were apparently ‘I want the world to be full of fluffy little ducks’.38 These words capture, enigmatically, the kind of ‘camp’ refusal to give in to any reality principle which The Tempest’s dancing sailors brilliantly embodied but Jarman knew that such revels have only one conclusion. The voice-over which he provided for the frame character of ‘old Prospero’ in an earlier draft script of The Tempest ended with the line: ‘I’m so sorry it had to be like this – I would have liked the dance to go on for ever.’39

Notes 1 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 183. 2 Tony Peake, Derek Jarman (London: Little, Brown, 1999), pp. 66–7. 3 Jarman in an interview with Simon Field and Michael O’Pray, ‘On Imaging October, Dr. Dee and Other Matters’, Afterimage, 12 (1985), p. 49. 4 Passage deleted from the typescript of Dancing Ledge, in the BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 17. 5 For instance, the Kozintsev Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1970), the Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet (1968), the Polanski Macbeth (1971), and the Brook King Lear (1971). 6 A British 1908 version, directed by Percy Stow, is available on the BFI compilation video Silent Shakespeare. It is surprising how much of the play can be faithfully conveyed in twelve minutes without dialogue, though one of the captions mistakenly speaks of Ferdinand as Antonio’s son.

MUP_Wymer_06_Chap 5

80

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

the tempest 7 8 9 10

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

11

12

13 14

15 16 17

18 19 20 21

22

81

Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 186. Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 210. Peter Ackroyd, The Spectator (10 May 1980). Frank Kermode, ‘Ideas Strangle Director’, The Times Literary Supplement (16 May 1980). Ibid. Kermode’s criticisms gain some validation from Toyah Willcox’s admission of the difficulties she had with her lines: ‘I just didn’t understand what I was saying. Shakespeare just doesn’t click up there. With Miranda I put everything into mime, it was the only way I could put the part over. I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about, I really didn’t. It was a nightmare.’ (Transcript of interview with Toyah Willcox, BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 7, Item 12, p. 5.) A very useful survey of the play’s possible New World connections can be found in Charles Frey, ‘The Tempest and the New World’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 30 (1979), 29–41. Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 186. See Tristan Marshall, ‘The Tempest and the British Imperium in 1611’, The Historical Journal, 41:2 (1998), 375–400; Rowland Wymer, ‘The Tempest and the Origins of Britain’, Critical Survey, 11:1 (1999), 3–14. A number of other critics have argued that in 1611 it was Ireland rather than America which was at the centre of English colonial debate. See Paul Brown, ‘“This Thing of Darkness I Ackowledge Mine”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 48–71; Barbara Fuchs, ‘Conquering Islands: Contextualizing The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 48 (1997), 45–62; David J. Baker, ‘Where in Ireland is The Tempest?’, in Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 68–88. The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Thomas Nelson, 1999), p. 118. Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 196. Quotations from the play text are from the Oxford edition by Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). The remark occurs in handwritten notes which form appendices to one of the earlier draft scripts of the Tempest (BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 5, Item 4, Appendix 1). At one stage of the script the flashback scene with Sycorax and Ariel was to have been considerably more extreme: ‘Sycorax tortures him. She has bound and handcuffed him and is whipping him. The scene is violent and sexual. Surrounded by figures with masks who watch and laugh’ (BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 6, Item 8, seq. 32). One of Jarman’s notebooks on The Tempest has a small square mirror pasted to each page (BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 28, Item 1). Script dated August 1974, BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 5, Item 1a. BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 5, Item 1b. Jarman had himself originally asked Gielgud to play Prospero but had been turned down. Even after abandoning the idea that Prospero should play all the parts, Jarman retained for some time the possibility that Prospero should contain within himself Caliban, Ariel, Miranda, and Ferdinand. ‘It would be necessary for the actor who plays Prospero to convince us that these four characters are divergent parts of his persona – but this could be done filmically and they could materialise from his body – If in rehearsal an actor of sufficient range could be found he would play all four voices [,] the figures themselves materialising as totems – this would be an ideal’ (BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 28, Item 1). Transcript of interview with Toyah Willcox, BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 7, Item 12, p. 11 and p. 6.

MUP_Wymer_06_Chap 5

81

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

82 23 24 25 26 27

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

28 29

30 31

32

33

34

35 36 37 38 39

derek jarman Ibid., p. 12. 1976 draft of script (Notes on Characters), BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 5, Item 4. Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 202. Jim Ellis, ‘Conjuring The Tempest: Derek Jarman and the Spectacle of Redemption’, Gay Literature Quarterly, 7:2 (2001), 265–84 (p. 265). BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 21. The relevant passage is on p. 21 of Kicking the Pricks. Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 134. In Shakespeare’s Queer Children (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), Kate Chedgzoy is honest enough to admit that her efficient cultural materialist analysis of class, race, and gender issues in the film has ‘failed to convey anything of the huge pleasure I have derived from my repeated viewings of it’ (p. 205). The best account of the film as a pleasurable aesthetic experience is by Diana Harris and MacDonald Jackson in ‘Stormy Weather: Derek Jarman’s The Tempest’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 25:2 (1997), 90–8. Frances Yates, Shakespeare’s Last Plays: A New Approach (London: Routledge, 1975), pp. 95–7. Detailed analyses of Dee’s monad can be found in Charles Nicholl, The Chemical Theatre (London: Routledge, 1980), pp. 41–8 and György Szo…nyi, ‘Ficino’s Talismanic Magic and John Dee’s Hieroglyphic Monad’, Cauda Pavonis, 20:1 (2001), 1–11. See in particular C. G. Jung, Alchemical Studies, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge, 1983) and C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 2nd edn, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge, 1968). This property, which makes a significant appearance in several of Jarman’s films, was rescued by him when the Slade antiques room was dismantled in 1965. See Dancing Ledge, pp. 122–3. See, for example, Anson C. Fyler, Jr., ‘Self-Unification: An Archetypal Analysis of Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, Hartford Studies in Literature, 3:1 (1977), 45–50. BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 6, Item 7. Transcript of interview with Toyah Willcox, BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 7, Item 12, p. 18. 1976 draft of script (Notes on Characters), BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 5, Item 4. Peake, Derek Jarman, p. 532. BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 6, Item 9.

MUP_Wymer_06_Chap 5

82

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘To me, fair friend, you never can be old’: The Angelic Conversation (1985) 6

Despite the generally positive critical reception of The Tempest, Jarman was unable for several years to gain the necessary funding for his planned film about the painter Caravaggio. In consequence, his frustrated creative energies flowed in many different directions. He took up painting again, wrote a volume of autobiography, and produced draft scripts for a number of projects which were never filmed. These included a joky continuation of Jubilee called B Movie: Little England/A Time of Hope, two poetic and mystical representations of the process of individuation – Egypt, Egypt, Egypt and The Archaeology of Soul, a short film about the murder of his hero Pasolini, a medieval fable about a doomed love affair between a village girl and a mysterious charcoal-burner called Bob-up-aDown, and the apocalyptic fantasy Neutron, which debated the claims of art against politics, and at one point was to have starred David Bowie. He also completed a number of short films, the most important of which was Imagining October (1984), and made his first ventures into the lucrative sideline of pop music videos. During the 1970s, as I discussed in Chapter 2, by experimenting with the controls on his Nizo super-8 camera he had developed a technique of shooting at only three or six frames per second and then projecting the result at a similarly slowed down speed, to produce an effect something like a rapid and dreamlike slide show. In the summer of 1984 he and James Mackay used this method to film two young men, Paul Reynolds and Philip Williamson, wandering through a variety of locations which had personal significance for him, such as the cliffs at Dancing Ledge, the caves at Winspit, the Isle of Grain, and the Elizabethan mansion and garden at Montacute House in Somerset. In the course of the film, the young men wash, bathe, wrestle, embrace, and kiss, the generally idyllic and pastoral tone being only slightly modified by occasional discordant elements such as a revolving radar scanner, a burning car, a steel mesh fence, or the mysterious burdens which both

MUP_Wymer_07_Chap 6

83

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

84

derek jarman

men are forced to carry at times, one resembling a barrel (or small coffin), the other a yoke (or cross). By refilming the projected images with a video camera and using various filters and electronic controls, he generated some highly textured visual effects which, with the help of £35,000 from the British Film Institute, he was able to blow up to 35mm while adding a soundtrack. The ‘degradation’ of the cinematic image which was achieved through these processes blurs all outlines and renders colours unstable, and the stop-motion photography seems to be trying, but eventually failing, to arrest time itself, whilst also insisting on our paying increased and loving attention to the objects photographed. In this way the film exemplifies the Russian Formalist dictum that ‘the technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged’.1 Critical reaction was predictably mixed, depending on the individual critic’s degree of attachment to cinema as a narrative form, and ranged from ‘This is cinema as painting, a guise we see in it far too seldom, and superbly achieved’2 to ‘It is frightful. Possibly the most boring film ever made’.3 A middle position would be to celebrate the beauty and strangeness of individual shots and sequences but to acknowledge that seventy-eight minutes is a long time to sustain a series of lyric moments without dialogue or obvious narrative progression. There is a repetitiveness and an absence of internal tension which compares unfavourably with The Last of England and The Garden, though these would be deemed equally unwatchable by the kind of critics who judge everything by the standards of Hollywood. Jarman had no script when he began filming and only at the editing stage did a very loose structure start to emerge, one which, as so often in early Jarman, had elements of a spiritual journey leading to the emergence of an individuated psyche: The beginning had symbols of industrialism – the burning car. The cross related to industrialism – sort of a Bunuel moment. The weight of received thought. The fog and night journey is the idea of a journey which is so important to Jung. That is the first section. Then I thought the caves were places where analysis began. The dark cave where if you went under the temple, where they would put you out if you were ill. The place where the world might be put to right. A sort of descent into darkness – that is like Rimbaud – the descent into the other side is necessary. Then I saw the swimming sections as ablution, the ritual washing of the world … and the sunlight comes out and one is out in the fresh air.4

Elemental imagery of rock, water, fire, and air is deployed throughout, usually made strange in some way by the filming processes. The slowed

MUP_Wymer_07_Chap 6

84

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the angelic conversation

85

down close-ups of flickering candle flames have transformed them into something almost wholly abstract, ‘an agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve’. Of equal importance is the soundtrack, to which Jarman paid great care: ‘The image was improvised whereas the soundtrack was carefully structured.’5 Natural sounds of running water, a man panting, the cawing of rooks, or the cry of gulls alternate with electronic music by Coil, which can sound threatening and ‘industrial’ or archaically lyrical, depending on the requirements of the moment. One section of the film makes use of the ‘Sea Interludes’ from Britten’s Peter Grimes, but by far the most significant decision concerning the soundtrack was to include readings of fourteen Shakespeare sonnets. Although Jarman often spoke of The Angelic Conversation as if it were an attempt to film Shakespeare’s sonnets, it is clear from his own accounts of the film’s genesis that the fourteen poems, read by Judi Dench, were something of an afterthought, a belated attempt to bring some structure and drama to a series of technically contrived lyrical effects. Understandably, most discussion of the film, Jarman’s own favourite among his works, has centred on its visual impact and the experimental techniques used to achieve this. Nevertheless, Jarman was able to persuade himself that the film was a serious engagement with Shakespeare and a valuable reclamation of his ‘queer’ sexuality from all those scholars who had ignored or suppressed it. Shakespeare had homosexual experience, the sonnets are not convention. No poet writes his most personal work as ‘convention’. For a century the English literary establishment tied itself in knots to avoid simple observation, scholars who couldn’t look at the Master straight in the eye. Stamp all those great Shakespeare scholars with ‘NOT TO BE TRUSTED’ on every single page in college libraries. The Angelic Conversation was a reclamation, it was important for us to know that we have that history. Our greatest love poetry is queer. Once it had been shown to half a million people on television, it would be more difficult for teachers in schools to bury it.6

It was an important part of Jarman’s strong personal identification with Shakespeare that they both belonged to a ‘great tradition’ of ‘queer’ artists. His 1992 painting Letter to the Minister was overlaid with the text of a letter supposedly copied to the Arts Minister and which began ‘Dear William Shakespeare / I am a 14 year old and I’m / Queer like you’ and went on to mention Leonardo, Michelangelo, Francis Bacon, Allen Ginsberg, Rimbaud, Tchaikovsky, Eisenstein, Murnau, Pasolini, and Visconti.7 There have, of course, been many previous attempts to argue, largely on the basis of the Sonnets, that Shakespeare had homosexual tendencies but for Jarman the important word was ‘queer’ rather than ‘gay’, a term

MUP_Wymer_07_Chap 6

85

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

86

derek jarman

he always disliked for its complacently optimistic connotations: ‘We have academics who dispute Shakespeare was gay. Well, he wasn’t – that term hadn’t been invented and the either/or ghetto with it. He was much more likely to be queer, which includes all of us’.8 Approaching The Angelic Conversation as a film of the Sonnets, one is immediately and inevitably struck by the immense and puzzling differences. The 154 sonnets, which were published in 1609 and written at various times during the preceding twenty-seven years,9 revolve round three main characters. The majority of them concern the passionate and intense friendship between the speaker, the ‘I’ of the poems, and a beautiful younger man of higher social rank. Biographical interpretations naturally take the ‘I’ to be Shakespeare himself (there are numerous puns on the word ‘Will’) and the fair youth to be one or other of Shakespeare’s aristocratic patrons – Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, or William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. A smaller number of the sonnets deal with a ‘dark lady’, the speaker’s mistress, who arouses both lust and self-disgust in him, and who is suspected of betraying him by seducing his young friend. Jarman once said that his film of The Tempest ‘should be full of irreverence yet allow the great play to remain intact’10 and this is arguably what he achieved. Yet in his treatment of the Sonnets the ‘dark lady’ has been edited out and the intense triangular drama of betrayal and forgiveness, social and sexual difference, has been flattened into an idealised fantasy of male love, with all differences of age and rank erased. The two young men are hard to tell apart and a prolonged sequence of kisses is filmed in such a way as to suggest that one of them is repeatedly kissing his own reflection. Although, as we have seen, Jarman intended some of the imagery (such as the shots of a man apparently fighting with his own shadow) to imply a Jungian night journey into the self, the overall effect is more like the entrapment within the narcissistic ‘mirror maze’ described in the Dr. Dee scripts.11 It is as if Jarman had taken at face value the Renaissance rhetoric about friendship between men in which the ideal friend is described as ‘another self’ and chosen to ignore the fact that such rhetoric often masked important inequalities of age, wealth, and status, of the kind apparent in the Sonnets themselves. No one has yet tried to discuss in any detail the significance of the particular sonnets chosen,12 or the order in which they are heard, and maybe such an attempt is of limited hermeneutic value. Nevertheless, I wish to take Jarman’s use of these poems seriously and I offer here some preliminary thoughts about his citation of Shakespeare in this film. The opening credits conclude with the first two lines of sonnet 151: ‘Love is too young to know what conscience is, / Yet who knows not

MUP_Wymer_07_Chap 6

86

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the angelic conversation

87

conscience is born of love’. The neat chiasmus ‘Love-conscienceconscience-love’ moves us from a vigorously amoral Cupid figure, much like the impudent young boy in Caravaggio’s Amor Vincit Omnia (a painting which appears in two of Jarman’s films), towards deeper and less well defined feelings and responsibilities towards others. The couplet would make a wonderful epitaph for Jarman’s own life but it is a curious choice in many ways. It is from a ‘dark lady’ sonnet yet the film which follows contains no ‘dark lady’. The couplet’s air of general moral wisdom temporarily conceals the crudely physical nature of the unquoted remainder of the sonnet, which is filled with allusions to the male erection. It is possible, though, to detect, as does Katherine DuncanJones, ‘a concealed pun on the prick of conscience and the prick which has no conscience’13 and the lineation adopted in the credits, Love is too young to know what conscience is, Yet who knows not conscience Is born of love.

prompts the reading that it is not ‘conscience’ which is ‘born of love’ but rather the person ‘who knows not conscience’. At all events, the complex tangle of love, lust, and conscience in these lines is not the most obvious prelude to the rather chaste and idealised images which follow. The sexual violence which features in many of Jarman’s films has here been subjected to a rigorous repression, although since we are talking about a deliberate and conscious intention on Jarman’s part, the more precise word is probably ‘suppression’. Aware that many films dealing with male homosexuality contained sadomasochistic overtones, he was determined to do something different. ‘I was exploring a landscape I had never seen on film: areas of psyche that hadn’t been projected before. I had seen very few films on male love which are gentle, they usually have a violent subtext – the violence you have to traverse before you make peace with yourself.’14 Insofar as there is a disturbing sub-text to the film, it is largely provided by Shakespeare’s sonnets themselves. Given that the film’s images are not arranged in any immediately obvious narrative sequence, what sort of ‘story’, if any, do the fourteen sonnets on the soundtrack tell? As with the 1609 edition itself, there are hints of significant narrative ordering but no real sense that a true and final order has been achieved. There is little attempt to match particular sonnets with particular images and no sense that the choice of these fourteen was absolutely inevitable. Jarman’s unpublished papers mention the possibility of utilising a further seventeen sonnets, including

MUP_Wymer_07_Chap 6

87

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

88

derek jarman

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

such famous ones as 20 (‘A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted’), 68 (‘Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn’), and 116 (‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments’).15 He actually had recordings made of all the sonnets to give himself the maximum editorial choice and it is of considerable interest that, despite cutting out the ‘dark lady’, he had the poems read by a woman: I asked Judi Dench to read them, I wanted a woman’s voice so that there was no confusion. If I had used a man’s voice it would have seemed that one of the young men was talking about the other. One of them would have had the dominant voice, and I didn’t want that to happen, so the voice became that of an observer, leaving the imagery autonomous. It also established the feminine in the film, which otherwise would have been lacking. It completed it.16

The ‘feminine’, usually embodied by the actress Tilda Swinton, is crucial to many of Jarman’s films and has been psychoanalytically interpreted as demonstrating the paradox that there is ‘an inconsolable heterosexuality’ at the heart of male homosexual desire, a ‘militantly heterosexual refusal to renounce the mother as an object of desire’.17 It might be fruitful to pursue this in relation to The Angelic Conversation but the main point seems to be, as Jarman says, to preserve the two young men as interchangeable equals, simultaneously both subject and object, with neither holding the privileged position of viewpoint character. In fact the balance between the two is somewhat compromised from the start, since the opening shot is of Philip Williamson looking through the leaded window of an Elizabethan house into a garden, while we hear the first twelve lines of sonnet 57 (‘Being your slave, what should I do but tend / Upon the hours and times of your desire’). This seems to establish him as the watcher, masochistically in thrall to the beauty of the other man, something confirmed by the fact that Jarman’s fascination with Paul Reynolds was the starting point for the whole film. However, any straightforward distinction between identification and desire, subject and object, watcher and watched, quickly disappears and, with it, the possibility of a clear storyline. At the end of this opening sequence, Philip turns towards the camera and gazes out at us. The thirteen remaining sonnets are 90, 43, 53, 148, 126, 29, 94, 30, 55, 27, 61, 56, and 104. In very general terms, they could be said to move from the initial overwhelming attraction in 57, through a fear of rejection in 90, obsessional fantasising in 43, jealous suspicions in 148, to an acknowledgement of the inevitability of the ageing process in 104. Some sort of narrative climax could be seen in 148, a sonnet which (lacking any gender markers) has been transposed from the ‘dark lady’

MUP_Wymer_07_Chap 6

88

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the angelic conversation

89

group and which ends with a reference to ‘thy foul faults’. However, there is almost no pause on the soundtrack before 126 ‘O thou my lovely Boy’ is heard and the youth’s vulnerability to time rather than other lovers becomes the emotional keynote. From that point on, even the most minimal narrative impetus seems lost, though there is a peculiar interlude involving a third man (played by Dave Baby) to whom both Paul and Philip offer ritual obeisance and which was linked in Jarman’s mind to the feudal homosociality of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer. This sequence, which involves repeated submissive washing and kissing of the heavily tattooed and regal Dave Baby is filmed at normal speed and accompanied by sonnet 94 (‘They that have power to hurt, and will do none’). Jarman has taken one of the most enigmatic and sinister of the Sonnets (it ends with the line ‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds’) and transformed its dark hints of power and corruption into something much more benign, partly by shifting its reference away from the central love relationship, which is thus able to retain its aura of perfect equality and reciprocity. After this episode, the primary effect of the remaining poems is one of repetitive circling, as 27 and 61 return to the sleepless nights and intense dreams of 43, though hints of jealousy remain (‘From me far off, with others all too near’). The loose sense of a journey towards psychic integration which is implied by some of the visual imagery, such as the appearance of an androgynous figure who is caught in a spotlight suggestive of a solar disc, is counterbalanced by the soundtrack’s inability to move beyond a mood of unresolved yearning. What Jarman found in the Sonnets was not a story or a drama of relationships but a series of intense psychological states and a deep meditation on beauty’s vulnerability to time. For Jarman ‘one of the most consistent feelings conveyed in the sonnets is loss’18 and although his film, like the Sonnets, can confer a kind of immortality on its young men, they will still lose their looks, grow old, and die. Jarman once said that the techniques used in his film created the impression that ‘time actually is suspended’.19 This, however, can only be an illusion, like the poet’s belief that his friend has shown no sign of ageing since they first met. Sonnet 104, the last one heard on the soundtrack, begins confidently with ‘To me, fair friend, you never can be old’ but ends by admitting, Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial hand, Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived; So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand, Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived …

Jarman’s stop-motion photography has not stopped time, though it has preserved memories of desire. ‘Slow motion increases the sense of

MUP_Wymer_07_Chap 6

89

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

90

derek jarman

mastery over the image. These young men are now literally caught in our gaze. Yet being just film images they escape, already part of the past … The Angelic Conversation foregrounds the simultaneous presence and absence inherent in the cinematic image.’20 The film is engaged with some of the same paradoxes as Chris Marker’s famous tragedy of time travel La Jetée (1962), which is composed almost entirely of stills. In the first scene of The Angelic Conversation a ticking clock is heard on the soundtrack and, at the end, the reading of 104 is followed by a bell-like clang before the final freeze-frame of Philip with his face buried in flowers. In the moments before this, the surrounding foliage has cast shadows on his face which hint at the disfiguring blotches of Kaposi’s sarcoma.21 A more appropriate epigraph for the film than the lines about conscience from 151 would have been Yeats’s ‘Man is in love and loves what vanishes, / What more is there to say?’22

Notes 1 Victor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ (1917), in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. and ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 12. 2 Nigel Andrews, Financial Times (18 October 1985). 3 William Parente, Scotsman (Weekend) (19 October 1985). 4 An interview with Simon Field and Michael O’Pray, ‘On Imaging October, Dr. Dee and Other Matters’, Afterimage, 12 (1985), p. 52. 5 Ibid., p. 55. 6 Passage deleted from the typescript of Kicking the Pricks, BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 21. 7 The text of the ‘letter’ is quoted in Derek Jarman: A Portrait, ed. Roger Wollen (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), p. 27. There is a reproduction of the painting on p. 126. ‘Francis Bacon’ elides the Renaissance with the twentieth century by alluding simultaneously to the early modern thinker and the contemporary painter. 8 Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 161. 9 It has been suggested (by Andrew Gurr) that 145 includes a pun on Hathaway and dates back to the summer of 1582 when Shakespeare was courting his wife. In contrast, 107 seems to allude to the accession of James I in 1603 and 124 to the execution of the Gunpowder plotters in 1606. The consensus is that most of the sonnets date from the 1590s. 10 Production Note for a Tempest, BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 5, Item 1c. 11 Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit offer a more positive reading of the apparently narcissistic images in the film. See Caravaggio, pp. 71–2. 12 There is a good, more general, discussion of the relation of the film to the Sonnets in Jim Ellis, ‘Queer Period: Derek Jarman’s Renaissance’, in Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 288–315 (pp. 297–304). 13 Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Thomas Nelson, 1997), p. 418.

MUP_Wymer_07_Chap 6

90

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the angelic conversation

91

14 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 134. 15 BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 5. Jarman was to read out 116 at an OutRage demonstration in 1992. 16 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, pp. 143–5. 17 Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio, p. 78. Jarman’s other Shakespearean film, The Tempest, was in fact dedicated to the memory of his mother, who had died in the summer of 1978. 18 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 140. 19 In the interview with Field and O’Pray, ‘On Imaging October’, p. 55. 20 Mark Nash, ‘Innocence and Experience’, Afterimage, 12 (Autumn 1985), 30–5 (p. 35). 21 This was one of Jarman’s particular anxieties after he had been diagnosed as HIV positive: ‘mirror mirror please god I don’t get the awful disfiguring blemishes of Kaposi’ (Peake, Derek Jarman, p. 379). 22 W. B. Yeats, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, in Selected Poetry, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1962), p. 121.

MUP_Wymer_07_Chap 6

91

7/25/05, 5:16 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Red is just blue screaming’: Caravaggio (1986)

7

From 1978 to 1985, whatever else he was engaged in, Jarman’s life was dominated by his desire to make a film about the life of the Italian painter Caravaggio, a contemporary of Shakespeare though perhaps closer in personality to Marlowe. The initial idea for the film, and much of the subsequent pressure to realise it, came from an art dealer called Nicholas Ward-Jackson, who had once hoped that Pasolini would be able to direct it and, after meeting Jarman, became convinced that he would be a worthy alternative. Jarman had completed a first draft of the script, titled ‘No Hope, No Fear’, by July 1978 but it was another seven years before he was able to obtain the necessary funding. In that time, a further seventeen versions of the script were written, some of them with the aid of collaborators, who included Simon Raven, Steve Thorn, Paul Wolfson, Julian Sands, Tom Priestley, Stephen Pickles, and Suso Cecchi D’Amico. The later rewrites succeeded in simplifying some quite complex material by concentrating on the fatal triangular relationship between Caravaggio and his two models and loves Ranuccio and Lena, which Jarman developed from hints in his sources and which, framed by scenes of the painter’s lonely death in Porto Ercole, structured the final film. There were many frustrations along the way, as expected financial support failed to materialise, and Jarman’s most painful moment came in 1983 when Channel Four, perhaps sensitive to tabloid outrage over their purchase of Sebastiane, withdrew from a planned co-production deal. Jarman and Nicholas Ward-Jackson were furious but, two years later, Channel Four did join with the British Film Institute to offer £475,000, a much smaller figure than Jarman had originally hoped for, but enough to get the film made. One condition which was imposed was that it had to be shot in 35mm, the first time Jarman had ever filmed in what is the normal gauge for theatre release. Given that films about the lives of famous artists were a recognised Hollywood genre, it was perhaps surprising that no one had previously

MUP_Wymer_08_Chap 7

92

7/25/05, 5:17 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

caravaggio

93

attempted to film the life of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571– 1610). His revolutionary style of painting had caused a sensation in the early seventeenth century, making him the most acclaimed and controversial painter in Rome. He used ordinary people from the street to model his sacred figures and included naturalistic details that were sometimes judged indecorous, but he rose above mere ‘realism’ through a rigorous control of lighting effects, which created a highly dramatic and emotionally compelling interplay of light and shadow (Jarman called him ‘the painter who had “invented” cinematic light’).1 From the point of view of a film producer, his life contained a gratifyingly large number of violent incidents which included several street brawls in Rome, one of which led to the killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni in 1606 after which he fled into exile, a dramatic escape from a Maltese prison in 1608, a savage attack by several men in Naples in 1609 which left him disfigured, and a mysterious death far from home, leaving no body and no record of his burial.2 There were also intriguing rumours about his sexuality, with allegations made that he had a taste for boys as well as his better documented interest in female prostitutes. When Nicholas Ward-Jackson made a pitch for funding to the National Film Finance Corporation in 1981, he offered several reasons why the film was a sound commercial project, including the argument that ‘In distributors’ terms, there is a good mix of hetero- and homo-sexuality, violence, art and glamour.’3 Although the idea for the film had first come from Ward-Jackson, the project soon took on the character of an obsessive personal mission for Jarman. This was because of the extraordinary strength of his identification with Caravaggio, which exceeded even that with Shakespeare. The last photograph of Jarman in his autobiographical book Dancing Ledge, published before he knew the film would definitely be made, is deliberately Caravaggesque, its chiaroscuro deriving from a single light source high on the left, as in so many of Caravaggio’s paintings. The final photograph in the published script is of Jarman holding, as if it were his own, Caravaggio’s knife which, with its defiant engraved motto of ‘Nec Spe, Nec Metu’ (‘No Hope, No Fear’), the film represents as the painter’s dearest possession and which never leaves his side, even in death. In a section of the script headed ‘Correspondences’, Jarman wrote that, ‘This story, as it grew, allowed me to recreate many details of my life and, bridging the gap of centuries and cultures, to exchange a camera with a brush.’4 A good way into the heart of the film is to consider some of the elements of this personal identification. First, and most obviously, is the fact that Jarman chose to see Caravaggio as ‘the most homosexual of painters’,5 basing this opinion not so

MUP_Wymer_08_Chap 7

93

7/25/05, 5:17 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

94

derek jarman

much on three highly disputable biographical clues but on his reading of pictures like ‘The Boy with a Basket of Fruit’ or ‘Amor Vincit Omnia’ (called ‘Profane Love’ in the film script) which show a powerful responsiveness to youthful male beauty. His Caravaggio is masochistically in thrall to such beauty but ‘the strictures of Church and society leave a cancer, a lingering doubt, which leads to dis-ease in this painter’6 and generates violent psychological conflicts, evident in such paintings as ‘David with the Head of Goliath’, where it is Caravaggio’s own dripping head which is held triumphantly by the handsome young David. In a 1981 script there is a voice-over from Jarman himself as he gazes at ‘The Martyrdom of St Matthew’: ‘God, I hate priests with their phobias about homosexuality and sin. Hypocrites … The pernicious self-hatred they’ve fostered among homosexuals themselves, which is the key to Caravaggio’s life and destruction – it’s written all over the painting.’7 It was of equal importance to Jarman, however, that his hero should not be viewed primarily as a self-hating tragic victim or violent outlaw but ‘presented simply as a man who you feel might have the resources to transfigure his life, especially in the great altarpieces that ring with a freshness that is still admired in Rome to this day’.8 In other words, what mattered most to Jarman was that his hero was a successful artist and the film is driven by the paintings themselves and the processes by which they were produced more than by the many violent adventures which made up the life. Unusually for a film about a painter, there are as many scenes set in the quietness of the studio as in the bustling ‘bohemian’ world beyond it, scenes in which the lonely, intense concentration of the artist is disturbed only by the sound of his assistant grinding pigments or the anachronistic whistle of a distant train. The contrast between this necessary solitude and the rowdy, sociable life of street, tavern, and brothel was something Jarman was vividly aware of in his own life. The artist is torn between an outgoing empathetic engagement with other people, evident in the emotional importance of the human face in both painting and film, and a deliberately chosen isolation and introversion, without which there would be no art. In a version of the script dated April 1985, the opening title for the film is a quotation from Picasso: NOTHING CAN COME ABOUT WITHOUT LONELINESS I HAVE CREATED A LONELINESS FOR MYSELF WHICH NO-ONE CAN IMAGINE9

In the published script these lines now form part of Caravaggio’s voiceover when he describes his dumb assistant Jerusaleme as a ‘companion in my loneliness’.10 However, they have been cut from the soundtrack of

MUP_Wymer_08_Chap 7

94

7/25/05, 5:17 PM

caravaggio

95

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the film, despite their obvious centrality to Jarman’s imaginative conception of a painter’s life. The paradoxical stillness at the heart of all meaningful human activity is something which has also been detected by critics in Caravaggio’s most ambitious narrative paintings, such as ‘The Entombment of Christ’: The technical solution to the problem of painting action from life was a matter of perceiving the stillness and inwardness that was present even at the height of violence and confusion. M [i.e. Caravaggio] understood people’s infinitesimal reflective detachment from their own acts, and in painting the surface of events he seemed to see through their momentariness to a permanence of inner meaning. M would go on painting histories of violent group action to the very end of his life, and more and more they were images of austere and monumental stillness.11

Another way of making the same point would be to emphasise the spiritual quality in Caravaggio’s work. For all his accuracy in depicting human flesh and for all the strong erotic interest of some of his paintings, he was not a painter of surfaces. If he had been more strictly naturalistic, Jarman would not have admired him so much: ‘Caravaggio’s works are lit with a spiritual light, whatever claims have been made for “realism” by art historians. The progress in his work is away from reality.’12 This ‘most homosexual of painters’ was also ‘the most powerful religious painter of the Renaissance’13 and perhaps of any period. The tension between carnality and spirituality was something Jarman felt strongly in himself and it was not only a psychological problem but also an artistic one – how can spirit manifest itself through a material (and commercial) medium like paint or film? One of the most significant and ambiguous lines in the film is Caravaggio’s cry while painting ‘The Death of the Virgin’, ‘I’ve trapped pure spirit in matter’, which at one level sounds like an artistic triumph but at another hints at a Gnostic theology in which the material world is a demonically created prison for the soul. In the film he goes on to say, ‘and what should grow like the lilies of the field is placed high on the altars of Rome in mockery’ but the point he is making is not immediately obvious, partly because the words are muffled as he turns away from the camera. In earlier versions of the script the lines belonged to a voice-over by Jerusaleme and it was clearer that the complaint was about the way the spirit could be commodified once it had taken a material form: ‘he said of his painting, “I’ve trapped pure spirit in matter, so it could be bartered and sold and what should have no value and grow like the lilies of the field is horribly perverted and placed high on the altars of Rome in mockery”.’14 The intertwining of the spiritual with the material and the commercial was a preoccupation of Jarman’s and another

MUP_Wymer_08_Chap 7

95

7/25/05, 5:17 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

96

derek jarman

manifestation of it in the film was the recurring symbolism of gold. ‘Gold is a metaphor for purity, for sunlight and also for everything that is wrong with the world. It goes all the way through the film.’15 In alchemical terms, gold is not just a precious metal but ‘the symbol, the marke and the shadow of that eternity, which we shall enjoy above’.16 It is the emblem of the pure and perfected soul. In one draft of the script there was a scene in Cardinal Del Monte’s Alchemical Laboratory in which the Cardinal said to Caravaggio: ‘Mankind, Michele, are angels who have strayed too far from the central source and have been contaminated by the shadow of matter. At the moment the transmutation of base metals to gold takes place the key to the refinement of the physical world and the human condition will have been found.’17 However, gold is also a means of commercial exchange and throughout the film gold coins circulate ceaselessly between the characters, sometimes transferred erotically from mouth to mouth as if even the most intimate human relations could not take place outside the system of patronage and commerce. When Lena admires her golden hair in the mirror before the party given by Giustiniani, the papal banker, it is a sign of her determination to find a rich patron and ‘improve’ herself, a decision which leads to her murder at the hands of her lover Ranuccio and a watery grave in a river turned golden by the sun’s rays. If gold turns out to be a highly ambiguous symbol of spiritual transcendence, so does the colour blue. In many of Jarman’s films there is an alternation between red and blue, with red representing the carnal and blue the spiritual, in accordance with the Jungian chromatic symbolism he favoured. One of the interesting things about Caravaggio is that he hardly ever used blue in his palette, declaring once that ‘blue is poison’, a phrase Jarman used as his title in some versions of the script. Even when painting the Virgin Mary, he usually gave her a red dress rather than the conventional blue, and red is the most obvious colour visible among the dark shadows of his late paintings. In Jarman’s film there is also virtually no blue but the word ‘blue’ is heard frequently in Caravaggio’s voice-overs, where it is associated with death, drowning, and the dissolution of identity in the ‘poisonous blue sea’ at Porto Ercole where he lies dying and where the waves can be heard in the background. It is as if blue still signifies the loss of the corporeal self but imagined negatively and fearfully rather than positively. If Caravaggio’s love of red and horror of blue seems to indicate a fixation on the earthly, sexual body and a rejection of transcendence, Jarman knew from his own psyche that such a simple opposition between the sexual and the spiritual was always unstable. Blue had no one meaning and, if red was the opposite of blue, it was also its echo.

MUP_Wymer_08_Chap 7

96

7/25/05, 5:17 PM

caravaggio

97

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The blue is not reciprocal but if you have to balance it its echo is red but the echo is a mere reflection connected by a scream red is just blue screaming18

The intensity with which Jarman engaged with Caravaggio’s paintings involved a rejection of historical distance, which he justified partly by reference to Caravaggio’s own techniques. He saw both himself and Caravaggio as part of a pre-Enlightenment tradition of representation ‘in which the past is always contemporary, in the sense that the past is always the present. So when Caravaggio painted biblical scenes they were always of people of his own period, and all the medieval pictures are like that’.19 The use of anachronistic faces and costumes, together with a trick of making certain details appear to push through the plane of the picture into the space of the viewer, mean that many of Caravaggio’s paintings still jolt us into an immediate emotional response to them. When Jonathan Jones reviewed the Royal Academy’s ‘Genius of Rome’ exhibition in 2001, he wrote: These paintings push painting to an edge where it is becoming life, is ending as art. Caravaggio looks like our contemporary because his scenes are so mesmerically poised in time, dramatizing moments of choice and decision in which we ourselves are implicated. Will you accept the boy’s offer of fruit? Will you just stand there watching St Peter being crucified upside down, or will you do something about it? These scenes transfix us as they transfixed their original viewers.20

Jarman wanted his own film to have some of the same immediacy. After delivering his complaint about the commodification of spirit, Jarman’s Caravaggio suddenly screams ‘God curse you! You!’ directly at the camera, implicating us, the cinema audience, in the commercial degradation of his soul. The decision not to use reproductions of the paintings but to have them repainted by Christopher Hobbs was designed to make us respond to the pictures as fresh and living works of art rather than ‘Old Masters’, by eliminating the encrustations of time which in some cases would have been all too visible on a large cinema screen. The many anachronisms – a typewriter, a motorbike, an old car, an electronic calculator, the smoking of cigarettes, the sound of a train – were also intended to increase the sense of immediacy, though for the most part these details suggest not the Italy of the 1980s but that of the 1940s and 1950s, ‘the last time the world was intact before modern consumerism and Americanism swamped it’.21 This was the world of the Italian Neorealist films of Visconti, Rossellini, and De Sica, and Jarman saw their

MUP_Wymer_08_Chap 7

97

7/25/05, 5:17 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

98

derek jarman

combination of naturalism and emotional intensity as in a direct line of descent from Caravaggio. When casting the part of Lena, Jarman said he was looking for ‘a young Anna Magnani’, the charismatic heroine of Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945).22 The one or two details, like the electronic calculator, which were very obviously not part of this lost ‘intact world’, were presumably there to indicate that it was in the Renaissance that modern capitalism was born. Some reviewers found the anachronisms irritating whilst others, more woundingly for Jarman, saw them as little more than a technical trick to disguise the film’s essential orthodoxy. For Mark Finch in Monthly Film Bulletin, this was ‘certainly not the radical vision of history yearned for by Colin MacCabe (as executive producer and in charge of BFI Production). Caravaggio doesn’t so much break with the traditions of costume drama and historical biography as flirt with them.’23 Despite almost universal admiration for the look of the film (the cameraman Gabriel Beristain won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival), many reviews were surprisingly lukewarm, and as Finch’s remarks indicate, this was often because the critics had been anticipating something more extreme and innovative. Jarman, however, felt he had succeeded in putting his soul into the film and also thought, correctly, that he had been brilliantly served by Beristain, Christopher Hobbs (his designer), and the actors. For the first time in a Jarman film the acting had been fully professional and the performances of Nigel Terry as Caravaggio (or Michele as he is referred to throughout), Tilda Swinton as Lena, Sean Bean as Ranuccio, and Michael Gough as Cardinal Del Monte were all excellent. It now seems to many, including myself, that Caravaggio is indeed one of Jarman’s finest films, but it is worth reflecting a little on some of the criticisms it originally attracted before analysing it more closely. It was the first film of Jarman’s to follow some of the conventions of a recognised cinematic genre – in this case the biopic of a great painter – and for some critics the result was too close to the standard Romantic (and Hollywood) view of the artist as a tormented and alienated figure redeemed only by his art which could be found in Moulin Rouge (1953), Lust for Life (1956), or The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965). Jarman in fact disliked all these films and his decision to concentrate on the paintings themselves rather than ‘the life and times of Caravaggio’ was a deliberate revision of the genre. His depiction of an artist whose unresolved sexual feeling for boys is one of the factors threatening him with psychic disintegration owes more to Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968) than to any of the Hollywood films (one of the Porto Ercole scenes in the published script is in fact given the subtitle ‘The Hour of the Wolf’).

MUP_Wymer_08_Chap 7

98

7/25/05, 5:17 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

caravaggio

99

Jarman opened up new possibilities in the treatment of a painter’s life and his influence continues to be apparent in such interesting films as Agnès Merlet’s Artemisia (1997) or John Maybury’s Love is the Devil (1998), both of which explore the problem of art, sexuality and suffering without appearing formulaic. A more potentially valid criticism was that Jarman was so immersed in his material that, ‘over the years, he has come to take his subject, and the involvement an audience is likely to feel in it, for granted. Too much exposition is omitted or elided to permit an easy purchase on the plot. It is as if Jarman knows the tale too well to sense the need to tell it clearly.’24 In actuality, the basic narrative structure of the film is clear enough – a chronological account of Caravaggio’s period in Rome between 1592 and 1606 framed and intercut with scenes on his deathbed in Porto Ercole four years later – but Jarman’s decision, which was made quite late on, to remove some of the explanatory voice-overs does perhaps cause a few narrative problems, though these largely disappear on subsequent viewings. The repeated references to Caravaggio’s boyhood love Pasqualone, who does not appear until the film’s penultimate scene, are initially enigmatic and might cause some viewers mistakenly to identify this figure with Jerusaleme on whom the camera is frequently focused when Pasqualone’s name is mentioned. The film’s time scheme, like that of many Shakespeare plays, turns out to be impossible on close inspection, however intuitively right it feels, and there is a deliberate refusal to spell out some of the characters’ motivations – such as Ranuccio’s for killing Lena or Caravaggio’s for killing Ranuccio. None of this, however, seems to matter very much in the end. Clarity of exposition may be a virtue but it is not a requirement for greatness in a film, a play, or a novel and may actually work against the fullest and richest kinds of aesthetic experience. The most potentially damaging complaints about Caravaggio were that it lacked life and energy. Critics who were aware of the colourful nature of Caravaggio’s life and of the quirky and irreverent manner with which Jarman frequently saw the past were taken aback by the rather austere, melancholic, and death-haunted tone of the film. However, its wistfulness and abiding sense of loss is as central to Jarman’s sensibility as the occasional camp provocation like the casting of Jack Birkett as the Pope. Its allegedly static quality was singled out by several reviewers who nevertheless admired its visual style. For Iain Johnstone in The Sunday Times, ‘as a drama it comes over as a bit of a still life, a succession of barely animated friezes’25 and John Russell Taylor, writing in Sight and Sound, thought that: ‘By the standard of Bresson and Pasolini, unfortunately, it remains all too suggestive of love amongst the wax-

MUP_Wymer_08_Chap 7

99

7/25/05, 5:17 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

100

derek jarman

works. The breath of life is somehow missing’.26 These criticisms, and the closely related one that Jarman showed ‘a lack of interest in psychology’27 derive from the fact that the characters in the film do not have a life that is fully distinct from the paintings in which they appear. Live action scenes alternate with tableaux vivants and representations of the paintings in various stages of completion. As well as being responsible for the look of the film, the paintings drive the narrative and carry the burden of its significance, and the psychology they express is not that of a full range of independently conceived characters but that of the artist himself – Jarman-Caravaggio. Far from being uninterested in psychology, Jarman was fascinated by it, but it was always ultimately his own mind which he wanted to explore and in this film the exploration is carried out through a sequence of Caravaggio’s paintings, the most important of which I shall now discuss in detail, in the order in which they appear. After the opening scene in Porto Ercole where the dying Caravaggio is being cared for by his dumb manservant Jerusaleme, we move back in time to see Caravaggio purchase Jerusaleme, then a little boy of about six, from his peasant grandmother, while his mother looks on and weeps. On their return to Caravaggio’s studio, we see the first of the many paintings which will be represented during the film – the severed snake-haired head of the Gorgon Medusa. The little boy grimaces at it, then picks up the shield on which it is painted and runs round the studio, brandishing it at Caravaggio who first feigns alarm before grimacing back. He then picks up Jerusaleme, embraces him and strokes his hair, before the two of them fall asleep on the windowsill. Apparently marginal to the development of the plot, it is nevertheless perhaps the most moving moment in the film and is repeated as a brief flashback in the final scene. After they have gone to sleep, a snake glides from the basket of fruit and moves over the Medusa’s face before there is a cut to the adult Jerusaleme with a horned ram. This is quickly followed by a shot of the sleeping little boy, still cradled by Caravaggio, with the snake near his throat, and then a second shot of the two of them in the same tender embrace but with the snake no longer visible. There is clearly a good deal going on here and the painting of the Gorgon’s head seems central to its psychological complexity.28 In Greek legend, the Medusa’s face was so terrifying that it turned men to stone until Perseus used a mirror to confront her so that he could decapitate her. Psychoanalytically she is usually interpreted as a version of the Terrible Mother archetype, like Kali, Hecate, or Circe, from whom the (male) hero must free himself or risk being devoured or rendered powerless. Here, however, there is a gender ambiguity (Caravaggio used

MUP_Wymer_08_Chap 7

100

7/25/05, 5:17 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

caravaggio

101

a boy for his model) and the face, as well as being a horrific threat to the viewer, is in a state of horror at his (or her) own identity. It is as if this identity has been glimpsed for the first time in the mirror held up by Perseus, provoking an extreme self-alienation which is then literalised by decapitation. The obvious comparison is with other Caravaggio depictions of severed heads, such as David with the Head of Goliath or Salome with the Head of St John the Baptist, in which elements of self-pity and self-disgust are present. The snake which glides out of the basket of fruit is described in the script as ‘the serpent of memory, bringing with it the sounds of the country’,29 suggesting the yearning for a lost origin (the mother?), but it is also undoubtedly phallic as it pushes against the painted face of the boy/woman whose hair consists of highly realistic writhing serpents. The phallic connotations are maintained by the horned ram which stands by the adult Jerusaleme’s bed, and it becomes impossible not to see the little boy with the snake coiled near his throat without thinking of threatened or corrupted innocence. The whole sequence, including the painting itself, expresses a deep confusion of desire and identity, sexual and non-sexual feeling. The highly affecting shot of Caravaggio cradling the sleeping boy condenses a number of quite different emotions without resolving them logically. In part, there is a lament for his own lost childhood (when we eventually see the boy Caravaggio at the end of the film he looks quite similar to the young Jerusaleme) and perhaps there is also a lament for the father’s love he himself never had (in his first voice-over the dying Caravaggio, speaking of the sailors who pulled him from the sea, says: ‘If arms as steady as these had embraced me in life … ’). There is also the regret (if only a passing one) of the ‘bohemian’ single man for missing out on the emotional fulfillment of fatherhood. And, as the serpent disturbingly intimates, there is the dark hint of a sexual attraction to young boys. The model for the impudent Cupid in ‘Profane Love’ would only be a few years older than the tiny, vulnerable figure sleeping in his arms. Finally, in keeping with many other reminders of mortality in the film, the Gorgon’s head is an intimation of death. A recent survey of the Gorgon motif in ancient cultures has concluded that the terrifying properties attributed to it derive from the fact that the Gorgon’s swollen face and bulging eyes are the representation of a putrefying corpse.30 When the murdered Lena’s body floats in the Tiber, her ‘hair streams out dark as the Medusa weed’ and in an early script, which began with Caravaggio himself drowning, the same image is used of him: ‘As he sinks, his face, with contorted mouth and hair entwined with seaweed, becomes a Medusa’.31 Whether the Gorgon is mother, boy, lover, or one’s self, in the end it signifies the same thing.

MUP_Wymer_08_Chap 7

101

7/25/05, 5:17 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

102

derek jarman

There follow several scenes in which the young Caravaggio (played by Dexter Fletcher) is shown as a tough, amoral hustler, trying to make his way in Rome by selling both his paintings and his body, before being taken into the service of Cardinal Del Monte. The historical Caravaggio’s first major public commission came in 1599 and was to paint two pictures of St Matthew (The Calling and The Martyrdom) for the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi. Jarman chose to focus on the latter of these and, knowing from X-ray evidence that Caravaggio got into serious difficulties with the picture and completely changed his composition halfway through, he made the revised picture central to his interpretation of the painter and the shape of his story. The now mature artist, played with brooding intensity by Nigel Terry, is shown struggling with the unsatisfactory first version of The Martyrdom (‘Thought without image / lost in the pigment / trapped in the formless umber wastes’) until he becomes masochistically infatuated with a brawny young man whom he first sees in the tavern then later, stripped to the waist, brutally demolishing his opponent in a boxing match. He becomes the executioner in the new version of The Martyrdom and the manner in which he dispatches the saint replicates the downward diagonal punch with which he destroyed the other boxer. Jarman noticed that Caravaggio had painted his own face staring from the back of the crowd and hypothesised a whole psychology from this: ‘Michele gazes wistfully at the hero slaying the saint. It is a look no one can understand unless he has stood till 5 a.m. in a gay bar hoping to be fucked by that hero. The gaze of the passive homosexual at the object of his desire, he waits to be chosen, he cannot make the choice.’32 Jarman’s narrative then required a number of further hypotheses: that the model for the executioner was the Ranuccio Tomassoni whom Caravaggio was to kill, that the same man modelled for a semi-naked picture of St John the Baptist which was so precious to the painter that (according to Jarman) he had carried it with him into exile, and that in the late painting of The Beheading of St John the Baptist the signature in the saint’s blood ‘f. michel.’ (the only time Caravaggio had ever signed his work) should be interpreted as a confession of murder (‘f[ecit] [M]ichel[e]’ meaning ‘Michele did this’). From all this it could be deduced that the central narrative of the film would concern a tragic (because hopeless and unconsummated) homoerotic relationship between the painter and Ranuccio of a kind hinted at in mainstream films like The Wild Bunch or The Deer Hunter in which men are bonded together by violence and die in each other’s arms. The scene in which Ranuccio wounds Caravaggio in a knife fight and the final killing of Ranuccio carry this sort of emotional charge (in the first scene Caravaggio daubs Ranuccio’s face with his blood while in

MUP_Wymer_08_Chap 7

102

7/25/05, 5:17 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

caravaggio

103

the second the action is reversed). However, it is remarkable how far the film veers from the reading of the paintings Jarman put forward in Dancing Ledge and the published script.33 When Caravaggio reads from ‘The Song of Solomon’ (‘In the streets and the squares / I will seek him whom my soul loves. / I sought him but found him not.’), the camera comes to rest on the executioner of St Matthew and then on the model Ranuccio, but when we see Caravaggio painting Ranuccio as John the Baptist, there is little sign of any emotional fixation and the dynamics of the scene revolve round the increasing attraction between the artist and Lena, Ranuccio’s lover. Caravaggio orders an expensive dress for her and the messenger’s arrival with this dress throws a large shadow over both Ranuccio and Lena, who is sitting at his feet while he is being painted. When Caravaggio puts earrings on her and kisses her, their heads come together obscuring an out-of-focus Ranuccio who had been visible between them. When he comes back into visibility and focus, he looks troubled and uncertain, as well he might, having been told that she wants ‘much more than you can imagine’. The dress and earrings were so that Lena might make an impression at the party given by the banker Giustiniani to display the picture of ‘Profane Love’ he had commissioned, and in the aftermath of the party there is a strange scene in which it is Jerusaleme rather than Ranuccio who is posed as St John and is explicitly addressed as such by Caravaggio: ‘You are my St John and this is our Wilderness’. This substitution had been anticipated in the earlier scene when Jerusaleme was shown with a red-stained cloth over his shoulder, paralleling the red cloak worn by St John. Whom does Caravaggio really love? Ranuccio seems to be being displaced by both Lena and Jerusaleme and there may be an ambiguity being resolved about the identity of the St John in question. In Jarman’s writings about the significance of the St John pictures for Caravaggio, St John seems at times to suggest ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’, a Biblically sanctioned example of male love which Jarman liked to use to challenge the modern Church’s hostility to homosexual relationships. When Jerusaleme picks up his cloak, however, he is without doubt John the Baptist, the one who prepares the way for Christ rather than the lover of Christ and this suggests the essentially solitary fulfillment towards which Caravaggio is moving. The question ‘Whom does Caravaggio love?’ is further complicated by the scene in which Caravaggio relaxes with a cigarette while painting ‘Profane Love’. This extraordinary picture of a naked twelve-year-old Cupid, with an impudent grin and predatory eagle’s wings, trampling on the symbols of art and learning while giving us a very good view of what is between his spread thighs, is Caravaggio’s most erotic picture

MUP_Wymer_08_Chap 7

103

7/25/05, 5:17 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

104

derek jarman

and one which helped provoke some of the rumours about his sexuality. When Richard Symonds, an English traveller, saw the painting in 1649–50 he put down in his notebook that ‘Twas the body & face / of his owne boy or servant / that laid with him’.34 Jarman called it ‘Caravaggio’s venture into paedophilia’35 and whereas The Martyrdom of St Matthew could be interpreted as the sublimation of a disturbed sexuality, showing ‘how the awareness of this fickle fleshly state can be translated into art’,36 ‘Profane Love’ was an explicit challenge to all forms of sublimation, signifying, as Giustiniani says to Del Monte in one of the earlier scripts, that ‘A good Fuck is worth the lot’.37 The scene is described in the script as ‘An Idyll’ but it takes an enigmatic form because of the difficulty of finding a 12-year-old boy actor to model this erotic nude. In the end Jarman used an actress, Dawn Archibald, who remained fully clothed, her cropped hair giving her an androgynous look and whose character, Pipo, is referred to in the film as ‘he’. Once more there is a confusion of desire and gender identity as the camera cuts back and forth between the watching painter, the Cupid of the painting (whose face is often seen in close-up), and the ambiguous Pipo who is the model for the Cupid and yet at the same time obviously not the model for him. A ‘wild and melancholy’ song plays on the soundtrack throughout and Pipo performs some improvised gymnastic moves watched intently by Caravaggio. A strange and wonderful sense of intimacy is created but what sort of intimacy? At one point Pipo gazes at, then spins, a blue globe covered with stars, the only blue in the whole film. Is sexuality transcended here? Is it ever? In the aftermath of Giustiniani’s party, Caravaggio again watches Pipo (this time unseen) as he (or she) performs a balletic dance with a strong young man. Reclining amid dimly visible shrivelled corpses (the party had taken place in the catacombs), Caravaggio blows the couple an unseen kiss as they depart. The script says at this point that, ‘He smiles and then his face grows blank with loneliness.’38 In the film we only see the smile but at that point ‘Profane Love’ is taken away, covered by a cloth, and several old women, dressed in black, begin to sweep the floor, raising clouds of dust. The deepening feeling between Caravaggio and Lena, evident while St John was being painted, is seen again when he paints her as Mary Magdalen and is deeply attentive to her when her pregnancy causes her to faint with exhaustion. Later, in the deserted studio, Del Monte picks up the pearls and oil flask which were symbols of the Magdalen’s previous life of luxury, then, after replacing them, lets a handful of dust trickle through his fingers. Lena’s brief moment of worldly triumph as the mistress of Cardinal Scipione Borghese is likewise immediately

MUP_Wymer_08_Chap 7

104

7/25/05, 5:17 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

caravaggio

105

followed by her muddy death in the Tiber. Her body is brought to the studio where Caravaggio uses it as the model for his painting of ‘The Death of the Virgin’, one of his most controversial pictures and one of the film’s most important scenes. Historically, the painting had been commissioned for the Carmelite Church of Santa Maria della Scala but when the friars saw the swollen belly and bare feet of the Virgin and recognized the model as a well known prostitute and lover of Caravaggio, they rejected the picture, despite its intense and moving depiction of death and grief. Jarman chose to make it as central as The Martyrdom of St Matthew to the psychological narrative he constructed from the paintings, though he says little about it in his many published comments. As Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit point out, ‘there is only silence surrounding the strangest, most powerful element of Jarman’s most powerful film. It can be shown but it can’t be said’.39 After a long period of quiet preparation during which the painter looks at the dead woman’s face and places his hand on hers, there is a close-up of her painted face within the picture and a long, grief-stricken voice-over begins: ‘Look! Look! Alone again. Down into the back of the skull. Imagining and dreaming, and beyond the edge of the frame – darkness. The black night invading.’ The close-ups of her face in the picture alternate with shots of a semi-naked Caravaggio cradling her corpse and stroking her hair in the way that he had once embraced the little boy Jerusaleme. The voice-over continues with images of identity dissolving (‘you blink and send me spinning, swallowed in the vortex’) before concluding, ‘Beyond, matter, scintilla, star, I love you more than my eyes.’ If the intensity of this seems disproportionate in terms of the literal relationship between Caravaggio and Lena, then the previous hints of an identification with Christ (‘You are my St John’) point to the emotional significance of painting Lena as the dead Virgin, the mother of Christ. It was a bonus that Tilda Swinton, who from now on became the most important figure in Jarman’s films, had a definite physical resemblance to Jarman’s own mother. ‘Thus in Jarman’s cinematic biography of “the most homosexual of painters”, the ultimate “truth” of homosexuality is represented as an inconsolable heterosexuality.’40 Since the object of this desire, the mother, is forever unattainable, any reunion with her can only take the form of a dissolution of identity, a drowning of self in that blue sea whose waves break continually on the beach at Porto Ercole. Caravaggio has reached a state not unlike that of Paul Morel following the death of his mother at the end of Sons and Lovers and we see him slumped in an alcoholic stupor in the Bar Del Moro. One of the wines jeeringly offered to him in his despair is ‘Lacrima Christi’ and his

MUP_Wymer_08_Chap 7

105

7/25/05, 5:17 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

106

derek jarman

identification with Christ, an identification which reconfigures loss of self as a restoration of self, is completed in the film’s extraordinary penultimate scene. We seem to have been taken back to an episode from Caravaggio’s childhood as a small boy called Michele watches an Easter procession of penitents in the company of a young man called Pasqualone, whose name has been heard repeatedly in the dying painter’s voice-overs. This fictional figure is clearly based on the handsome eighteen-year-old Davide who used to take the four-year-old Jarman for rides on his motorbike by Lake Maggiore and whom Jarman called ‘my first love’.41 But in giving him the name Pasqualone, a man whom the historical Caravaggio wounded in a quarrel over Lena, Jarman retains the ambiguity over who really was the painter’s first and truest love. The boy Michele is dressed as an angel and is clearly pre-pubertal and ‘innocent’ but his garland prefigures Caravaggio’s self-portraits as Bacchus (‘I painted myself as Bacchus and took on his fate, a wild orgiastic dismemberment’) and his wings perhaps hint at the winged Cupid of ‘Profane Love’. Behind a curtained doorway Michele reveals to Pasqualone a tableau vivant, the models posed as if being painted for one of the most famous of Caravaggio’s works, ‘The Entombment of Christ’. A nearly naked Jesus, in a posture resembling the Deposition from the Cross or the Pietà, is being lowered into the grave by St John, the three Marys, and Nicodemus. Although the tableau resembles the painting very closely it differs from it in a number of respects, the most important of which is that the face of Christ is clearly the face of Caravaggio. The child Michele is brought literally face-to-face with his own future death and burial but in a form which implies a completion and fulfilment of self, Christ being one of the archetypes of successful individuation. The liturgical music which accompanies this tableau is then continued, without a break, into the scene of Caravaggio’s own funeral. Since ‘The Entombment’ was not one of the historical Caravaggio’s self-portraits, Jarman’s revision of it is highly significant and becomes even more so when one recalls another painting which is surprisingly absent from the film. ‘David with the Head of Goliath’, which may have been one of the last pictures Caravaggio painted, had loomed large in Jarman’s original conception of his hero. The severed head of Goliath, held up by a toughlooking young David, is clearly Caravaggio’s own, thus showing a ‘martyrdom at the hands of youth’42 involving an extreme self-alienation and self-pity. A reproduction of it is the first photograph in Dancing Ledge and three different versions of it appear in the published script. The one on the cover is particularly significant since it shows Dexter Fletcher (the young Caravaggio) as David, holding the head of Nigel

MUP_Wymer_08_Chap 7

106

7/25/05, 5:17 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

caravaggio

107

Terry (the mature Caravaggio) as Goliath, making it a literal depiction of a man destroying himself. It is rather a jolt to be reminded that the picture does not appear in the final film, though it is alluded to in the opening shot of the dying Caravaggio in which he is framed as a disembodied head showing marks of violence and with the left eye open, like that of Goliath. It is clear that over the many years that Jarman worked on the film he moved away somewhat from an emphasis on the pain and ‘dis-ease’ evident in the Goliath painting to a more redemptive view of the artist as ‘a man who you feel might have the resources to transfigure his life’. In a version of the script dated July 1985 (in other words shortly before filming began), there is a Title Sequence which makes this transition explicit: ‘The painting of the “Beheading of Goliath”, Caravaggio’s Self Portrait[,] dissolves through a tableaux [sic] based on the Entombment.’43 In the film this movement is more obliquely suggested but all desires, all relationships, and all identities eventually converge in the artist-asChrist. At the end of Carol Reed’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, Pope Julius II asks Michelangelo what he has learnt from his painting of the Sistine Chapel, with its famous central image of God reaching down to touch the outstretched hand of Adam. Michelangelo says he has learned ‘That I am not alone’, his relationship with God compensating for and transcending the inadequacies of human love. Jarman’s hero does not find a relationship with God – he hurls away the crucifix offered to him on his deathbed – but he becomes God. In one sense he remains entirely alone but in another sense he is part of everyone and everything, both small boy and dying man, both grieving mother and beloved disciple, able to feel the feelings of others as if they were his own, in ‘an expansive rather than a self-enclosing narcissism’.44 As Wilde put it in De Profundis, Christ was a true artist not only because he was ‘the first individualist in history’ but also because ‘he realised in the entire sphere of human relations that imaginative sympathy which in the sphere of Art is the sole secret of creation’.45 This vision, a positive resolution of the confusions of desire and identity which took a more threatening form in the Head of the Gorgon, is qualified but not cancelled by the final shots of Caravaggio laid out in death, his body diminished and rendered slightly grotesque through foreshortening, and with his artist’s eyes covered by two gold coins, a final reminder that the journey towards self-realisation takes place through the very material and commercial medium of painting – or film.

MUP_Wymer_08_Chap 7

107

7/25/05, 5:17 PM

108

derek jarman

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 Derek Jarman, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), p. 6. 2 Two good recent biographies are Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998; repr. London: Pimlico, 1999) and Peter Robb, M (Sydney: Duffy and Snelgrove, 1998; repr. with corrections London: Bloomsbury, 1999). Robb permits himself rather more speculation, including an airing of the possibility that Caravaggio was murdered by the Knights of St John, from whose prison he had escaped in 1608. 3 BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 11, Item 17a. 4 Jarman, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, p. 132. 5 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 22. 6 Ibid. 7 BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 10, Item 13b, pp. 27–8. 8 Jarman, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, p. 92. 9 BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 13, Item 26b. 10 Jarman, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, p. 13. 11 Robb, M, p. 217. 12 Jarman, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, p. 22. 13 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 24. 14 BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 8, ‘Caravaggio Shooting Script’, Seq. 62. 15 Press cutting from piece on ‘The Making of Caravaggio’, in Square Peg, BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 9. 16 Michael Maier, Lusus Serius, quoted in Abraham, Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, p. 87. 17 BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 8, Item 6, Seq. 10. 18 Words which Jarman imagined Yves Klein using when asked what was the meaning of the blue in his abstract monochrome paintings (BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 16). 19 An interview with Field and O’Pray, ‘On Imaging October’, p. 55. 20 Jonathan Jones, ‘The Secret Caravaggio’, Guardian (6 January 2001). 21 A remark in Jarman’s unpublished papers which is quoted by Tony Peake in Derek Jarman, p. 348. 22 BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 11, Item 17b. 23 Review in Monthly Film Bulletin, 53:627 (April 1986), p. 100. 24 Alan Stanbrook in Stills (April 1986). 25 The Sunday Times (27 April 1986). 26 Sight and Sound, 55:2 (Spring 1986). 27 Stephen Harvey, ‘See Rome and Die’, Village Voice (2 September 1986). 28 There are interesting discussions of the Medusa’s head in James Tweedie, ‘The Suspended Spectacle of History: The Tableau Vivant in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio’, Screen, 44:4 (Winter 2003), 379–403 (pp. 402–3) and Timothy Murray, Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera and Canvas (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 143–56. 29 Jarman, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, p. 13. 30 See Stephen R. Wilk, Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 31 BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 11, Item 16, p. 5. 32 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 22. 33 In some of what follows I am indebted to the subtle arguments put forward by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit in Caravaggio. 34 Quoted in Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life, p. 220.

MUP_Wymer_08_Chap 7

108

7/25/05, 5:17 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

caravaggio

109

35 Jarman, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, p. 75. 36 Ibid., p. 51. The phrase forms part of an important voice-over which was cut from the actual film. 37 Script titled ‘Blue is Poison’ and dated Dec. 1984, Seq. 40 (BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 13, Item 25). 38 Jarman, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, p. 91. 39 Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio, p. 30. In unpublished notes on the script which was presented to the National Film Finance Corporation in 1981, Jarman does say that, ‘the role of Lena as the female presence in the film will be paramount’ (BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 11, Item 17b). 40 Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio, p. 78. 41 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 19, Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 11, and Jarman, At Your Own Risk, p. 15. 42 Jarman, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, p. 48. 43 BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 14, Item 30. 44 Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio, p. 80. 45 Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1996), pp. 58 and 56.

MUP_Wymer_08_Chap 7

109

7/25/05, 5:17 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Where in all of this is Love?’ The Last of England (1987)

8

1986 proved to be a pivotal year in Jarman’s life. The release of Caravaggio, which brought an eight-year obsession to a successful conclusion, was followed by the illness and death of his father in the autumn and then, just before Christmas, the formal confirmation of what he had feared for some time – that he was carrying the HIV virus. Around the same time he also first met Keith Collins, then aged 23, the man who was to become his close companion for the rest of his life, and who is usually referred to as ‘HB’ in Jarman’s writings. During this very significant period of personal farewells, fears, and hopes, he resolved to make a film which would ‘explore through metaphor and dream imagery the deep seated malaise in current Britain’.1 After being called at various times ‘Victorian Values’, ‘The Dead Sea’, and ‘GBH’ (i.e. ‘Grievous Bodily Harm’), it became The Last of England shortly before release. In Jubilee Jarman had vividly depicted the social disintegration of the late 1970s but none of his subsequent feature-length films had directly addressed the impact of Margaret Thatcher’s political and economic policies on the nation, though in Imagining October (1984) he had explored both individual and collective alternatives to ‘the sheer visual ugliness of Margaret Thatcher and her gang of vacuous henchmen’2 and in The Queen is Dead (1986) had created angry and despairing apocalyptic images for the Smiths to accompany their song ‘Panic’. Like many people, Jarman had probably not been too sorry to see the end of Callaghan’s struggling Labour government in 1979, but the first few years of Conservative rule made the discontents of the previous decade seem trivial. The strict monetarist policies pursued by Thatcher devastated the traditional manufacturing industries, leading to levels of unemployment not seen since the 1930s. Whereas Callaghan had been pilloried for allowing the number of unemployed to reach a million, Thatcher seemed unperturbed by a figure of over three million so long as inflation was brought under control. The long and bitter Miners’

MUP_Wymer_09_Chap 8

110

7/25/05, 5:18 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the last of england

111

Strike of 1984–5 ended in total defeat for the strikers after considerable violence on the picket lines and an unprecedented national policing operation of doubtful legality. The alienation and frustration of young black men led to major riots in London, Liverpool and Bristol and the struggle with the IRA in Northern Ireland continued to poison national life, creating a perpetual low-level state of civil war. During her first term of office, Thatcher sank to new depths of personal unpopularity for a Prime Minister but was nevertheless re-elected with a massively increased Parliamentary majority in 1983, following the British victory in the Falklands the year before. Although she never achieved a majority in the popular vote, she seemed destined to rule forever and, between the completion of The Last of England and its premiere at Edinburgh in August 1987, was indeed duly elected for a third term with another three-figure majority. As a number of commentators have pointed out, one of the most obvious ways in which Thatcher’s policies impacted on British cinema was by stimulating an eloquent oppositional response from several directors, sometimes in the style of social realism but sometimes also in the form of an allegorical lament on the ‘state of the nation’.3 The latter group of films would include Lindsay Anderson’s Britannia Hospital (1982), though this is as much an anatomisation of the conditions which preceded the rise of Thatcher as it is a critique of any of her policies, and Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1990) which personifies the ruthless self-interest and greed which Greenaway saw as characteristic of the 1980s in the horrifying form of the gangster Albert Spica, ‘a man who is thoroughly despicable in every part of his character’ and who has ‘no redeeming features’.4 There are many elements of Jarman’s film, beginning with its title, which seem to demand that it too should be read as an allegorical lament for the nation, but the processes of its construction and its inclusion of deeply personal material make it a much more intuitive and open-ended work than the word ‘allegory’ would normally connote. It dramatises feelings rather than statements and part of its power paradoxically derives from the fact that it hardly appears to know what it is saying. If Caravaggio, with its carefully scripted storyline, professionally acted character parts, precisely lit studio set-ups, and use of 35mm, was Jarman’s nearest approach to the procedures of mainstream cinema, then The Last of England represents a return to his less formal super-8 films, this time augmented by editing techniques derived from his work on music videos with John Maybury, Richard Heslop, and James Mackay. Rather than starting with a script, he began to accumulate super-8 footage taken at various locations which could later be edited

MUP_Wymer_09_Chap 8

111

7/25/05, 5:18 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

112

derek jarman

into a significant structure. Much of it was of scenes of urban dereliction, mainly shot in East London, either at a ruined gas works in Beckton, which had also been used for battlefield scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1986), or an old flour mill at Victoria Docks. The principal figures he used to people these landscapes were Tilda Swinton as a tragic bride destroying her wedding dress, Spencer Leigh as her one-time lover who wanders disconsolately through the rubble before being shot by a firing squad, a sulky-looking young man called Spring, who injects himself repeatedly with heroin, and an anonymous group of exhausted-looking refugees guarded by several gunmen wearing balaclava hoods. Fires burn throughout the film, sometimes warming and comforting, sometimes purgatorial and cleansing, and sometimes infernal and destructive. The same fiery, apocalyptic look had been achieved in the ‘GBH’ series of paintings which Jarman had exhibited in 1984.5 We frequently see the figures who move through this landscape holding aloft a flaring torch like that used by Virgil to guide Dante through Hell in Gustave Doré’s famous illustrations to the Divine Comedy.6 After deciding that this material would be presented as his own dream (or nightmare) vision, Jarman also filmed himself alone in his flat at Phoenix House, writing in his diary and musing upon the state of the country. All the filming had been completed by the time he learned of his HIV status on 22 December but the most critical part of the whole process, the editing, was yet to come. This involved the technique he had developed over the previous few years of transferring super-8 film to video and making full use of the electronic manipulations of the image which then became possible, before transferring back to 35mm and adding a soundtrack. All this could be quite an expensive process, particularly if you wanted – as Jarman did – the numerous flashcuts typical of the high-energy rock video. However, James Mackay and Don Boyd, operating under the title of Anglo International Films, were able to raise a budget of £260,000 from British Screen, Channel Four, and the German television company ZDF. It was at the editing stage that the highly significant decision was taken to insert clips from some of the home movies shot by Jarman’s father in the 1940s and 1950s (and one sequence filmed by his grandfather in the 1920s) to act as a counterpoint to the desolation of the 1980s. In some ways the finished film can be seen as a memorial to, and continuing dialogue with, Jarman’s father and his father’s values. Recollections of his father take up many pages of the autobiographical book which was published alongside the film and which originally shared its title. The cover of the reissued version, Kicking the Pricks, has Jarman’s face looking out from the middle of a

MUP_Wymer_09_Chap 8

112

7/25/05, 5:18 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the last of england

113

Union Jack, while his father, in RAF uniform, occupies the bottom righthand corner, displaced from the centre by his son but still in the picture. The film which emerged from the editing process is a rich and powerful one but one which makes considerable demands on its audience,7 given that it runs for eighty-seven minutes with no obvious storyline, no named characters, no dialogue, and only intermittently synchronised sound (though it makes good use of a poetic voice-over, music, and a variety of sound effects). It intercuts footage with different tints and grains, moving continually between blue, red, and brown monochrome, full colour, black and white, and an electronically enhanced artificial palette of ‘night blues, mauves and a burning orange reminiscent of London as painted by Turner’.8 Some sequences are edited with such speed that the flow of images becomes virtually subliminal, inducing an anxiety that if one looks away for a moment or blinks, one will have missed something crucial (according to Jarman, the six-minute sequence of dancers in a disco had 1,600 separate cuts). He saw The Last of England as ‘the first stirring of a new cinema’,9 one in which the flexibility of video will have demoted narrative in favour of image, and he had complete confidence in what he had achieved: ‘I know that I can stand by this film even if the critics form a firing squad.’10 They didn’t quite do that, but many of the reviews were fairly negative, accusing him of combining inaccessible private images with over-familiar symbols of national identity and urban breakdown, and lacking any real social or political insight. Simon Burt’s comments in The Times Literary Supplement were not untypical: ‘Leaving aside the fact that it is an expressly confrontational work – and irredeemably ugly in its subject matter – the film simply makes too many demands on the viewer in terms of its comprehensibility.’11 Yet major academic critics like Michael O’Pray, John Hill, and Annette Kuhn have been eloquent in their praise of The Last of England. For O’Pray it is ‘arguably Jarman’s most brilliant film, a major artistic achievement’ and ‘one of the key British films of the 80s, if not of the post-war period’.12 John Hill gives a detailed and sensitive reading of it in British Cinema of the 1980s and seems to endorse O’Pray’s sense of its ‘representative’ importance by using a still from it on the front cover of his book. In Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination Annette Kuhn gives a more personally inflected account of how Jarman’s apparently idiosyncratic nightmare vision seems to her one ‘which has considerable purchase in the collective imagination’; she compares it to the poetic realism of the British documentary tradition and in particular to two wartime films by Humphrey Jennings, Listen to Britain (1942) and Fires were Started (1943).13

MUP_Wymer_09_Chap 8

113

7/25/05, 5:18 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

114

derek jarman

All in all, The Last of England is something of a test case as to whether a feature-length non-narrative montage of images and sounds can achieve canonical recognition without being automatically relegated to the status of an interesting ‘experiment’. Listen to Britain, which arguably has achieved such recognition, ran for only twenty minutes. At the heart of disputes over the meanings and merits of Jarman’s film are questions about the relation of the past to the present, the public to the private, and the degree to which any irony or distance is maintained by the director in his deployment of highly emotive images. The film’s title is an apparent invitation to nostalgia and derives from Ford Madox Brown’s sentimental 1855 painting of an unhappy-looking couple, reduced to a genteel poverty, leaving by boat for a new life, with the white cliffs of Dover clearly visible behind them. In Jubilee Jarman’s critique of the present had included some idealisation of the Elizabethan past, though the interaction of this past with the punk culture of the 1970s had quickly become quite complex. In The Last of England, according to Michael O’Pray, ‘The nostalgia of Jubilee, provided mainly through the John Dee sequences, has been shed, leaving fragmentation, brutality, loss of identity and a maelstrom of words and images that never quite connect’.14 No one could deny that there is a good deal of fragmentation, brutality, and loss of identity but the yearning for a lost time and place is definitely, if ambiguously, registered in the home movie sequences. These include images of a Sunday lunch in the 1920s, his parents by a Scottish loch shortly after their wartime marriage, his father’s Wellington bomber on a snowy airfield at Lossiemouth, his mother holding him as a baby, a ball game with his sister and mother in their back garden, and scenes of marching soldiers shot by his father in Pakistan in the early 1950s. These scenes contrast strikingly with the industrial wasteland which is used to characterise contemporary England but the contrast is not as formally (and therefore conceptually) neat as one might expect because Jarman abandons the cinematic convention whereby the present is always in full colour and the past shown in black and white or monochrome. He had followed this convention himself in his contribution to Aria where the old woman’s idyllic memories of her younger self and her lover – the shots of Tilda Swinton and Spencer Leigh, some of which reappear in The Last of England – are all presented in black and white, though versions of them do exist in colour, as can be seen on Glitterbug. The clear distinctions between past and present break down because both types of scene appear in a variety of tints and textures. The shots of Jarman and his sister playing ball are in a brighter natural colour than anything else in the film while the monochrome shots of Tilda Swinton

MUP_Wymer_09_Chap 8

114

7/25/05, 5:18 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the last of england

115

in a field of flowers, although taken in 1985, have the look of a 1950s home movie, and serve to associate her with Jarman’s mother. The past resembles the present because it too was a time of anxiety and insecurity, just as the late Elizabethan period, idealised by Jarman, was itself suffused with fin-de-siècle melancholy. When Jarman’s mother holds him up as a baby, the sound of exploding bombs can be heard, and when he and his sister play ball in the garden, barbed wire can be glimpsed on top of the fence; the most striking feature of his father’s RAF base at Lossiemouth, when filmed by him from the air, is its row of H-blocks which provide an obvious visual link to Northern Ireland’s notorious Maze prison, constantly in the news during the 1980s. The footage of marching soldiers, which is accompanied on the soundtrack by Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance’, is often described as showing scenes from India which exemplify England’s imperial past (it is intercut with images of the Albert Memorial) but strictly speaking it shows scenes of post-imperial Pakistan. If from one point of view the Empire never ended, from another it was always already in decline. The formal complexity of the editing and colouration in The Last of England mean that none of its images is ever purely innocent. All of them contain potential ironies but, nevertheless, it seems wrong not to acknowledge the tenderness and sense of loss attaching to these scenes from the past. At one point Jarman planned to make a film called Lossiemouth about his parents’ wedding in 1940, his father’s immediate recall to active service, and his participation in a dangerous bombing raid on the Norwegian oil refineries. The look of the film would have been based on the same home movies which are included in The Last of England and the tone of it, as described in Jarman’s notes, would have been simple and touching, the climax being a tea party which the young RAF wives prepare for their husbands’ return which turns to tragedy as more and more of the planes fail to come back.15 There is nothing in these notes to indicate a brutally iconoclastic or revisionist treatment of the ‘national and family romance’ in which his father played a leading role. This is one reason why it seems too extreme to argue that the juxtaposition of his father’s footage with contemporary scenes of squalor was intended to expose both the public and private forms of this romance as a ‘sham’.16 The home movie images carry a charge of feeling for his country’s and family’s past which is not so easily dispelled. The simple shot of a child eating Sunday lunch in the 1920s becomes more rather than less poignant when contrasted with the images of a naked, longhaired vagrant gnawing desperately on a raw cauliflower which we see later in the film. If Jarman’s relation to the past is problematic so also is his

MUP_Wymer_09_Chap 8

115

7/25/05, 5:18 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

116

derek jarman

relationship to the scenes of devastation in the present. The film begins with shots of him writing in his flat. The tint is a tranquil blue monochrome and, until the poetic voice-over begins, the only sound is of a chiming clock. Almost immediately, however, there are brief intercuts in red monochrome of a young man preparing to shoot up, of Caravaggio’s painting ‘Profane Love’ being rotated rapidly, followed by a longer sequence of the young man, dressed only in torn trousers and heavy boots, dancing on top of the painting and stamping his boots down on the naked Cupid. The contrast in the colouration, the educated tones of Nigel Terry’s voice-over, and our knowledge that Jarman had directed a film about Caravaggio and was an admirer of this particular painting, all serve to distance the director from the degradation he is depicting. As the boots come down on the picture, we hear a brief allusion to Shakespeare (‘The swan of Avon dies a syncopated death’) and a lament for the nation: ‘On every green hill mourners stand, and weep for the last of England.’ It seems all too easy to associate the director with a vanishing high culture and an idealised past and to see him as a horrified observer of, rather than active participant in, the brutality and squalor of the present. As usual, however, Jarman complicates things. The camera movements in the ‘tranquil’ flat have a restless, edgy quality and the poetic voice-over is interrupted by the crude exclamation ‘Ah, fuck it!’. Among the words Jarman is writing in his diary can be glimpsed ‘fucking’ and the semi-literate ‘skooling’. How much distance is there really between the artist and the yob who tramples on ‘Profane Love’? The actor, Spring, was in fact one of Jarman’s lovers and his behaviour in the film was not entirely out of keeping with his off-screen persona. The trampling is itself not an unmitigatedly brutal act, since it begins as a kind of dance, rendered graceful by the slowed down filming and the accompanying violin music. The music is of course part of the high culture which is being threatened but it also aestheticises the actions which threaten it. And, on reflection, the amoral destructiveness of the young man is not simply a repudiation of Caravaggio’s art but a replaying of the painting’s own destructive energies since Caravaggio has shown the young Cupid triumphing over assorted symbols of art and learning. The ambiguities here can be compared with the difficulty of knowing how to respond to the recent defacing of a mint edition of Goya’s Disasters of War etchings by Jake and Dinos Chapman, who changed the heads of all the victims to those of clowns and puppies. Jonathan Jones, the Guardian’s art critic, was initially apoplectic (‘To destroy a work of art is a genuinely nasty, insane, deviant thing to do’) but came round to

MUP_Wymer_09_Chap 8

116

7/25/05, 5:18 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the last of england

117

the view that the Chapmans had produced ‘not so much a travesty of Goya as an extension of his despair’,17 just as Jarman presumably saw himself as renewing Caravaggio’s vision rather than rejecting it (and, incidentally, offering his own extension of Goya’s despair in a later scene, by making Spencer Leigh wear the conical hat of ‘The Heretic’ who is garrotted). Jones also made the point that ‘Destruction can be an act of love’ so it is perhaps not surprising that after trampling on ‘Profane Love’, Spring masturbates on it, at first frenetically and then more languorously, his crotch precisely aligned with the Cupid’s spread thighs. Jarman chooses to implicate himself erotically in the scene by letting his shadow fall across Spring’s back while he is filming. As well as being a loutish gesture of philistine aggression, the trampling of the painting had also been an erotic act, conjoining a sadistic militarylooking boot with a sensuous, vulnerable nakedness, always a potent combination for Jarman, and one that reappears in another highly ambiguous scene of aggression, despair, and desire. The episode in which a naked young man tries to make love to a figure in full combat dress, booted, gloved, wearing a balaclava hood, and spreadeagled over an enormous Union Jack surrounded by empty bottles, has achieved iconic status within Jarman’s œuvre and stills from it are frequently reproduced. Like most of the film’s images it raises more questions than it answers about sexuality and identity. The initial iconography carries suggestions of a military funeral and hence perhaps hints at the death of Jarman’s father. However, the apparently dead soldier soon comes to life and a prolonged attempt at sex ensues which often looks more like a wrestling match, with first one figure on top and then the other. Although the naked man seems to gain some masochistic excitement from the struggle, the failure of the other figure to remove any clothes means that no consummation is achieved, though the juxtaposition of nakedness and uniform generates its own particular eroticism, as in Imagining October. In some of the Dr. Dee scripts, there is a melancholy vision which seems particularly apposite to this scene: ‘Here in the wasteland at the sea’s edge two men are revealed fighting and fucking[,] forever trying to consume each other, forever separate.’18 Here, however, the ‘wasteland’ is the national flag and if their drunken, unsatisfactory sex is in some sense a ‘desecration’ of it, it is also the very ground of their being, the field on which their identity is formed. This is emphasised by shooting most of the scene from above, so that the full visual impact of the Union Jack is registered throughout. The question of whether or not the clothed figure, at some level, represents Jarman’s father, with whom he never succeeded in bonding properly, is complicated by a number of ambiguities.

MUP_Wymer_09_Chap 8

117

7/25/05, 5:18 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

118

derek jarman

The figure, like all the hooded gunmen in the film, could be interpreted equally well as a soldier or a terrorist. Terrorists in balaclava hoods, whether Palestinian or Irish Republican, became familiar figures on the news from the late 1960s onwards. Jarman’s conflation of such figures with the regular army was not an idiosyncratic gesture of dissent but part of an acknowledged public iconography which emerged after hooded members of the SAS were filmed storming the Iranian embassy to end a hostage crisis in 1980. The breakdown of clear distinctions between the security forces and the terrorists they were fighting became a recurrent theme in leftwing commentary on the war in Ireland – as in Ken Loach’s Hidden Agenda (1990) – but the remarkable thing was that the Government itself and the rightwing media appeared perfectly happy with this iconographic convergence. Jarman exploited this situation for his own purposes and claimed that ‘by the end of the film we know who these people are, they are the army, they are the SAS, they are no terror[ists], they are the Establishment’19 but he also introduced a more private level of ambiguity by claiming, in the book which accompanied the film, that the uniformed figure stretched out on the Union Jack was really a woman.20 This is something which no viewing of the film would ever pick up but which James Mackay has confirmed to me as true.21 It is a good indication that desire is as complicated in The Last of England as it was in Caravaggio and that Freud may have been right when he said that in any sexual encounter, both one’s parents were present. ‘Where in all of this is LOVE?’ Jarman asked himself.22 Where is there any transcendence of this hell of anger and frustrated desire (‘forever trying to consume each other, forever separate’)? There are some brief shots of a Buddha-like figure spinning the blue globe painted with stars which Pipo had twirled in the scene described as ‘An Idyll’ in the Caravaggio script. Here, however, there are superimpositions of flames, which means that the globe itself seems to burn and the Buddha figure starts to resemble the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who in 1963 immolated himself in a public protest against the Saigon government. The newsreel footage of this was used in Bergman’s Persona (1966), where it is watched on television by a horrified Liv Ullman who, unable to bear the reality of human suffering and the world’s indifference to it, has retreated into a state of muteness. Jarman himself had included two brief shots of the burning monk in the montage he created to accompany Marianne Faithfull’s song ‘Broken English’. He made another reference to the extremes of human nature and human suffering when he compared The Last of England to Pasolini’s Salò (‘The centre of the film is very dark, unforgiving, like Salò’)23 and he

MUP_Wymer_09_Chap 8

118

7/25/05, 5:18 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the last of england

119

borrowed the last shot of that film, its one moment of transcendence, when he showed two soldiers dancing together. However, all the tenderness of the Pasolini sequence is lost, as the soldiers remain hooded and sinister, almost totally obscured by the darkness, while the accompanying music is discordant. For Jarman, the first real moment of tenderness (excluding some of the home movie scenes) was to be found during the execution of the figure played by Spencer Leigh. During that sequence a woman’s voice can be heard on the soundtrack saying ‘Don’t be sad’ and the question ‘Where in all of this is LOVE?’ starts to merge with the related question ‘Where is the feminine in The Last of England?’24 The climactic sequences of the film are dominated by Tilda Swinton, whom we initially see as the bride in a wedding group being formally photographed. This scene is filmed in pink monochrome and is accompanied by snatches of commentary from a Royal Wedding but is rendered grotesque by its location (a ruined warehouse) and by the fact that the bridesmaids are burly men with beards and moustaches. Jarman had participated enthusiastically in the transvestite extravagances of the Alternative Miss World contest but there is no hint of camp gaiety here, only a sense of melancholy, perversity, and loss. The crippled chimney sweep, who is also in the wedding group, satirically allegorises the ‘Victorian Values’ which Margaret Thatcher appeared to admire so much but the bearded bridesmaids raise more complicated questions about the past and the present and what sort of world Jarman is looking to recover. After the wedding has been photographed, the bride hacks at her dress with a gigantic pair of scissors, chews on one of its artificial flowers before spitting it out, and launches into an elemental dance of despair, her hair and dress blown by a raging wind which also fans the fires which burn behind her. These images are at first silent but are then accompanied by the strange, wordless keening of Diamanda Galas. At one level the bride is mourning her marriage to the stuffed shirt in top hat and tails who accompanied her in the photography session but a number of monochrome intercuts of her with Spencer Leigh indicate that she also weeps for the man we have earlier seen executed. The absence of any clearly defined relationships in the film makes it easier for her also to become a traditional allegorical figure, that of ‘Weeping England’. This personification appears frequently in English Renaissance literature, particularly in the writings of exiles, as one consequence of the period’s bitter political and religious conflicts. She is ‘the mourning woman who mourns in some way for England or the English nation. Sometimes the woman herself is England, mourning; sometimes she

MUP_Wymer_09_Chap 8

119

7/25/05, 5:18 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

120

derek jarman

mourns England as an other; sometimes she is the soul of England’s body’.25 Tilda Swinton is both weeping for what has been lost and is herself an image of what has been lost. Or perhaps not entirely lost, since Jarman tells us that ‘she projects and protects love’s idyll, a mother, my mother’26 and, in the midst of the flashbacks of her with her executed lover, there is a very brief image of the baby Jarman. Earlier in the film, over shots of wretched people huddled at the dockside, we heard an unaccompanied rendition of ‘The Skye Boat Song’, a song of exile but one which Jarman’s mother used to sing to him as a child and therefore comforting as well as melancholy. The film’s final scene is of a boatload of refugees, lit by a solitary flare, heading into the night. Although the scene connects with the painting which gave the film its title, we do not know anything about these people, what they want, or where they are going. Jarman tells us that he remembered his great-grandparents leaving their farm in Devon for New Zealand at the end of the nineteenth century but the image of exile is as much a psychological or existential one as anything more literal. It has a political dimension in that the authoritarianism of the Thatcher years had made Jarman feel like a stranger in his own country, though paradoxically this had also helped to reconnect him emotionally with the figure who created his ‘aversion to all authority’,27 his father. After the war, according to Jarman, his father experienced a sense of alienation and exile as extreme as anything felt later by his son: ‘It seemed to me he lost everything in the numbing destruction to which he was party; it drove him into some far-off region from which he never returned. A world distant from everything and everyone around him. He stared in disbelief at the society he had helped to save.’28 Beyond any specific political or historical context, beyond the 1940s or the 1980s, The Last of England also raises other questions. What is ‘home’ and where is love when both your parents are dead and you yourself are under sentence of death? The emotional desperation of the film, epitomised in such images as the naked man gnawing at the cauliflower, is intensified by the fact that it cannot finally articulate what it wants, because whatever government happens to be in power, whatever redistribution of material goods takes place, there is a sense in which we all remain in a permanent state of exile, disturbed by images of a past to which we cannot return and would not be happy in even if we could. Jarman wrote eloquently of the ‘longing for paradise’ in all home movies,29 but here it is a paradise which is well and truly lost and which may never have existed in the first place.

MUP_Wymer_09_Chap 8

120

7/25/05, 5:18 PM

the last of england

121

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 12. 2 BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 4. 3 See especially John Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) and some of the essays in British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires were Started, ed. Lester Friedman (London: UCL Press, 1993). 4 Peter Greenaway, interviewed by Brian McFarlane, Cinema Papers, No. 78 (March 1990), pp. 38–9. 5 See John Roberts, ‘Painting the Apocalypse’, Afterimage, 12 (1985), 36–9. 6 William Pencak, The Films of Derek Jarman (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2002), p. 144. 7 ‘Through Jarman’s feverish, vertiginous aesthetic, the spectator is almost nauseated by the hyper-kinetic camera movements, shell-shocked by flash-frames, thrown into a kind of dementia by the film’s nearly unreadable diegesis’ (Daniel Humphrey, ‘Authorship, History and the Dialectic of Trauma: Derek Jarman’s The Last of England’, Screen 44:2 (Summer 2003), 208–15 (p. 213)). It is worth noting that the film was very enthusiastically received when it was premiered at the Edinburgh Festival, despite getting poor audiences on its commercial release. 8 O’Pray, Dreams of England, p. 156. 9 BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 21. 10 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 173. 11 Simon Burt, ‘Vice and Men’, The Times Literary Supplement (6–12 November 1987). 12 O’Pray, Dreams of England, p. 156. 13 Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 104–21 (p. 109). 14 O’Pray, Dreams of England, p. 162. 15 BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 43, Item 5. 16 O’Pray, Dreams of England, p. 158. O’Pray immediately modifies this statement somewhat by adding that Jarman’s ‘feelings towards his country are as ambivalent as those for his family’ (my italics). 17 Jonathan Jones, ‘Look what we did’, Guardian (31 March 2003). 18 BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 3, Jubilee Item 2 (p. 21). 19 BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 24. 20 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 196. In the draft typescript there is the additional comment that ‘the sequence is heterosexual’ (BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 21). 21 The woman was Yvonne Little, one of the associate producers. In Derek Jarman: A Portrait, ed. Roger Wollen (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), a still from this scene is incorrectly captioned with a credit to Rod Laye as the actor (p. 100). 22 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 208. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 203. 25 Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558– 1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 175. 26 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 203. 27 Ibid., p. 179. 28 Jarman, War Requiem: The Film (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 9. 29 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 54.

MUP_Wymer_09_Chap 8

121

7/25/05, 5:18 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Dulce et decorum est’: War Requiem (1989)

9

In a draft manuscript of Kicking the Pricks, Jarman wrote that ‘if you have to have the atmosphere [of The Last of England] in words, our best thing would be to print the Wilfred Owen poem “Strange Meeting”’.1 While editing the film he repeatedly listened to the musical setting for this poem which Benjamin Britten had created for the War Requiem because ‘the sequences in the ruined factories at Beckton seemed destined for this music’.2 Despite his deep imaginative engagement with both Owen’s poetry and Britten’s use of it, the copyright charges Jarman had incurred when using short extracts from other Britten works in Imagining October and The Angelic Conversation had deterred him from any attempt to film the War Requiem. However, Don Boyd, the producer of Aria, was able to convince both the Britten estate and Decca records that, on the basis of that earlier experiment in creating film images to accompany ‘serious’ music, he and Jarman could be trusted to make a film which would do justice to Britten’s masterpiece. Permission to use the music was granted, provided that the 1963 Decca recording was chosen and that it was played without interruptions or additional sound effects. These stipulations obviously presented a severe technical challenge to the making of a feature-length film but it was one which Jarman, with his continuing commitment to a form of cinema which was not grounded in narrative, character, or dialogue, was particularly well equipped to meet. Britten’s War Requiem had been commissioned as a large-scale choral and orchestral work to accompany the opening in May 1962 of the new Coventry Cathedral which had been built alongside the ruins of the one destroyed in the devastating air raid of 1940. In using the traditional form of the Requiem Mass Britten was fulfilling the requirements of a public act of remembrance and reconciliation3 but by interweaving the Latin liturgy with nine poems, or extracts of poems, by the poet who had done most to convey the horror and the pity of the

MUP_Wymer_10_Chap 9

122

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

war requiem

123

First World War, Britten was making a more personal and, indeed, angry statement of his pacifist beliefs. These had been strong enough for him to register as a conscientious objector when he returned to England from America in 1942 and to appeal, successfully, against even the requirement to do non-combatant forms of war work. The musical and ideological tensions between the liturgical passages of the War Requiem and the Owen poems and their settings have been a focal point for critical discussion, a discussion complicated by the fact that, despite his sensitivity to what modern weapons could do to the bodies and minds of young men, Owen himself had not been a pacifist in Britten’s sense of the word, having enlisted voluntarily in 1915 and chosen to return to the front in 1918 after recovering from his breakdown.4 Jarman spoke of his own ‘revulsion for war’5 but his attitude was in fact closer to Owen’s than Britten’s. Whereas Britten had been prepared to argue that ‘the fascist attitude to life can only be overcome by passive resistance’,6 Jarman knew very well that ‘without men like my father the war would not have been won!’,7 even though the violence with which he had fought would later damage both himself and his family. The need to maintain a continuous relationship with the moods and rhythms of Britten’s music whilst avoiding merely ‘illustrating’ it, together with the impossibility of creating convincing battle scenes from the budget of £670,000 which had been raised from the BBC and Liberty Film Sales, obviously determined many of Jarman’s artistic choices. At the centre of the film were a number of scenes, shot in full colour on 35mm, involving Wilfred Owen (Nathaniel Parker), the German soldier he kills (Sean Bean), the Unknown Soldier who is stabbed by the German (Owen Teale), and a Nurse (Tilda Swinton) who is related in some way to Owen and who grieves over him repeatedly.8 Her maternal gestures (she laces the dead poet’s boot for him as he lies on the stone slab) are paralleled by Owen’s own tender and ‘feminine’ concern for the well-being of his men (he checks that they are sleeping soundly, covers one with his coat, and at the beginning of the film removes a thorn from the foot of a fellow recruit). These scenes in the trenches, in hospital wards, or the tomb where Owen lies, were filmed at Darenth Park Hospital, a recently closed Victorian mental asylum, whose labyrinth of corridors and rooms, extending deep underground made a crucial contribution to establishing a non-literal form of period authenticity. A prologue sequence, filmed in the grounds of the hospital, shows an old soldier (played by Laurence Olivier in his final film role) being wheeled about by Tilda Swinton who reminds him of the nurse in the photograph he has carried in his wallet for seventy years. His frail but still expressive voice is heard on the soundtrack reading the first part

MUP_Wymer_10_Chap 9

123

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

124

derek jarman

of ‘Strange Meeting’, concluding with the line about ‘The pity of war’. Other 35mm footage was shot in a more openly allegorical style, such as a grotesque (and deliberately overexposed) revue sequence in the manner of O What a Lovely War! in which a Britannia figure, with a face caked in powder like an ageing prostitute, laughs hysterically while cross-dressed soldiers dance a can-can and four fat businessmen swing their scythes. The businessmen, smoking cigars and cramming their faces with food, reappear in the prolonged ‘Abraham and Isaac’ scene in which Nigel Terry, dressed as a Victorian bishop, ritually sacrifices Owen by binding his hands and cutting his throat.9 Interwoven with the 35mm material are some super-8 sequences of Owen’s pre-war family life, tinged with a golden glow of nostalgia, and some briefer images from the childhood of the German he kills. Distinct from both the 35mm and super-8 material are the many newsreel images of war which were edited onto video by John Maybury, sometimes with the use of superimpositions and flashcuts. These include the expected monochrome images from the First World War but, in the ‘Libera Me’ section of the Requiem, there is also a good deal of colour footage, much of it shocking, from a number of more recent wars, culminating in apocalyptic images of atomic explosions. Despite the variety of filming techniques and styles employed and the absence of a conventional storyline, there is a strong impression of overall emotional and thematic coherence which complements, without precisely replicating, that of the music. There are many reasons why the film can be seen as a thoroughly personal project, like all Jarman’s other work, and not merely as an interesting technical exercise in adaptation. Britten’s acknowledged homosexuality and the homoerotic elements in Owen’s poetry meant that Jarman was once more situating himself within a ‘great tradition’ of homosexual artists, a ‘family’ to which he was proud to belong. Owen’s strong attraction towards young men in uniform (often referred to as ‘boys’ or ‘lads’) and his intense, tender, masochistic identification with their suffering echoed particularly important aspects of Jarman’s own sexuality and he would have been very responsive to the hints of Swinburne and Wilde in a poem like ‘Greater Love’ which begins with the striking lines, ‘Red lips are not so red / As the stained stones kissed by the English dead’ and exalts in sensual terms the self-sacrificial love of men for each other above the normal (heterosexual) ‘Kindness of wooed and wooer’.10 In both Owen and Jarman the intensity of empathetic identification often resembles a form of self-projection and the boundaries between self and other start to blur. In ‘Strange Meeting’, the encounter of the poet with the German soldier he has killed resembles many of the

MUP_Wymer_10_Chap 9

124

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

war requiem

125

encounters in Jarman’s films with a figure who is simultaneously an object of desire, a rival, and an aspect of the self (‘His German adversary is his mirror image, his twin’).11 This blurring of desire and identification in a context of sacrifice and suffering promotes in both artists the emergence of Christ figures, who represent the ‘greater love’ in which individual identities (including distinctions of gender) start to dissolve. One of the poems selected by Britten, ‘At a Calvary near the Ancre’, makes explicit the way Owen, and many other soldiers, closely identified with the suffering figure they saw on wayside crosses in Flanders, often damaged by shellfire (‘In this war He too lost a limb’). In Jarman’s film Owen and the Enemy Soldier are ‘joined in Christ’ by the Nurse and the Unknown Soldier, both of whom are shown wearing crowns of thorns. In the case of both Owen and Jarman, the highly emotional identification with Christ coexisted with a profound alienation from the moralising of the organised Church and its representatives. Owen’s ambiguous phrase about priests being ‘flesh-marked by the Beast’ would have resonated with Jarman who had been appalled by the response of the religious Right to the AIDS crisis. Towards the end of the published script he wrote: ‘In my heart, I dedicate my film of War Requiem to all those cast out, like myself, from Christendom. To my friends who are dying in a moral climate created by a church with no compassion.’12 His decision not to foreground this dedication (it does not appear on the screen or in a prominent position in the script) is best explained as a matter of moral and aesthetic tact – an unwillingness to appropriate too obviously the sufferings of others or to reduce a multi-levelled work of art to a straightforward allegory. In an interview with Tim Clark for Time Out he concluded: ‘So, yes it is my AIDS film … but it’s not. I leave that to others. The film’s as ungrounded as possible so it remains an open situation, so people can put their own interpretation on parts of it.’13 In making the War Requiem, albeit in a very discreet way, rather more than a film about those who died in the war, Jarman was following Britten’s own lead. Britten dedicated his work (‘in loving memory’) to four of his friends who had served in the Second World War and it would be natural to assume that they had all been killed then. However, one of them, Piers Dunkerley, who had been close friends with Britten since the age of 13, had survived the war, only to commit suicide in 1959 on the eve of his marriage. Britten was later, enigmatically, to refer to the War Requiem as ‘a kind of reparation’.14 From what I have been saying so far, it should be clear that Jarman’s film seems to me a highly individual and creative response to Britten’s music and Owen’s poetry, a film in which the director’s personality ‘pervades every frame’,15 and yet one which maintains a respect for its

MUP_Wymer_10_Chap 9

125

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

126

derek jarman

sources.16 John Coldsteam, for the Daily Telegraph, wrote that ‘never can a musical piece of such magnitude have been translated so powerfully into another medium’17 and many other reviews were almost equally positive. Yet it would be true to say that those less impressed by the film included some critics who were normally Jarman’s strongest supporters, such as David Robinson of The Times, and Jarman himself often referred to it rather dismissively as if it were not central to the canon of his achievement. One possible reason for this, which I wish to explore, takes us to the heart of a number of interesting questions about Owen’s poetry, Britten’s incorporation of it into a Requiem Mass, and Jarman’s filming of this material. The key word here is ‘decorum’. When working with culturally respected material, and the work of both Owen and Britten had already achieved a ‘classic’ status, Jarman’s normal approach involved a certain amount of calculated irreverence and quirkiness. The eruption of the flamboyant dancing sailors into the ending of Shakespeare’s Tempest is only the most obvious of many such moments in his films. Yet in the War Requiem he is, as Tony Peake puts it, ‘oddly restrained’.18 Although there is considerable variety of tone, from nostalgia and melancholy through to horror and anger, there is little humour, no irreverence, and no explicit treatment of the homoerotic feelings which certainly flourished, though usually in repressed or sublimated forms, among frontline troops and which are evident in Owen’s poetry. The pressure Jarman must have felt to break through these self-imposed limits is evident in an anecdote he recounts in the script about a car journey to Hythe with Tilda Swinton to scout for properties: ‘On our way we were stuck on the sea road crawling behind a funeral cortège at 5 mph. I dared Tilda to overtake. She did so, pulling out with her hand on the horn. We passed at least fifteen cars of shocked mourners.’19 The problem here is not just about the kind of decorum which has to be maintained for a Requiem Mass but a problem about the way we respond to war and the representation of war, a problem which in its modern form goes back to Owen, Sassoon, and the other First-World-War writers. One of Owen’s most famous poems, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, sets out to demolish ‘the old lie’ that it is sweet and proper to die for one’s country and does so by means of its calculatedly ‘indecorous’ description of a death by gassing. Yet this and other poems were instrumental in establishing a new decorum governing what could and could not be said about war and the tones in which it could be said. Within this new set of rules, there is a reluctance to accept the validity of any responses other than pity, regret, or horror, even when we know of authentic testimony to the contrary such as that of Henry Williamson, the author

MUP_Wymer_10_Chap 9

126

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

war requiem

127

of Tarka the Otter and the Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight sequence of novels, or that of the German Ernst Jünger, who wrote the memoir Storm of Steel. Owen himself experienced the exultation of battle (‘I lost all my earthly faculties, and fought like an angel’)20 and in one of his most interesting poems, ‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’, is explicit about the irony that whereas ‘the true poets must be truthful’, there are some truths that should not be revealed to a civilian readership. These include the facts that soldiers are sometimes merry, that their merriment can come from the release of normal social restraints (‘For power was on us as we slashed bones bare / Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder’), and that the relationships they form with each other are deeper and more satisfying than those of ‘happy lovers in old song’. Nevertheless, You [the reader] shall not hear their mirth: You shall not come to think them well content By any jest of mine. These men are worth Your tears. You are not worth their merriment.21

Britten, in his choice of poems and in his arrangements for them, undoubtedly strove to maintain this new form of decorum, narrowing the range of emotions and experiences registered in Owen’s poetry to make his pacifist point more forcefully. Jarman felt constrained to follow him, though if he had engaged with Owen directly, rather than through the medium of Britten’s music, one feels there would have been rather more signs of irreverence, rather more ‘jests’, and certainly rather more eroticism.22 If the film is more ‘decorous’ than many of Jarman’s other works, it is nevertheless filled with subtle tensions arising from the poetry itself, the way Britten has organised this poetry, both musically and ideologically, in relation to the Requiem Mass, and the way Jarman’s images fulfil, or fail to fulfil, expectations generated by the poems, the liturgy, or the music. These tensions are all related to questions of aesthetic decorum and are usually the result of conscious decisions by one or other of the three artists concerned. Tony Peake is a little unfair to both Jarman and Britten when he writes that, ‘Nowhere does the film explore the irony that Britten’s essentially conventional music should have coopted Owen’s angry and anti-establishment poetry.’23 In fact Britten was fully aware of, and deliberately exploited, the significant differences in tone between Owen’s poetry and the Latin liturgy. For example, the opening section of the Mass, the ‘Requiem aeternam’, scored for full orchestra and choirs in a manner reminiscent of Verdi, reaches its conclusion with the line ‘ad te omnis caro veniet’ (‘all flesh shall come to thee’), only to be abruptly countered by the angry voice of the tenor solo

MUP_Wymer_10_Chap 9

127

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

128

derek jarman

beginning ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. The musical phrasing and the intonation of the soloist Peter Pears throw great emphasis on the final word of the opening line ‘What passing bells for these who die as cattle?’, making it a literally brutal transformation of the liturgical ‘flesh’. Britten is here following Owen in challenging the value of ritual and ceremony in the face of mass slaughter while also in some sense reasserting it. The bells, prayers, choirs, and candles, which Owen’s ‘Anthem’ rejects, continue to signify within the poem and the liturgical form of Britten’s work is not erased by the challenges he makes to it. These include his pervasive use of the dissonant interval known as the tritone (an augmented fourth), which had historically been known as the Devil’s interval (diabolus in musica) and proscribed from Catholic church music. Within Britten’s frequently employed key of G minor, the form it usually takes is that of C–F sharp, leaving it a semitone away from full tonic resolution and acting as a precise musical parallel to Owen’s use of half-rhyme in ‘Strange Meeting’. Jarman’s task, in which I believe he largely succeeded, was to be responsive to these tensions and dissonances without inertly and literally replicating them, and to introduce further quiet discordances of his own. It would have been too obvious to attempt a visual mockery of bells, choirs, and candles during the ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ sequence and Jarman contents himself at this point with a sequence showing recruits in training, the young and eager ‘cattle’ who will soon be slaughtered. However, he later shows a choir of men and women in full evening dress singing the ‘Dies Irae’ against a backdrop of newsreel footage and superimposed flames, and intercut with a full colour sequence of soldiers digging in the frozen mud. Rather than indicating a moving and heroic attempt to absorb and master the horror of war, as in the ending of Polanski’s The Pianist (2002), the juxtaposition tends to subvert the aesthetic and religious authority of the mass suggesting that it is a less than adequate response to the carnage, a suggestion heightened by the way the camera lingers satirically on the exaggerated yet absurdly formal grimaces of the singers. In another sequence, during the burial of the Unknown Soldier which is accompanied by a boys’ choir singing the ‘Offertorium’, Jarman shows us the choristers we might be expecting to see but there is no movement of their lips in synchronisation with the music: ‘The choirboys do not sing. They stand like a chorus in a Greek tragedy and observe the burial with accusing faces.’24 Likewise, in the extraordinary unbroken seven-minute take of Tilda Swinton emoting to the ‘Sanctus’, the music sometimes seems to bear an adequate and appropriate relation to her feelings and sometimes not. At times she smiles and moves her hand to the rhythm of the music, at

MUP_Wymer_10_Chap 9

128

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

war requiem

129

other times she breaks down into inconsolable grief, clutching her head and turning this way and that. Since the ‘Sanctus’ is sung by the female soloist Galina Vishnevskaya, the sequence comes close to a form of opera without ever quite reaching that level of aesthetic fullness and resolution.25 There is the lingering sense of a suffering always just beyond the reach of artistic representation or religious consolation. The battered old trumpet with which the German soldier tries vainly to parry Owen’s bayonet thrust and which is later seen lying in a puddle during the ‘Strange Meeting’ sequence also suggests the ultimate futility of art, implicitly ironising the trumpets of the Requiem Mass. In a number of respects Jarman goes further than Britten in breaching the decorum of the chosen liturgical form. One effect of the prologue scene in which Olivier is heard reading the first part of ‘Strange Meeting’ is to reinstate the lines which identify the ‘sullen hall’ in which the speaker meets his ‘strange friend’ as Hell. Britten cut these lines from his musical setting, no doubt feeling that the contradiction with the ‘in paradisum’ climax of the liturgy was too extreme (though Jarman’s script makes it appear that the lines are indeed sung). In the ‘Libera me’ section which precedes this climax Jarman also abandons another form of decorum which has prevailed up to this point by showing the kind of newsreel images of dead and injured soldiers which are normally edited out of public broadcasts: ‘it was part of the plan that the classical restraint of the 35mm film would be disrupted by the super-8 and, particularly, the video material’.26 Such images lend urgency and anger to the liturgical plea to ‘Free me’ from ‘eternal death’ but also threaten the aesthetic integrity of the music through their untransmutable rawness. They also raise difficult questions about Jarman’s own film which the film itself is largely silent about. In the script, however, he admits that ‘There is a fatal attraction which this violence conjures in all of us’,27 including, though he is too discreet to say so, Owen himself. The passage ends with the elliptic comment ‘Thanatos and Eros’. The final moments of both Britten’s work and Jarman’s film seek to subdue some of these tensions as the liturgical plea ‘May they rest in peace’ is integrated with Owen’s ‘Let us sleep now’, all anger, despair, and discord being softened, if not entirely banished, by the sleep of death. The red poppies which the German lays at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier are replaced by the white ones which Owen’s mother gives to Tilda Swinton and which she leaves in a basket by the chapel door. We are poised between a blood-soaked act of remembrance and an act of purification, between the past and the future. The candle which was seen at the beginning of the film illuminating the dead Owen, and

MUP_Wymer_10_Chap 9

129

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

130

derek jarman

which was later extinguished, now burns again in the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, an ‘eternal flame’. The chiming bell both completes the ritual while also, in a small way, disrupting it, by being dissonant with the climactic choral harmonies. One of the Owen poems which Britten used, ‘The End’, asks rhetorically ‘Shall life renew these bodies? Of a truth / All death will He annul, all tears assuage?’ before answering emphatically in the negative. Owen’s mother appropriated the lines for his gravestone, removing the last three words and the final question mark to create an orthodox Christian epitaph. Britten and Jarman seem to aim at a more ambiguous ending, restoring the question mark, but choosing not to mock all efforts at consolation and thus preserving at least some of the form and meaning of the Requiem Mass.

Notes 1 BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 24. 2 Jarman, War Requiem: The Film, p. xi. 3 As part of this symbolic act of reconciliation, Britten wanted his three soloists for the first performance to be an Englishman (Peter Pears), a German (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau), and a Russian (Galina Vishnevskaya). The Soviet authorities regarded this reconciliation as somewhat premature (the Soviet Union had lost at least twenty million dead following the Nazi invasion) and they refused permission for Vishnevskaya to take part so that she had to be replaced at short notice by Heather Harper. However, they later relented sufficiently for her to be reinstated as the female soloist in the ‘definitive’ Decca recording which was made in 1963 and used as the soundtrack for Jarman’s film. 4 There is a good discussion of ‘Owen, Britten and Pacifism’ in Mervyn Cooke, Britten: War Requiem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–19. This book also has some excellent analysis of the music. 5 Jarman, War Requiem: The Film, p. 9. 6 Part of his statement to the Tribunal adjudicating on his claim to be exempt from military service. The full statement is quoted in Cooke, Britten, pp. 15–16. 7 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 107. 8 In the published script Jarman wrote: ‘I have left the relationships in the Requiem as open as possible. Are the NURSE and OWEN brother and sister? Is the older lady their mother? Perhaps they are childhood friends. ‘I think of this as a requiem for brotherly and sisterly love, not sexual love. They break bread together in a home shared by equals.’ (War Requiem: The Film, p. 26) 9 There is a detailed discussion of the implications of this scene in Allen J. Frantzen, ‘Tears for Abraham: The Chester Play of Abraham and Isaac and Antisacrifice in Works by Wilfred Owen, Benjamin Britten, and Derek Jarman’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31:3 (Fall 2001), 445–76. 10 Wilfred Owen: The Complete Poems and Fragments, ed. Jon Stallworthy, 2 vols. (London: Chatto and Windus, The Hogarth Press, Oxford University Press, 1983), I, p. 166. The homoerotic feelings expressed in the literature of the First World War are discussed interestingly by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975; repr. 1979),

MUP_Wymer_10_Chap 9

130

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

war requiem

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

11 12 13 14

15 16

17 18 19 20

21 22

23 24 25

26 27

131

Chapter 8, ‘Soldier Boys’, and by Martin Taylor (ed.) in his introduction to Lads: Love Poetry of the Trenches (London: Constable, 1989). BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 14. Jarman, War Requiem: The Film, p. 35. Time Out (28 December 1988–4 January 1989). See Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography (London: Faber, 1992), pp. 406–8. Owen also extended the meaning of specific historical events, as in his poem ‘Miners’, where his response to the Podmore Hall Colliery pit explosion in January 1918 leads him to think ‘of all that worked dark pits / Of war, and died’ (The Complete Poems and Fragments, I, p. 135). Don Boyd in his introduction to the script, p. x. This also the view taken by Joseph A. Gomez in ‘The Process of Jarman’s War Requiem: Personal Vision and the Tradition of Fusion in the Arts’, in By Angels Driven: The Films of Derek Jarman, ed. Chris Lippard (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1996), pp. 84–102. Daily Telegraph (5 January 1989). Peake, Derek Jarman (London: Little, Brown), p. 432. Jarman, War Requiem: The Film, p. 3. Letter to his mother (4 October 1918) about the action in which he won the Military Cross, in Wilfred Owen: Selected Letters, ed. J. Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 351. The Complete Poems and Fragments, I, pp. 124–5. One of Owen’s poems, ‘Arms and the Boy’, which Britten originally marked for inclusion in the War Requiem, speaks of bullets ‘which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads’ and was probably left out because of its erotic overtones. Peake, Derek Jarman, p. 432. Jarman, War Requiem: The Film, p. 28. See Jim Ellis, ‘Strange Meeting: Wilfred Owen, Benjamin Britten, Derek Jarman, and the War Requiem’, in The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference, ed. Richard Dellamora and Daniel Fischlin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 277–96 (p. 291). BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 15, p. 35. Jarman, War Requiem: The Film, p. 12.

MUP_Wymer_10_Chap 9

131

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The imitation of Christ: The Garden (1990)

10

In May 1987, using some of the money inherited from his father, Jarman had bought a small fisherman’s cottage by the sea at Dungeness, the bleak and windswept shingle bank which projects into the English Channel from Romney Marsh in Kent, and is home to a large nuclear power station. Despite the unceasing salt winds and the lack of suitable soil, he succeeded in creating a garden of considerable beauty, using stones, driftwood, and other objects found on the beach to complement the sea kale, gorse, viper’s bugloss and other plants capable of surviving the extreme conditions. Prospect Cottage and its garden became his retreat from the pressures of living under permanent media scrutiny as one of the few well-known people prepared to admit to being HIV positive. Paradoxically, perhaps, he also began immediately to think of ways of artistically exploiting his new home and its surrounding landscape and made notes for a film centred on Tilda Swinton, which was to be called Borrowed Time. The title alludes to his gloom about being under a sentence of death (‘I live in borrowed time, therefore I see no reason in the world why my heart grows not dark’)1 but by the time filming began in September 1989 the whole project had been transformed. The garden he had successfully nurtured in Dungeness had started to dispel the mood of exile which had pervaded The Last of England. In an interview broadcast on BBC2’s film programme Moving Pictures in the autumn of 1990, Jarman said: ‘The garden is an anchor. That’s what it’s really all about. It’s about anchoring myself somewhere, having been a nomad all my life … I would never leave this place now.’ His continuing anger at the treatment of homosexuals in 1980s Britain and his grief for his dead friends (‘Old age came quickly for my frosted generation, / cold, cold, cold, they died so silently’) was now tempered by the beginnings of a new tranquillity, the tranquillity of one who understands that ‘the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time’.2

MUP_Wymer_11_Chap 10

132

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the garden

133

The Garden is not only about his new garden in Dungeness. It gathers up into itself all the lost gardens of his childhood: his grandmother’s garden in Northwood where ‘the blue stars of wild forget-me-nots … shimmered in the dark Edwardian shrubberies’;3 the garden of the Villa Zuassa on the shores of Lake Maggiore, ‘a cornucopia of cascading blossom, abandoned avenues of mighty camelias, old roses trailing into the lake, huge golden pumpkins, stone gods overturned and covered with scurrying green lizards, dark cypresses, and woods full of hazel and sweet chestnut’;4 the Elizabethan walled garden at Curry Mallet in Somerset, with its yew tree, box hedges, and cawing rooks. No reader of Modern Nature or derek jarman’s garden could be in any doubt about Jarman’s very real and literal interest in gardens and gardening but it is the symbolic and psychological aspects of the topic which seem more important to his film. As Jarman himself mentions, the word ‘paradise’ derives from a Persian word meaning a ‘walled garden’ and the search for paradise is always a search for what has been lost. At one point Jarman was engaged in discussions about a possible film version of Milton’s epic poem5 and its central myth of a paradise lost and regained was of lifelong imaginative importance to him. ‘Why can’t my film return to this Eden?’ he exclaimed in Modern Nature6 and part of what he sought to recover was an innocent unfallen sexuality, a timeless world of fulfilled desire before sin and death entered the garden, before nuns and schoolteachers ‘hacked my paradise to pieces’. In his own version of pastoral he claimed to catch glimpses of this world during his escapades on Hampstead Heath: ‘the alfresco fuck is the original fuck. Didn’t the Garden of Eden come before the house which hid our nakedness? Sex on the Heath is an idyll pre-fall.’7 However, he also noted that all the gardeners of his childhood were women and, within his own family, it was his mother who shared his love of flowers and who was upset by his father’s ‘attacks on nature’ with axe, lawnmower, and weedkiller. Psychoanalytically, the search for a lost garden is often interpreted as a search for the lost body of the mother and in Milton’s poem it is Eve rather than Adam who is most closely associated with the garden. Since the search for the lost mother is, by its very nature, doomed to failure, paradise can only be regained by achieving a new sense of self, building a new garden. ‘Why shouldn’t I invite people into another garden?’, Jarman asked,8 and he began this film by declaring ‘I went in search of myself’. While it is true that ‘there are many paths and many destinations’ there are obvious historical reasons why searches for the self within Western culture over the last two thousand years frequently take the form of an encounter with the

MUP_Wymer_11_Chap 10

133

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

134

derek jarman

figure of Christ, hence Jarman’s garden becomes Gethsemane as well as Eden, as he meditates upon, and identifies with, Christ’s suffering. The process by which The Garden took shape had close similarities with the way The Last of England had been created. Funding was a predictable problem and James Mackay’s energetic pursuit of a variety of sources only reached a successful conclusion after filming had already started, when he was finally able to raise £450,000 from a consortium which included Channel Four, the German television station ZDF, the Japanese company Uplink, and British Screen. There was no script and some of the footage used had been shot earlier without any firm idea of how it would eventually be integrated into a feature-length film. As a structure evolved, there were a number of formal shoots for particular scenes, using 16 mm and video in addition to the super-8 sequences, but artistic coherence would only really be achieved through the editing process (after a transfer of all the footage to video) and the dubbing in of a complex soundtrack. Given that Jarman frequently expressed dissatisfaction with the original rushes9 and that he became too ill to take proper control of the editing, which was largely carried out by Peter Cartwright and Keith Collins, it is something of a miracle that the final film is such a successful expression of its director’s highly distinctive vision. In the absence of any dialogue or conventional narrative, the film is held together by a number of recurring visual motifs (such as the frequent shots of the garden, shingle, sea, and power station at Dungeness taken at different speeds and converted into different tints), the moods and rhythms of Simon Fisher Turner’s haunting musical score, and a series of allusions to the Nativity and Passion of Christ. Nevertheless, the initial impression is one of extreme fragmentation, produced by the use of some deliberately shaky camera movements, pans and zooms which are rapid enough to blur the image beyond recognition, fast cutting between apparently unrelated images, alternations between monochrome, full colour, and the artificial tints generated by the video paintbox, as well as between grainy ‘realistic’ exterior shots and obvious studio setups using back projection. The film is tonally more varied than The Last of England or War Requiem, ranging from sentimental idyll through camp satire to prolonged scenes of sadistic torture, whilst hinting enigmatically at some form of spiritual transcendence. Before offering any interpretive comments, I want to convey something of the film’s real strangeness by evoking, without explanation for the moment, some of its more memorable images in the order in which they first appear. Jarman himself, filmed in black and white, sprawls half asleep on his desk, while water drips down on a crucified Christ, before splashing onto the desk itself. A leering figure, wearing the military peaked cap,

MUP_Wymer_11_Chap 10

134

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the garden

135

leather waistcoat, and chains favoured by sadomasochistic fetishists and with a huge dildo in his hand, slithers serpent-like towards a naked man and woman who are embracing. The man looks particularly upset at his approach. A group of mainly elderly women, dressed in black, sit round a long table like the disciples at the Last Supper, running their index fingers round the rims of their wine glasses to produce a continuous high-pitched note. Male and female torchbearers, stripped to the waist, circle Jarman, who is curled up in bed on the seashore, his iron bedstead lapped by the breaking waves. A radiant Madonna (Tilda Swinton) displays her baby boy to news photographers wearing balaclava hoods before becoming distressed and attempting to flee their intrusive lenses. A track-suited jogger, blowing a whistle, encounters a white-robed Christ (Roger Cook), his stigmata visible, on an endless flat road, bordered by giant pylons. A smarmy salesman with an unctuous voice, standing in front of a red motorbike, extols the virtues of credit cards to us while Judas swings from a noose, his swollen purple tongue protruding grotesquely. Two nearly identical young men (Johnny Mills and ‘Kevin Collins’ [i.e. Jarman’s partner Keith Collins]) share a bath on the beach, splashing each other affectionately and kissing, before being joined by a boy. A pretty young woman sings, with conventionalised brio, ‘Think Pink’ from the Hollywood musical Funny Face against a monochrome back projection of Gay Pride marchers. A mature Spanish woman dances the flamenco on a table top, joined after a time by the boy we have seen earlier, and watched by the two young men holding flowers and exchanging tender glances. Christ watches sombrely as naked men carrying smoking flares struggle with one another, seek to approach him, then draw back. Schoolmasters tap their canes menacingly on a long table, while a schoolboy writes on the blackboard and spins a globe. A young man in a glamorous blue dress (Spencer Leigh) is pursued and humiliated by a group of smartly dressed women while photographers click away. The two young men are tormented by Father Christmas figures (one of whom points a large camera in their faces), tarred and feathered by a jeering long-haired policeman (Peter Lee-Wilson), then flogged brutally by policemen wearing Father Christmas robes. The young men are then seeing carrying a large cross over the shingle, watched by sinister figures in penitential hoods, while a transvestite Mary Magdalene kisses their feet. Beside a lonely cottage, sheets on a line flap in the wind, ghostly in the twilight. The track-suited jogger once more encounters Christ on the road, blows his whistle, points to his head, and runs on, with only a brief backward glance. In a final tableau a woman shares amaretto biscuits with the two young men, the boy, and an older man. They set fire to the wrappers and watch the ash drifting upward.

MUP_Wymer_11_Chap 10

135

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

136

derek jarman

Some of these images, like the spinning globe or smoking flares, appear in several other Jarman films and thus carry an increased freight of personal connotation. Some of them represent other forms of textual allusion, drawn from a wide range of cultural reference. The washing blowing on the line beside the cottage, utterly mundane yet utterly mysterious, recalls similar images in Carl Dreyer’s great film of death and resurrection, The Word (1955). The seemingly idiosyncratic and surreal use of Father Christmases to torment the two young men probably alludes to medieval treatments of the Passion as a form of cruel, festive game. In the Wakefield play of the Buffeting, the torturers explicitly declare that they will teach Christ ‘a new play of Yule’, meaning that he will be subjected to a form of blindman’s buff in which he must guess who hit him last. Overall however, despite incidental obscurities, it is clear enough that the film is one of Jarman’s dreamjourneys in which, going in search of himself, he broods on his sexuality and the persecution he and others like him have had to endure, the violation of childish innocence by the Church, the state, schools, and the media, and the relation of all this to the person and teachings of Christ, the man who in Christian theology restores us to the lost garden. Sebastiane, Jubilee, The Angelic Conversation, Caravaggio, and War Requiem had all contained Christ figures, as had his unmade film on Pasolini, P.P.P. in the Garden of Earthly Delights.10 His hero Pasolini had, of course, made the most highly praised of all film versions of the Gospel (as well as a much less orthodox treatment of the Passion in La Ricotta) and Jarman succeeds him in a venerable tradition, stretching back to the Renaissance if not earlier, of homosexual artists who have identified strongly with Christ. One reason for this identification is because Jesus took upon himself the role of victim and outcast, one who suffers, becoming the figure prophesied by Isaiah: ‘He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.’11 The stigma of being homosexual finds its apparent etymological root and its moral validation in the stigmata of Christ. In an unpublished autobiographical statement, Jarman made a sharp distinction between Christ, the ‘great libertarian’ and lover of St John, and the oppressive legacy of institutionalised Christianity: It is the Christian inheritance that has made us this way. Christianity was meant to be lived, not dictated … There have been many repressors and oppressors in the name of Christ, who was a great libertarian … The story of Christ is one of brotherly love, one of teaching. And the Bible says that he loved the Apostle John. Now I don’t know how he expressed this, but the words are in the Bible in black and white. Christianity is a matter of fraternity, not of punishment or threatening.12

MUP_Wymer_11_Chap 10

136

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the garden

137

In an address written to be delivered at his funeral, he made a similar distinction between Christ and the Church, concluding, ‘I believe in Christ as exemplar. Love thy neighbour as thyself.’13 In this heartfelt ethical exhortation there is perhaps a glimpse of one of the recurring psychological problems posed by Jarman’s work – the degree to which love of others is always a form of self-love, the degree to which all desire is in some sense narcissistic, confusing itself with forms of identification. This problem is obviously foregrounded in the film by the decision to represent Christ sometimes by two of Jarman’s near-identical young men who ‘reflect’ each other as they embrace and kiss. Any reading of the film will have to ponder the relation of this composite ‘Christ’ to the more conventional figure, with beard, white robes, and stigmata, who appears repeatedly as a sorrowful spectator. It will also need to reflect on how both versions of Christ are situated within Jarman’s symbolic journey in search of himself. The Church has always been relatively comfortable with the urge to identify with Christ, even when this has taken such extreme forms as the spontaneous generation of stigmata or the voluntary crucifixions which take place every Easter in the Philippines. As far as I am aware, no accusations of blasphemy were levelled at the artist Sebastian Horsley when he went to the Philippines in 2000 to have himself crucified in preparation for a series of paintings he made of the crucifixion.14 Given, however, that such identifications often have a sexual component (Horsley described himself as ‘haunted with sexual ambiguity and extreme masochism’)15 they are inherently problematic. One way of dealing with this problem has been to ignore it and art-historical accounts of the many medieval and Renaissance paintings of the Passion have frequently evaded any consideration of the subject’s possible erotic appeal. Today’s cultural commentators are rather more knowing and even Mel Gibson’s manifestly earnest The Passion of the Christ (2004) did not escape speculation about some of the less-thanholy feelings it might arouse in its audience (‘the film seems like the greatest story ever told … by the Marquis de Sade’).16 When sexual desire for Christ, or Christ’s own sexuality, becomes a fully explicit component in any representation of the Passion, then the result is usually an accusation of blasphemy, as in the case of Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) or James Kirkup’s poem ‘The Love that Dares to Speak its Name’. Kirkup’s poem about a Roman centurion making love to the dead Jesus became notorious in 1977 when Mary Whitehouse initiated a prosecution, the only successful one of its kind in modern times, of Gay News and its editor Denis Lemon for the

MUP_Wymer_11_Chap 10

137

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

138

derek jarman

‘blasphemous libel’ which they had published.17 More recently, the Islamic shari’ah court of the UK, more zealous in the defence of Christ’s image than the Church of England, have pronounced a fatwa on the American playwright Terrence McNally for his play Corpus Christi (1998), which represents Jesus as a modern homosexual.18 In one of Wilfred Owen’s letters to his mother, he wrote: ‘There is a point where prayer is indistinguishable from blasphemy. There is also a point where blasphemy is indistinguishable from prayer.’19 His remarks are highly pertinent, since despite the outrage directed at Scorsese, Kirkup, and McNally, the provocative aspects of their works are mingled with elements of an orthodox, even sentimental, piety. Jarman himself briefly wondered whether The Garden could be considered blasphemous20 and when the film was shown on Channel Four in August 1992 it did attract a formal complaint from a viewer that it was ‘blasphemous, lascivious, obscene’, a complaint which was rejected by the Broadcasting Standards Council. Despite some tabloid speculation about the degree of shock Jarman’s film would cause, this was one of the few examples of ‘outrage’ recorded and the fine line between blasphemy and devotional seriousness was confirmed once more when The Garden won a ‘Special Mention’ from the International Catholic Organisation for Film at the 1991 Berlin Film Festival. One of the reasons that Jarman’s use of the figure of Christ to explore his own identity and sexuality provoked less controversy than might have been expected is because he did not, to anything like the degree that he had done in Sebastiane, make the near-naked body of a suffering man the object of a pleasurable gaze. The gaze in The Garden is directed more consistently inward and the most relevant points of reference are not so much the many sensual Renaissance representations of the Passion but rather Dürer’s intense, brooding, Christ-like self-portraits and the writings of Wilde and Jung on the imitation of Christ as a form of self-discovery and self-fulfilment. When discussing Jarman’s manipulation of Caravaggio’s painting of The Entombment – his substitution of Caravaggio’s head for that of Christ – I quoted Wilde’s argument that Jesus was the supreme type of the artist. This was part of a larger claim, first made in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, that ‘he who would lead a Christlike life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself’.21 This claim was developed with great eloquence in De Profundis in ways which would have resonated strongly with Jarman: ‘Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. Christ was not merely the supreme individualist, but he was the first individualist in history.’22

MUP_Wymer_11_Chap 10

138

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the garden

139

Whether or not Jarman was familiar with this section of De Profundis,23 he would have encountered a more systematic development of the same idea in the writings of Jung. In Alchemical Studies, one of Jung’s works which Jarman is known to have read with interest, we find the following: ‘The imitation of Christ might well be understood in a deeper sense. It could be taken as the duty to realise one’s deepest conviction with the same courage and the same self-sacrifice shown by Jesus.’24 The Jungian account of how one becomes a true individual, what he termed the process of individuation, involves locating a centre to the psyche which incorporates the unconscious as well as the conscious, the feminine as well as the masculine, the dark as well as the light. This centre is the Self and Christ is historically one of its most important images,25 along with the lapis or Philosopher’s Stone of the alchemists, alluded to in The Garden when Tilda Swinton is shown sifting stones on the beach and picking up one with a gold ring embedded in it. One advantage which the lapis possessed, as a symbol of the Self, was its more complete embodiment of all opposing tendencies within the psyche, integrating not only the spiritual with the material, but also good with evil. In contrast, Jung recognised a paradoxical incompleteness in the Christ image. Although he was the spirit made flesh and a man who possessed ‘feminine’ attributes, he could not fully symbolise human sexuality, particularly in its darker and more disturbing forms. He was at once the centre, and yet not the centre, of the human psyche. It could be argued that Jarman’s use of two young men as a composite ‘Christ’ is an attempt to overcome the limitations of the archetype, restoring the missing sexual component and emphasising relationship as the goal of human completeness rather than anything located purely within the individual. Yet each young man is merely a mirror image of the other, rather than a truly separate self, and the expression of their sexuality is limited to hugging, kissing, and frolicking in the bath. Jung argued that when we fail to acknowledge any cruel or perverse impulses within our own psyche, then we project them on to others and in The Garden the darker side of human sexuality appears in the sadistic pleasure with which the police torment the young men, while they remain as ‘innocent’ of such desires as any more conventional Christ. The long-haired policeman who sniffs and licks the excremental black treacle with which he daubs the lovers and who pulls feathers out of the lining of his own jacket, is exposed as unconsciously complicit with that which he is punishing. The lovers, however, remain closely associated with the innocence of the small boy who appears in many scenes, often in pajamas, and whose most aggressive act is to participate in a pillow fight which recalls the famous scene in Jean Vigo’s Zèro de Conduite

MUP_Wymer_11_Chap 10

139

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

140

derek jarman

(1933). The shower of feathers ironically anticipates the punishment in the police canteen but connotes, in a powerful imaginative contrast, childish innocence rather than any secret predilection for cruelty. There is one specific way in which the film does break down any simple distinction between persecutors and victims. The relentless intrusiveness of the newspaper photographers, looking like terrorists in their balaclava hoods and forever thrusting their long camera lenses into the faces of Tilda Swinton, the two lovers, or the transvestite Mary Magdalen, is echoed by brief shots of Jarman himself running after one of the young men, camera in hand, determined to capture him on film. When one of them puts his hand in front of the camera, he is protesting against the prying of the media into his personal life but also, literally, protesting against the film itself. Apart from this, however, the identification with Christ as innocent victim is strong enough to purify Jarman and his two young men from all hints of aggression or sadistic impulses. However, there is a projection of these onto the sinister figure in contemporary fetish gear who at the beginning of the film slithers towards a naked man and woman, clutching a large dildo. The maintenance of a pure (and therefore incomplete) Christ image requires such a complementary demonic figure but how are we to interpret him? Does he symbolise the excitements of a homosexual subculture which are too strong for the nervous sensibilities of conventional heterosexuals? (Jarman wrote in Kicking the Pricks that ‘safe sex can be awfully drab if you’ve experienced sodomy’.)26 Does he represent the demonisation of all homosexual desire by the dominant culture? Or does he mark the moment when adult male (homo)sexuality, with its need to seize and clutch and penetrate, its tendency towards aggression, disrupts the tender idyll between mother and son (for this might be the ‘heterosexual’ relationship which is threatened)? It is clear enough that Satan is entering the garden at this point but not clear whether this Satan is a liberating, Blakean figure or a more conventional embodiment of evil. On either reading, such a figure seems in stark opposition to the white-robed, mournful Christ whom we encounter on the road and whose ability to function as the archetypal image of Jarman’s successful quest for himself must therefore be questioned. In the relatively long scene where Christ watches a group of naked men, some carrying smoking flares, slide down the slopes of a red-lit pit and struggle with each other, to the accompaniment of blast-furnace noises, this traditionallooking ‘man of sorrows’ at one point covers his eyes in anguish. Is he horrified by those who, speaking in his name, have condemned homosexuals to this hell, or is he unable to contemplate the burning

MUP_Wymer_11_Chap 10

140

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the garden

141

intensity of lust itself? When some of the men seek to approach him, their sexuality emphasized by a crouching posture which thrusts out their buttocks and gives brief glimpses of their genitals, he seems unable to fold them into his embrace and they draw back. Shortly after this scene the young boy is shown beating at the embers of a fire in order to extinguish it. The rhythmic tapping noise which accompanies this on the soundtrack turns out to emanate from the canes of his schoolmasters and the process of repression is completed. The ambiguities of this conventional Christ, whose bloody stigmata and look of sombre inwardness offer Jarman strong possibilities of identification, are nowhere more apparent than in the final confrontation with the jogger on the road lined with pylons stretching far into the distance. Christ holds up his hand to show the mark of the nail but the jogger responds as if he were dealing with a mad beggar, blowing a whistle officiously and tapping his own head contemptuously. Seen in close-up, the jogger’s face is fleshy and brutal and it is easy to read him as worldly man, more concerned with his body’s health than anything spiritual, and devoid of compassion for the pain of others, including, by inference, the pain of persecuted homosexuals. After he has continued on his way, Christ reveals to us the wound in his side and a series of lowangle shots gives him a continuing dignity despite his rejection. However, it is also possible to read the encounter not as completing Jarman’s identification with the wounded Christ who is ‘despised and rejected of men’, but as implying the inability of this Christ to represent a successful conclusion to the quest for the Self, a quest which perhaps has no end. In Modern Nature Jarman quotes from an anonymous letter he has received: ‘Above all do not lose your desire to walk … if one just keeps walking, everything will be all right; you cannot travel on the path before you have become the path itself.’27 From this point of view, Jarman’s identification is more likely to be with the jogger on the seemingly endless road, and when this figure points to his head, he is telling us where to look for the real Christ – inside ourselves. The film’s final image of the Self is not Christ but the little group – old man, boy, lovers, and woman – who partake in an act of communion by sharing the amaretto biscuits and burning the wrappers. As in the case of the artist Viv and the two incestuous brothers in Jubilee, we are not so much looking at the beginnings of an alternative community as at a composite representation of Jarman himself, here imaged at the different stages of his life and incorporating a feminine (maternal) principle – now a complete individual.

MUP_Wymer_11_Chap 10

141

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 19. 2 T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 1974), p. 222. 3 Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 7. 4 Ibid., p. 11. 5 Peake, Derek Jarman, p. 559, n. 40. 6 Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 84. 7 Ibid., pp. 83–4. 8 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 108. 9 ‘Looking at the rushes over the past six days, I discovered not one sequence that worked. Glaring faults everywhere: no close-ups, camera faults, out-of-focus shots, shots that fall like confetti. 16mm deadly, with no resonance. There is not a shot that is not ugly’ (Modern Nature, p. 171). See also pp. 210 and 218, though by the middle of February 1990 he was able to reassure himself that ‘The film is looking remarkably good’ (p. 238). 10 The outline of this film was published in Afterimage, 12 (1985), pp. 22–5. A further unrealised script dealing with Christ is The Space Gospel, which was co-written with Ken Russell in 1976. This can be found in the BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 22. 11 Isaiah 53.3 (Authorised Version). 12 BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 12. 13 Peake, Derek Jarman, p. 519. 14 Horsley said: ‘I wanted to go to every extreme, to stretch my sensibility through suffering in order to feel and communicate more. I reasoned that I wouldn’t be able to produce a great work of art without that pain and anxiety. I wanted to break limits and test the boundaries of reality’ (interview with Jessica Berens in the Observer (26 May 2002, magazine section), p. 14. 15 Ibid., p. 16. 16 Peter Travers, Rolling Stone, quoted in Mark Kermode, ‘Drenched in the Blood’, Observer (29 February 2004). 17 The conviction for blasphemous libel presumably still stands, though the poem is easily accessible on the internet. 18 Guardian (30 October 1999). 19 Letter dated 18 February 1918, Wilfred Owen: Collected Letters, ed. Harold Owen and John Bell (1967), p. 533. 20 Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 234. 21 Oscar Wilde, Plays, Prose Writings and Poems, introduction by Isobel Murray (London: Everyman, 1975, reissued 1990), p. 248. 22 Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1996), p. 59. 23 In Smiling in Slow Motion, the diary entry for 30 September 1991 includes the sentence, ‘Bought De Profundis and marvelled at the classics I had not read’ (p. 54) which seems to imply he was unfamiliar with the work at the time he made The Garden. 24 C. G. Jung, ‘Commentary on “The Secret of the Golden Flower” ’, in Alchemical Studies, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967 [1968]), p. 53. 25 See C. G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), Chapter 5, ‘Christ, a Symbol of the Self’, pp. 36–71. In Kicking the Pricks, Jarman tells us that his script for Neutron ‘was based on Jung’s Aeon [sic]. Researches into the phenomenology of the self, the self-measured in the life of Christ’ (p. 182). 26 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 194. 27 Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 221.

MUP_Wymer_11_Chap 10

142

7/25/05, 5:19 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The closet of the heart: Edward II (1991)

11

Jarman nearly died in the spring of 1990 when AIDS-related infections attacked his liver, lungs, stomach, and eyes. This close encounter with death left him determined to achieve as much as possible artistically in the short time left to him and one of his major goals was to make a film of Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan play Edward II. Since the late 1980s, as he had become angrier and angrier with the state of British society, the film industry, and his own failing body, it is arguable that his previous close identification with Shakespeare weakened somewhat, while that with Shakespeare’s great rival Marlowe grew. Shakespeare’s alleged conservatism was now something which he was less ready to embrace and his fury at the homosexual actor Ian McKellen’s acceptance of a knighthood from the Conservative government helped to provoke the following observation: ‘I suspect if Elizabeth I was dishing out knighthoods, Shakespeare would have been at the front door with a begging bowl, Marlowe would have run a mile.’1 As an artist and personality, Marlowe had a number of striking resemblances to Jarman’s earlier hero Caravaggio. These included a capacity to shock and provoke, a well-documented tendency to become involved in street violence, and a less-well-documented ‘queer’ sexuality. The biographical evidence for the latter largely consists of two of the ‘damnable’ opinions attributed to Marlowe by the informer Richard Baines in a note he handed in to the Privy Council shortly after Marlowe had been killed in suspicious circumstances in May 1593. The list includes the remark ‘That all they that love not Tobacco & Boies were fooles’ and the even more provocative opinion ‘That St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned alwaies in his bosome, that he used him as the sinners of Sodoma’.2 Whereas many other of Marlowe’s alleged opinions conform to the standard ‘atheistic’ slanders which were levelled at unorthodox thinkers in the Renaissance, this particular blasphemy, which is also attributed to Marlowe in a letter by Thomas

MUP_Wymer_12_Chap 11

143

7/25/05, 5:20 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

144

derek jarman

Kyd written about the same time, is virtually unknown in English sixteenth-century records and its very rarity may be ‘an indication of its authenticity’.3 Apart from these allegations, the evidence for Marlowe’s homosexual tendencies is mainly, as in the case of Caravaggio, a matter of the inferences which can be drawn from his art. There are explicit allusions to same-sex desire in three of his seven plays – Dido Queen of Carthage, The Massacre at Paris, and Edward II – as well as a particularly interesting one in his unfinished poem Hero and Leander. In telling the famous story of how Leander swam the Hellespont to meet his beloved Hero, Marlowe adds an entirely invented episode in which the sea-God Neptune makes amorous advances to the swimming youth. When these are rejected, Neptune hurls his mace at Leander but recalls it in mid-air so that it flies back to wound his own hand.4 There is a self-punishing psychology evident here, which is also at work in Edward II and Doctor Faustus, a psychology to which Jarman was powerfully, if ambivalently, responsive. The motto visible in the famous 1585 Corpus Christi College portrait of a young man, whom many believe to be Marlowe – ‘Quod me nutrit, me destruit’ (‘What feeds me, destroys me’) – finds an echo in the young Jarman’s musings on the nature of the artist: ‘he might wish to lead a normal life but is incapable unless he destroys that which is his own existence’.5 With hindsight it seems inevitable that Jarman should have been drawn to film Marlowe’s 1592 play about a medieval king whose obsession with his favourite Piers Gaveston causes his barons to depose him before having him horribly murdered in a manner which parodies the act of sodomy. However, there was little sign of any particular interest in Marlowe during Jarman’s early career and the initial idea for a film of Edward II may have been triggered by an eloquent review of Caravaggio by Edmund White. In it he detected an unresolved ambiguity towards Lena – a conflict in the director’s mind between an utopian urge towards bisexuality (the Peaceable Kingdom of the Genders) and a covert fear and mistrust of women. All of which puts me in mind of Marlowe – the glowing intensity, the ramshackle structure, the pagan sensuality and violence, the high-flown rhetoric, the meaty fascination with men and the rather abstract admiration of women. Jarman really should do an Edward II one of these days. In any event, he has convincingly recaptured a Renaissance zest in showing the ecstatic self pounding against the closed door of an indifferent world.6

The first evidence of Jarman’s response to this was a script called Sod ’Em which he wrote in May 1988, driven in part by his anger over the

MUP_Wymer_12_Chap 11

144

7/25/05, 5:20 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

edward ii

145

recent passing of the Local Government Act, which included the notorious Section 28 forbidding local authorities (including the schools and libraries under their control) from ‘promoting’ homosexuality.7 Despite the fact that it led to no prosecutions before it was eventually repealed in 2003, this piece of legislation took on enormous symbolic importance both for its supporters and its opponents. It could be interpreted as an attempt to remove texts by authors like Marlowe or Wilde (or even Shakespeare’s sonnets) from the school syllabus and in the nightmarishly repressive future Britain which is pictured in Sod ’Em, Section 28 is looked back to as ‘the first of many similar acts of legislation restricting human rights’. The speech continues, ‘But 28 became famous. It was pivotal, like Kristallnacht, or the burning of the Reichstag, it fixed itself in the imagination.’8 In Sod ’Em some lines and scenes from Marlowe’s play are mixed in with episodes set in a near-future Britain ruled by ‘Margaret Reaper’, in which books by Wilde, Shakespeare, and Marlowe are banned, homosexuals executed by firing squad, and adulteresses stoned to death. The Church actively encourages this repression and, in a mild echo of Marlowe’s alleged blasphemies, Jarman has one of his characters ask: ‘Where was the Christ that loved Saint John?’.9 The figures of Edward and Gaveston exist both as characters within Marlowe’s play and as real people trying to pursue a homosexual relationship in the near-future society. The polemical conflation of past, present, and future in Sod ’Em was retained in the film which Jarman eventually made, partly through extensive use of anachronistic costuming, but the cartoon-like qualities were transmuted into something emotionally deeper, more complex, and more closely attuned to the original play. On the basis of Jarman’s script, which was written in 1990 with the help of Stephen McBride, the production company Working Title were able to raise £750,000 from the BBC, British Screen, and Uplink (Jarman’s Japanese distributor). Two young actors new to Jarman’s films (Steve Waddington and Andrew Tiernan) were cast as Edward and Gaveston, while the other major parts of Edward’s Queen Isabella and her lover Mortimer went to two of Jarman’s favourite performers, Tilda Swinton and Nigel Terry, both of whom had been excellent in Caravaggio and who had the additional merit of bearing some physical resemblance to Jarman’s parents. Keith Collins, appearing once again in the credits as ‘Kevin Collins’, had always been intended to play Lightborn, Edward’s gaoler and murderer, and his role was given a great deal of symbolic importance. Shooting began on 18 February 1991 at Bray Studios, once used by Hammer Films, and finished, on schedule, on 23 March. Jarman’s poor health meant that he could not guarantee to

MUP_Wymer_12_Chap 11

145

7/25/05, 5:20 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

146

derek jarman

be present throughout the shoot, so Ken Butler was named as Associate Director and did in fact direct on some days. The overall visual coherence of the film makes it easy to overlook the occasional recourse, for the first time in Jarman’s work, to some relatively conventional film grammar, such as the use of shot-reverse-shot sequences during dialogue. Despite the extreme and confrontational nature of Jarman’s film, it was generally very well reviewed. Geoff Brown in The Times called it ‘bold, passionate and savagely beautiful’ and ‘one of the best British films for some time’10 and Derek Malcolm in the Guardian thought that even if it ‘is not Jarman at his most imaginative and inventive, it is certainly the director at his most stylish and mature’.11 Nearly all reviewers commented favourably on the strength of the four central performances and on the interplay of light and shadow created by cameraman Ian Wilson, who, as Gabriel Beristain had done in Caravaggio, was able to suffuse the stark set with a (sometimes sinister) beauty. Nevertheless, it remains a film whose eroticism and violence is capable of making its audience feel deeply uncomfortable. It was not uncommon for people to walk out of the cinema during the early screenings and The Times Literary Supplement reviewer admitted to feeling ‘threatened’ by the film. Striving to be fair, for he saw much to admire in it, he concluded his review by saying: ‘Being repelled is a little beside the point. We all possess our own more or less private, more or less subtle set of conditions on which we are prepared to enjoy violence being represented. Edward II merely violated my set.’12 In striking contrast to the numerous film adaptations of Shakespeare, there have been very few attempts to film the plays of his contemporaries, despite their considerable cinematic potential. If one excludes productions made for television, the only examples prior to Edward II which spring to mind are a French Volpone (1939) based on Stefan Zweig’s rewrite of Ben Jonson’s play, the Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor Doctor Faustus (1967), and Guiseppe Patroni Griffi’s adaptation of John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1971). Griffi found in Ford what Jarman found in Marlowe – the narrative structure and ‘classic’ support for an intense exploration of his own (homo)sexuality, though there is still an element of indirection in Griffi’s film since the brother–sister incest is a displaced representation of the ‘forbidden love’ which most concerned him. Jarman admired Griffi’s Il Mare but I have no evidence that he ever saw ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, though it shares with Edward II the odd characteristic of containing sexually explicit scenes yet never showing an act of sex taking place between the central couple. Jarman claims in the published script that his original intention was to have a

MUP_Wymer_12_Chap 11

146

7/25/05, 5:20 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

edward ii

147

scene where ‘Edward and Gaveston fuck’,13 but in each case there seems to be an unacknowledged wish to preserve an idealised, even at times childlike, romantic equality, an image which would be disturbed if one partner were shown penetrating the other. Since 1991 there has been a poor version of Middleton’s Changeling (1998) and a much more impressive one of The Revenger’s Tragedy (2002), boldly updated and relocated to a Liverpool of the near future by Alex Cox. Cox’s use of anachronism was identified by reviewers as ‘Jarmanesque’ and he expressed the hope that his film would ‘open the doors to something that is uniquely British and of great interest to British film-makers: the gaping, skeleton- and sex- and joke-filled vault that is Renaissance tragedy’.14 For the moment, however, there is still no real tradition of filming non-Shakespearean Renaissance plays and hence no conventional way of doing it. To understand more precisely how Jarman’s film treated Marlowe’s play it is necessary to draw a sharp distinction between the film and the published screenplay, which is not only inaccurate as a record of the scene sequence and dialogue actually used in the film but is a quite distinct text with its own particular agenda and tone.15 Some of the differences between script and film can be attributed to Jarman’s knowledge that he could get away with being more outrageous in a publication destined for a specialist readership than in a film which was both financed and screened by the BBC. But the differences also signal a certain ambivalence in Jarman towards his source material. The film is titled, neutrally enough, Edward II and its credits tell us that it is ‘based on the play by Christopher Marlowe’. By contrast, the script is called Queer Edward II and has a running title saying ‘improved by Derek Jarman’. Every page of the script is embellished with provocative headings and marginalia such as ‘if you must be heterosexual, please try to be discreet’ and ‘You Say Don’t Fuck We Say FUCK YOU’.16 The script also begins with an aggressive preface which is absent from the film credits: 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 a queer in the cinema is almost impossible. Heterosexuals have fucked up the screen so completely that there is hardly room for us to kiss there. Marlowe outs the past – why don’t we out the present? That’s really the only message this play has. Fuck poetry. The best lines in Marlowe sound like pop songs and the worst, well, we’ve tried to spare you them… This book is dedicated to: the repeal of all anti-gay laws, particularly Section 28 17

MUP_Wymer_12_Chap 11

147

7/25/05, 5:20 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

148

derek jarman

One might guess from all this that the film would offer an aggressive promotion of gay rights, that it would exploit Marlowe’s lyrical vein where appropriate, retaining and emphasising exchanges like ‘Why should you love him whom the world hates so?’ ‘Because he loves me more than all the world’ (1.4.76–7),18 but that it would not hesitate to violate anything else in the play which did not contribute to Jarman’s political agenda. There are, in fact, more than enough violations to annoy anyone with a conservative attitude towards Marlowe’s play. In general terms, Jarman stripped away the concerns of an Elizabethan history play for national unity and strong kingship to reveal what he saw as the core of Edward II, the obsessional attachment of Edward to Gaveston. In a famous essay on ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England’, Alan Bray wrote that, ‘Marlowe describes in this play what could be a sodomitical relationship, but he places it wholly within the incompatible conventions of Elizabethan friendship, in a tension which he never allows to be resolved’.19 Jarman, by contrast, represents the relationship as unambiguously homosexual and the barons’ opposition to it as homophobic as well as deriving from an aristocratic dislike of a ‘base upstart’. Nevertheless, the tension between ideal friendship and sodomy is one which runs throughout Jarman’s work and, as I have already noted, we never see Edward and Gaveston engage in an explicit sexual act. One of Jarman’s most notorious ‘improvements’ to Marlowe’s text, justified by reference to a medieval source which claimed that Edward had escaped from Berkeley Castle,20 involves the insertion of a brief scene of reconciliation between Edward and Lightborn, retrospectively confirming that the murder with the redhot poker was merely a bad dream and not the true ending of the story. Another major violation, more provoking to traditionalist critics than even the flamboyant dance numbers or the scenes with placard-waving OutRage demonstrators, is the transformation of the young Prince Edward, who at the end of Marlowe’s play is beginning to emerge as the strong and successful warrior-king Edward III, into a camp little boy who, in the film’s penultimate scene, is shown capering in earrings, lipstick, and high heels to ‘The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’, on top of the cage where Isabella and Mortimer sit like joyless ghosts, covered in white flour and shadowed by the bars of their (heterosexual) prison. Yet despite retaining some of the agitprop gestures of the screenplay, the film finally comes across as something considerably more disturbing and complex, much closer in spirit to its Marlovian source than the dismissive rhetoric of the script’s preface would lead one to suppose. This can be seen clearly in the treatment of Piers Gaveston. Jarman

MUP_Wymer_12_Chap 11

148

7/25/05, 5:20 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

edward ii

149

chose not to sentimentalise Marlowe’s portrait of a ruthless social climber but to reproduce, even exaggerate, some of the character’s most unpleasant features. Gaveston’s dismissal of the impoverished masses in the opening speech of the play is retained in the form ‘As for the multitude … Fuck ‘em’, thus immediately alienating the sympathies of those left-liberal members of the audience who would be Jarman’s most natural allies in any struggle for gay rights. Gaveston’s gibe at one of the ‘Three Poor Men’ is also retained in a slightly modified form. The line ‘There are hospitals for men like you’ sounds particularly vicious when addressed to a gay ‘hustler’ in a 1990s film and Jarman would have been fully aware of the extra edge the line had acquired. A subsequent scene in which Gaveston himself appears briefly on a hospital bed hints at a very Marlovian retributive irony. Two further examples of Gaveston’s singularly unengaging behaviour should be noted. There is his mockseduction of Isabella, when he makes very plausible sexual advances to her, only to laugh brutally in her face when she begins to respond, and there is his sadistic humiliation of the Bishop of Winchester (altered from Coventry in Marlowe, perhaps because ‘Winchester’ has more Establishment connotations). In a truly appalling scene, the old man in his underclothes, his face trickling with blood, is taunted by Gaveston and a group of leather-jacketed thugs. His underpants are pulled down, he is made to perform an act of pseudo-fellatio, and his false teeth are plucked out and waved over him in a sign of the cross. As Jarman commented sardonically in the margin of another scene, ‘Andrew [Tiernan] is not playing Gaveston in a way that will endear me to “Gay Times”.’21 The tormenting of the Bishop of Winchester is but one of a whole sequence of scenes of eroticised violence and humiliation. These include the garrotting of Gaveston by a young policeman, the literal ‘butchery’ of the same policeman (stabbed by Edward and Spencer while he is hanging from meathooks alongside an animal carcass),22 the strangling of Spencer by Mortimer, Isabella’s vampiric murder of Kent, and of course the climactic anal rape and murder of Edward which lasts longer and has considerably more impact than the brief loving kiss which displaces it in the new ‘happy’ ending. All of these scenes of cruelty are eroticised to some degree and none more so than the relationship with Lightborn, who is seen suggestively fingering the end of the poker prior to the rape/murder. The film is quite clearly not simply a representation of the cruel social oppression which homosexuals have to resist but an enactment of a compulsive dance of violent and perverse desires. All the characters, whether straight or gay, are in the grip of similar sadomasochistic obsessions and there is even a short scene of Mortimer being dominated in bed by women in stiletto heels. In an interview for Sight

MUP_Wymer_12_Chap 11

149

7/25/05, 5:20 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

150

derek jarman

and Sound Jarman said: ‘I was trying to keep up this psycho-sexual tension all the way through. All these people trapped in a merry-goround of conflicting emotion.’23 The consequence is a film whose tone is as much grimly compulsive as it is ‘liberating’. The editing has transformed Marlowe’s linear narrative which moves towards the completion of a story into a succession of scenes which appear to represent a permanent psychological state. Individual episodes can easily be reshuffled without damaging the film’s emotional logic and in fact the order of scenes as given in the script differs significantly from the order which appears in the film.24 In both the script and the film, sequences set in the dungeon with Lightborn (and there are fourteen of these, together with a couple of brief intercuts) are not confined to the last few minutes but are distributed throughout. Prison and torture are not just the literal punishment waiting for Edward at the end of the story but are a permanent state of mind. The opening and closing credits appear against the background of a grey prison wall. The film begins with the crash of the prison door slamming and Lightborn the gaoler approaching his sleeping prisoner. The use of a single set means that, in a way, the film never leaves the dungeon in which it begins. Clever lighting changes are able to disguise the prison walls for a while but all the subsequent action is played out within them. There was, of course, an important financial saving in the use of a single set but, as usual, Jarman was able to turn budgetary constraints to his own advantage. According to Jarman, ‘the set became a metaphor for the trapped country, the prison of our lives, “the closet of our heart”, in Edward’s words’.25 The actual phrase in Marlowe is ‘closet of my heart’26 and it has a particular resonance in the film because of the frequent use of the word ‘closet’ in gay rhetoric to signify enforced social invisibility. In this usage there always remains the possibility that one can choose, if one wishes, to ‘come out’ of the closet in which one has hidden away from social disapproval. Jarman’s use of the phrase, however, suggests something more like ‘the prison of the self’, ‘the dungeon of the soul’, an entrapment in unbreakable cycles of violent, selfdestructive desire. He had used similar imagery when he had considered ‘the possibility of a film of The Picture of Dorian Gray, set in the closet of Wilde’s heart, a prison movie’.27 There are also other senses of ‘closet’ which may be pertinent to Marlowe’s play and Jarman’s film. As well as signifying a ‘small room’ or ‘confined space’ the word can imply a sewer. In Marlowe, Edward’s dungeon literally is a sewer (‘This dungeon where they keep me is the sink / Wherein the filth of all the castle falls.’ (4.5.55–6)). Although ‘closet’ did not come to mean ‘privy’ till the seventeenth century, following Sir

MUP_Wymer_12_Chap 11

150

7/25/05, 5:20 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

edward ii

151

John Harington’s invention of the water-closet in 1596, the OED gives ‘closet’ meaning ‘sewer’ as an obsolete sixteenth-century Scottish usage. In Jarman’s film this ‘sink / Wherein the filth of all the castle falls’ is represented by what the script calls ‘a stagnant pool’.28 Its appropriateness as an image for ‘the prison of the self’ lies not so much in any obvious excremental quality but in its capacity to evoke the myth of Narcissus. There are a number of shots of Edward gazing at his own reflection in the pool and, as we have already seen, Jarman had speculated anxiously on the dangers of narcissistic self-absorption, characterising it negatively as a ‘benumbed retreat into the self’.29 There is a painful problem of desire here which the film seems to be addressing through its images. A comfortable and comforting myth about desire would be that the self finds its completion and fullness through the encounter with otherness and difference but, as one of the headings in Jarman’s script spells out in large letters: ‘HOMO means SAME means EQUAL’.30 Hence the film seems to swing violently between the grim alternatives of a narcissistic imprisonment in the self, the relationship with Gaveston being only an idealised self-projection, and fantasies of escape from the self through total annihilation (in the script directions, Lightborn ‘destroys’ Edward rather than simply killing him and, after the murder, Edward’s hair falls across his face, obscuring it completely). Edward tells Gaveston near the beginning of the film, in Marlowe’s exact words, that he is ‘Thy friend, thy self, another Gaveston’ and the two actors do indeed look very much alike. They are always dressed more or less identically, whether they are wearing pyjamas, suits, dinner jackets, or T-shirts and jeans. In a number of scenes it is possible to be unsure for several seconds which of them is which. This is why there is a special significance in the repeated ‘pool of Narcissus’ shots, including one striking composition in which Edward’s entire form is perfectly replicated in the water. When not in the form of ‘a stagnant pool’ and mirror, water can, of course, signify quite differently. It can suggest a fluidity and changeability of identity, a possibility of transformation. Jarman wrote of how his own homosexual lifestyle had ‘fluidity and possibility’ compared with the prison of heterosexual monogamy.31 Such implications can be found at several points in Marlowe’s play, notably in Mortimer’s likening of Gaveston to ‘Proteus, god of shapes’ (1.4.410) : Although the play is short on figurative language, some critics have noticed a number of apt allusions to metamorphic myths. By far the most important of these is the allusion to Proteus, for it is the key to a network of sea and water symbolism … Like Proteus, water signifies change, passion, limitlessness, Chaos.32

MUP_Wymer_12_Chap 11

151

7/25/05, 5:20 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

152

derek jarman

Numerous shots of the moving ripples of water reflected in Edward’s face may be intended to express this fluidity of identity and sense of limitless possibility and in the course of the film the relation with his reflection, his ‘other self’, Gaveston, is not the only one Edward has. Arguably Spencer’s Irish accent and Lightborn’s working-class appearance and Geordie accent suggest the possibility of a series of lovers who are significantly ‘different’ and who would enable him to escape the prison of the self; but however angrily he disturbs the surface of the stagnant pool, his own image always reforms. The climactic scene of punishment may be only a dream and is signalled initially as such by the use of a non-synchronised soundtrack, but the pain is real and inescapable and before the end of the sequence the distancing choral music has given way to an agonised scream. Brief flashbacks to Gaveston and Spenser carrying glowing torches establish a visual link with Lightborn’s redhot poker and tighten the painful knot of desire and punishment. Claude Summers wrote of Marlowe’s play that, ‘The concept of the protean self – so pregnant with possibilities – becomes finally a measure of limitations rather than aspiration, of entrapment rather than freedom … Characters remain entrapped in the prisons of their own circumstances and their own selves.’33 Jarman’s film also vividly dramatises how yearnings for freedom, transformation, and love constantly risk collapsing back into narcissistic self-absorption and sadomasochistic fantasies of punishment. This is why, despite Jarman’s many irreverent alterations to his source, it is possible to detect an underlying fidelity to some important Marlovian themes. As The Times Literary Supplement reviewer put it: ‘His use of the play comes across as strangely respectful as well as predictably weird. In his own way he is faithful to it.’34 To say that Jarman faithfully reproduces some of the psychological patterns found in Marlowe’s plays is to reopen the whole vexed question of the validity of a psychological approach to Marlowe. Such studies are currently unfashionable because most recent critics write under the influence of Foucault, and, within a Foucauldian paradigm, all psychological phenomena must be understood historically and psychoanalysis itself has no special insight to offer but is simply one more historical mechanism of control through categorisation.35 As is well known, Foucault also disputed the idea that there was any such thing as a homosexual ‘identity’ in the Renaissance and Jarman himself would sometimes remind his readers that the word ‘homosexual’ was of recent origin.36 However, he more typically saw desire (if not social identity) as transcending history: ‘An orgasm joins you to the past. Its timelessness becomes the brotherhood; the brethren are lovers; they

MUP_Wymer_12_Chap 11

152

7/25/05, 5:20 PM

edward ii

153

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

extend the “family”. I share that sexuality. It was then, is now and will be in the future.’37 There are two obvious ways of responding to the Foucauldian dismissal of psychology and psychoanalysis. One would be to turn the whole problem round and allow psychoanalysis to ‘place’ Foucault. The distinguished psychoanalytic critic Leo Bersani, himself a homosexual and the co-author of an excellent book on Jarman’s Caravaggio, wrote: But is it really possible for anyone seriously interested in Foucault on fantasy, sexuality, and power not to engage him in a confrontation with psychoanalysis? Can anyone believe that such peremptory formulas as l’Art de vivre c’est de tuer la psychologie make any sense except as an aggressive riposte to an interlocutor [i.e. Freud] Foucault seldom acknowledges or addresses directly? He was so acutely aware of psychoanalysis as yet another episode in a history of disciplinary networks that he never considered that psychoanalysis might provide some answers to questions he himself found urgent.38

It certainly seems highly unlikely that Foucault’s ‘recurrent emphasis on control, domination, and punishment as the only mediating qualities possible in personal and social relationships’ had no relation whatsoever to his own sadomasochistic sexual preferences.39 The implications of this for the vast body of academic work which takes Foucault’s thinking about society and relationships to be paradigmatic have not really been explored. The other response would be to attempt a better integration of psychological and historical approaches. The masochistic, self-punishing tendency of a number of male homosexual artists – Pier Paolo Pasolini, Yukio Mishima, Francis Bacon, and Robert Mapplethorpe are obvious examples – is an intriguing psychological phenomenon but it is surely, at least in part, ‘historical’ in that it involves an internalisation of social disapproval (the degree of which is historically variable), leaving a residue of guilt which no amount of iconoclastic aggression can entirely eradicate. It is in this sense that, as one of the script’s scene headings declares in large capitals, ‘LAWS MAKE NATURE’.40 Jarman was very aware of this process and he saw it clearly at work in his hero Caravaggio: ‘the strictures of Church and society leave a cancer, a lingering doubt, which leads to dis-ease in this painter … In a hostile environment this extreme of self-analysis became self-destruction.’41 Jarman’s empathy for such tormented, self-punishing figures is evident in his belief that the real hero of Prick Up Your Ears (1987), the Stephen Frears film about Joe Orton’s life in which Jarman himself had a small acting part, was the unhappy Halliwell rather than the uncomplicatedly amoral Orton.42 It is likely, as I have said, that Jarman saw the same self-

MUP_Wymer_12_Chap 11

153

7/25/05, 5:20 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

154

derek jarman

punishing psychology present in Marlowe’s work and responded imaginatively to it, at some cost to any simple message about gay ‘liberation’. Foucault’s entire project can be seen as a ‘liberating’ Nietzschean refusal to be made to feel guilty about anything, a systematic attempt to demystify all the discourses of Church and society before they can leave ‘a cancer, a lingering doubt’ in the soul. A Nietzschean ‘will to absolute play’ has been detected in Marlowe43 and a similar quality is apparent in Jarman’s film. Despite its compulsive sadomasochistic eroticism and its claustrophobic sense of entrapment, it is indeed a ‘gay’ film in the Nietzschean sense, finding its gaiety in the perpetually transforming play of the artist. The last photograph in the script is of Jarman himself, seriously ill and aware of his approaching death, flamboyantly posing with the royal crown on his head, king for an hour. This indeed is ‘play on the brink of an abyss, absolute play’44 and this transformative urge is resonantly expressed by the line in the film (slightly adapted from Marlowe): ‘Imagine this dark prison were your court.’ Yet the Nietzschean striving towards self-transcendence in Marlowe, Jarman, and Foucault derives its energies from an equally strong awareness of all the counter-forces which resist transformation. There is a dialectic of freedom and necessity in Nietzsche which is apparent in his lifelong quest to understand ‘how one becomes what one is’.45 If life is a perpetual process of becoming, this process is also inescapably governed by the intractability of one’s desires, by ‘what one is’. The inability to transform or transcend the self and its desires, however painful and conflicting they may be, gives rise to a longing for selfcancellation, for death, for oblivion. The ‘happy ending’ in which Lightborn throws away the poker and kisses Edward, the ending which Jarman teasingly claimed had ‘rescued the play’,46 is not the actual ending of the film. The last words on the soundtrack, heard over a blacked-out screen, are: ‘Come death, and with thy fingers close my eyes, / Or if I live let me forget myself.’ Colin MacCabe called these lines ‘Jarman’s rather than Edward’s or Marlowe’s’47 but they are Marlowe’s as well as Jarman’s, transferred from the scene in which Edward gives away his crown (5.1.110–11). In this last despairing wish to ‘forget myself’ and escape the dark prison of the self, the closet of the heart, Jarman is once again surprisingly faithful to his source.

MUP_Wymer_12_Chap 11

154

7/25/05, 5:20 PM

edward ii

155

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 162. The opposition between a safely conservative Shakespeare and a dangerously radical Marlowe has a mythic force for many people but does indeed prove to be ‘mythic’ in some respects. Richard Dutton has made the important point that it is Shakespeare’s plays rather than Marlowe’s that appear to have suffered more from political censorship. See ‘Shakespeare and Marlowe: Censorship and Construction’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 23 (1993), 1–29. 2 Marlowe: The Critical Heritage 1588–1896, ed. Millar MacLure (London: Routledge, 1979), p. 37. 3 Nicholas Davidson, ‘Marlowe and Atheism’, in Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture, ed. Darryll Grantley and Peter Roberts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), pp. 129–47 (p. 142). Both Baines and Kyd were undoubtedly under pressure to incriminate Marlowe at this point, but both knew him well and the picture they paint of him is remarkably consistent. 4 Hero and Leander II, ll. 155–226, in Christopher Marlowe, The Poems, ed. Millar MacLure (London: Methuen, 1968). 5 Peake, Derek Jarman, p. 79. 6 Edmund White, The Literary Review (May 1986). 7 Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act reads as follows: ‘1) A local authority shall not: a) Intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality. b) Promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. 2) Nothing in subsection 1 shall be taken to prohibit the doing of anything for the purpose of treating or preventing the spread of disease. 3) In any proceedings in connection with the application of this section a court shall draw such inferences as to the intention of the local authority as may reasonably be drawn from the evidence before it.’ 8 Jarman, Up in the Air, p. 190. 9 Ibid., p. 193. 10 Geoff Brown, The Times (17 October 1991). 11 Derek Malcolm, Guardian (17 October 1991). 12 Francis Spufford, ‘Blank Verse and Body Fluids’, The Times Literary Supplement (15 November 1991), p. 19. 13 Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 26. ‘Fucking was a problem … In the end they had a cuddle. I wanted an act of buggery’ (ibid.). 14 Alex Cox, ‘Stage Fright’, Guardian (9 August 2002). 15 A failure to distinguish sufficiently between screenplay and film is evident in J. Horger, ‘Derek Jarman’s Film Adaptation of Marlowe’s Edward II’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 11:4 (1993), 37–40. 16 Jarman, Queer Edward II, pp. 104, 114. 17 Jarman’s complaint that ‘to be a queer in the cinema is almost impossible’ was ironically substantiated by the video cover used for Edward II. A careful selection of text (‘A cracking tale of murder, intrigue and doomed love’) and images (three stills of Edward with Isabella, one of Gaveston with Isabella, none of Edward with Gaveston) succeeded in completely concealing from any prospective purchaser that the film was centrally concerned with a male homosexual relationship. 18 Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, ed. Charles R. Forker, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). All further quotations are from this edition. 19 Alan Bray, ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England’, History Workshop, 29 (Spring 1990), 1–19 (p. 10).

MUP_Wymer_12_Chap 11

155

7/25/05, 5:20 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

156

derek jarman

20 The medieval source is a letter from a papal notary, Manuel de Fienschi, to Edward III, written at least eight years after his father’s supposed murder in 1327, claiming that Edward II was living as a hermit in Lombardy. A recent book has argued strongly that this claim should be believed. See Ian Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March, Ruler of England, 1327–1330 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002). 21 Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 20. 22 The slaughterhouse imagery of this scene is derived from one of the drafts of Neutron: ‘Seq. 78 INT BUNKER SLAUGHTER-HOUSE[:] ORDERLIES are hosing blood into the gutters from a line of bodies hung on meat hooks that pass in front of masked BUTCHERS in blood-stained aprons’ (BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 20, Item 4a). One of the few non-artistic jobs that Jarman ever did was to work for a few weeks on a city survey of slaughter-houses when he was in America in the summer of 1964. See Jarman, At Your Own Risk, p. 49. 23 Mike O’Pray, ‘Damning Desire’, Sight and Sound, 1:6 n.s. (October 1991), p. 10. 24 Both script and film have approximately eighty distinct sequences (the exact number depending on how one classifies a number of brief images inserted into the middle of scenes) and there are only a couple of sequences present in the script but not in the film or vice versa. However, the degree of divergence is considerable. The first thirteen sequences in the film correspond to the following sequence numbers given in the script: 2, 3 and 5, 8, 9, 20, 21, 22, 6, 10, 17, 11, 24, 27. After this, there is a much greater degree of correspondence but significant differences remain. 25 O’Pray, ‘Damning Desire’, p. 11. 26 ‘My daily diet is heart-breaking sobs, / That almost rends the closet of my heart’ (V.iii.21–2). 27 Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 52. 28 Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 4. 29 Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 18. 30 Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 18. 31 Jarman, At Your Own Risk, p. 64. 32 T. McAlindon, English Renaissance Tragedy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), p. 119. See also Sara Munson Deats, ‘Myth and Metamorphosis in Marlowe’s Edward II’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 22:3 (1980), 304–21. 33 Claude J. Summers, ‘Sex, Politics, and Self-Realization in Edward II’, in A Poet and a Filthy Play-maker’: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Constance Kuriyama (New York: AMS Press, 1988), p. 231. 34 Spufford, ‘Blank Verse and Body Fluids’, p. 19. 35 Most discussions of homosexuality in Renaissance writing take their cue from Alan Bray’s Foucauldian approach in Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982). Hence critics like Bruce Smith, Jonathan Goldberg, and Gregory Bredbeck feel able to ignore entirely Constance Kuriyama’s detailed psychoanalytic study of Marlowe, Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980). Conversely, Matthew N. Proser’s more recent psychoanalytic approach, The Gift of Fire: Aggression and the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), does not mention Foucault anywhere. 36 ‘The term “homosexual” which identifies and ostracizes a group because of their desires and inclinations, is a nineteenth-century clinical invention, c. 1860’ (Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 21). 37 Jarman, At Your Own Risk, p. 31. The idea that ‘homosexuality’ as a distinct category is a post-Renaissance invention has become the orthodoxy in Renaissance studies but has been ably challenged by Joseph Cady in ‘“Masculine Love,”

MUP_Wymer_12_Chap 11

156

7/25/05, 5:20 PM

edward ii

38

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

39

40 41 42 43

44 45

46 47

157

Renaissance Writing, and the “New Invention” of Homosexuality’, in Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context, ed. Claude J. Summers (New York: Haworth Press, 1992), pp. 9–40. One of Cady’s principal criticisms of the ‘new-inventionist’ position, as he calls it, is its over-reliance on legal evidence. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, repr. 1996), pp. 97–8. Lawrence Stone, ‘An Exchange with Michel Foucault’, The New York Review of Books (31 March 1983), p. 43. Quoted in James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p. 236. Miller’s valuable book includes substantial documentation of Foucault’s sadomasochistic interests. Foucault himself thought that, ‘The private life of an individual, his sexual preference, and his work are interrelated, not because the work translates his sexual life, but because the work includes the whole life as well as the text’ (Miller, p. 19. The italics are Miller’s). Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 150. Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 22. Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 150. See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), Chapter 5, ‘Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play’. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 220. The subtitle of Nietzsche’s autobiographical work, Ecce Homo. In the preface to Madness and Civilization, Foucault declared that all of his inquiries would be carried out ‘under the sun of the great Nietzschean quest’ and James Miller used this as the structuring principle of his biography of Foucault. Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 162. Colin MacCabe, ‘A Post-national European Cinema: A Consideration of Derek Jarman’s The Tempest and Edward II’ [1992], reprinted in The Eloquence of the Vulgar (London: British Film Institute, 1999), pp. 107–15 (p. 114).

MUP_Wymer_12_Chap 11

157

7/25/05, 5:20 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Still homesick for the ice’: Wittgenstein (1993)

12

Many people had assumed that Edward II would be Jarman’s final film but, despite his doubts about whether he would survive for another year, he continued to look for new projects, while also completing a series of paintings for the Manchester City Art Gallery (exhibited under the title Queer), writing a further instalment of autobiography (At Your Own Risk) and assembling some reflections on colour which were published as Chroma. One script which he worked on during 1992 and which failed to reach the screen was Narrow Rooms, an adaptation of a James Purdy novel set in West Virginia concerning a sequence of violent and obsessive homosexual relationships. The project foundered when Channel Four objected to the casting of Keith Collins in a central role and Jarman refused to reallocate the part. Nearly all Jarman’s planned feature films, whether completed or not, were highly personal projects from the very outset, generated by his own interests and enthusiasms. However, in the summer of 1992 he accepted a surprise offer from Tariq Ali to make a one-hour television film about the life and ideas of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, to be shown on Channel Four as part of a series. The original plan had been to make twelve films but, in the event, only four scripts were commissioned. These were Socrates by Howard Brenton, Spinoza by Tariq Ali, Locke by David Edgar, and Wittgenstein by Terry Eagleton. Howard Brenton’s script was never filmed but Spinoza: The Apostle of Reason, directed by Chris Spencer, and Citizen Locke, directed by Agnieszka Piotrowska (rather than Peter Wollen as originally planned), were both transmitted in 1994 as fifty-two-minute television films. Unlike films about painters, which are numerous enough to constitute a genre with its own conventions and expectations, films about philosophers which are anything more than straightforward documentaries are extremely rare and were virtually non-existent when Jarman made Wittgenstein. Since then, we have had Iris (2001), which focused

MUP_Wymer_13_Chap 12

158

7/25/05, 5:21 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

wittgenstein

159

on Iris Murdoch’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease rather than on her ideas, Derrida: The Movie (2003), the real interest of which, despite its entertainment value, was mainly as ‘lifestyle pornography’,1 and a South Bank Show television drama, ‘Broken Morning’ (ITV, 31 August 2003), about how the life of Camus might have developed, had he not died in the 1960 car crash. The film which has come closest to replicating Jarman’s achievement in dramatising both the life and the ideas of a major thinker in a way that is mutually illuminating is Isaac Julien’s Black Skin, White Mask (1996), about the anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon. Two obvious reasons for the shortage of philosophical biopics are that, first, the lives of many philosophers have been extremely dull. A faithful film of the life of Immanuel Kant, one of the undisputed giants of post-Cartesian philosophy, might have little more to record than his regular mealtimes and daily walks. Secondly, there is arguably, as Jarman himself says, something ‘antithetical to film’2 in philosophy, with its dependence on language, and often a highly abstract form of language, rather than image. To show a philosopher at work is potentially even more cinematically problematic than to show a painter at work. The stasis, silence, and solitude of the artist’s studio is at least offset by the gradual emergence of a filmable image and a palpable sense of the (often erotic) tension between the artist and his model. But what do we see when we film someone thinking? In fact Jarman’s task was made easier both by the fact that Wittgenstein led a fascinatingly eccentric life and by the fact that his later writings explicitly challenge the notion of allegedly ‘private’ mental events which cannot be represented or communicated. Described by Bertrand Russell as ‘perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating’,3 Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889 as the eighth and youngest child of an immensely wealthy family of assimilated and Christianised Austrian Jews. After a technical education, he pursued pioneering research into aeronautics at Manchester University but soon became interested in the philosophy of mathematics and the attempts by Russell and Gottlieb Frege to provide a firm logical foundation for mathematics. He worked with Russell in Cambridge for two years before moving to a remote village in Norway to write up his ideas. On the outbreak of war in 1914, he enlisted as an ordinary soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army in the hope that the confrontation with death would give meaning to his life. He did indeed experience something akin to a religious conversion after reading Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief, and when he completed the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while

MUP_Wymer_13_Chap 12

159

7/25/05, 5:21 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

160

derek jarman

a prisoner-of-war, his rigorous account of how propositions map onto the world of facts now led towards a number of ethical and mystical conclusions which drew attention to the severe limitations of what can meaningfully be communicated by logical or factual propositions. Some things can only be shown rather than said and he ended the work with the famous words ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’. His new outlook led him to give away his vast fortune, abandon philosophy, and teach for six years in elementary village schools in Austria. Drawn back to Cambridge in 1929, he became dissatisfied with some of the arguments of the Tractatus and developed a different account of language, one which saw meaning as arising from the use to which words are put within a variety of language games rather than through a hidden logical structure which could be correlated with the structure of facts. Still dissatisfied with Cambridge academic life, he returned for a time to Norway and also attempted, without success, to find work in Stalin’s Soviet Union as a manual labourer. On the outbreak of the Second World War, he left his Cambridge Chair of Philosophy to work as a hospital porter in London during the Blitz. After the war he resumed academic life for a couple of years but then resigned his post to live in a remote hamlet on the west coast of Ireland. When he died in 1951, nearly all his later philosophical writings were still unpublished but they have since been gathered together under various titles, the most important of which is the Philosophical Investigations. Since he wrote provocatively about art, religion, and psychology as well as about linguistics, logic, and mathematics, he has always attracted interest outside normal academic circles and in the introduction to his script, Eagleton calls him ‘the philosopher of poets and composers, playwrights and novelists’.4 This first version of the script, set mainly in Cambridge during the mid-1930s, left out a good deal of the life in order to concentrate on some of Wittgenstein’s most important later ideas on language. Eagleton used a number of interchanges between Wittgenstein, Russell, G. E. Moore, and John Maynard Keynes, leavened by some effective humour, to clarify the notion of language as a tool, rather than a picture, useful and meaningful only within a specific social practice, a specific ‘form of life’, a specific language game. He also managed to convey the constant self-torment to which Wittgenstein was prone in his pursuit of a life of absolute integrity, an integrity both maintained and compromised by his romantic attachments to young men. As he tells Russell, ‘I’ve hardly lived a day – not a single day – when the thought of destroying myself hasn’t occurred to me, But it’s no good; it wouldn’t be the decent thing. If suicide’s allowed, then everything’s allowed.’5 There is little in this

MUP_Wymer_13_Chap 12

160

7/25/05, 5:21 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

wittgenstein

161

script about the fundamental ‘atomic’ propositions with which the Tractatus was concerned and nothing about the relationship between logic and mathematics which was one of Wittgenstein’s major preoccupations, but Eagleton was probably correct in thinking that these topics would have been difficult to make accessible to a television audience. Jarman thought it was a good script but wanted to increase the humour and the biographical coverage. Budgetary considerations also meant that any realistic representation of Cambridge in the 1930s was out of the question. After Jarman and Ken Butler, acting once more as back-up director, had made a number of major changes, Tariq Ali thought the revised version (expanded to seventy-five minutes’ running time) would be suitable for theatrical release and he was able to supplement the Channel Four money with funding from the British Film Institute and Uplink, Jarman’s Japanese distribution company, giving a total budget of about £300,000. The two-week shoot began on 5 October 1992 in a small studio near Waterloo station and, as with most of Jarman’s films, was completed on time and within budget. One of the most obvious changes to the Eagleton script was to remove any realistic background shots and photograph the actors against black drapes. Jarman wrote of this decision: ‘My criticism of being married to scenery comes right over into the film, which is set nowhere. It demonstrates that the historicising attitude to biopic is totally irrelevant, questioning all of that in one black drape.’6 In his detailed review of the film, Wittgenstein’s biographer Ray Monk said that the black background ‘creates the entirely apposite impression that this is a story that is happening, not in any particular place, but rather in somebody’s – Wittgenstein’s – mind’.7 He would also presumably find it apposite to what he described in his biography as ‘Wittgenstein’s ahistorical, existential style of philosophising’.8 Yet the suggestion of an existential void contradicts Wittgenstein’s argument that words only have meaning as part of a definite (and therefore historical) ‘form of life’ and erases the kinds of distinction – such as the way philosophy was practised at Cambridge rather than Oxford – which are highly pertinent. As Monk himself had noted: ‘It is almost inconceivable that a man who claimed proudly never to have read a word of Aristotle would have been given any tutorial responsibilities at all in Oxford, let alone be allowed to preside over the affairs of the department.’9 Wittgenstein’s deliberate ignorance of Aristotle is in fact comically alluded to in the film when Russell’s slightly camp barber describes it as ‘shocking’. Against the black backgrounds are paraded, in vivid colours like exotic birds, such Cambridge and Bloomsbury figures as Bertrand Russell (Michael Gough), Ottoline Morrell (Tilda Swinton), and J. M.

MUP_Wymer_13_Chap 12

161

7/25/05, 5:21 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

162

derek jarman

Keynes (John Quentin), the more down-to-earth G. E. Moore being edited out. Ottoline Morrell is particularly extraordinary, appearing in a succession of pink, green, and scarlet hats and boas made of ostrich feathers, her vulgar ostentation contrasting sharply with Wittgenstein’s own shabby appearance and probably alluding to the costumes worn by his favourite film actress, Carmen Miranda. She is one of a number of female parts added to the original script and all the women (with the exception of Wittgenstein’s mother who is shown putting her hands tenderly on her son’s shoulders in the pre-credit sequence) display a shallow and sometimes aggressive refusal to understand his arguments and motivations. Worst of all are the three mannish female students who chant ‘Witters-gitters, witters-gitters, witters-gitters, fairy, fairy, fairy!’ and give him a V-sign.10 This prompts him to exclaim ‘What’s the logical structure of this gesture? It doesn’t have one!’ and to abandon the entire theory of meaning which he had constructed in the Tractatus. The incident is adapted from a famous anecdote about Wittgenstein’s friend, the economist Piero Sraffa, brushing his chin with his fingertips and asking Wittgenstein what was the logical form of that gesture, a question which supposedly prompted a major philosophical rethink.11 Eagleton, partly for comic purposes no doubt, had converted the episode into an encounter with an angry cyclist, but it was Jarman who created the three jeering female cyclists, a chorus of harridans who swell the ranks of the film’s other uncomprehending women. The two other most significant changes made to the Eagleton script were the introduction of a young Wittgenstein who acts as an autobiographical narrator throughout the film, and a comic green Martian, ‘Mr Green’, who engages in philosophical dialogues with Wittgenstein. Both figures represent something important about the adult Wittgenstein. The young boy reminds us of the childlike sense of wonder which remains at the heart of the most sophisticated philosophy, the impulse to ask questions like ‘Why is there anything at all, rather than just nothing?’, a question which haunted Heidegger as well as Wittgenstein. The Martian, who was particularly disliked by Eagleton, similarly reminds us of the necessity of adopting an ‘alien’ perspective when doing any serious thinking. Jarman took the idea of a Martian asking ‘How many toes do philosophers have?’ from something Wittgenstein wrote only a month before his death and which appears in his posthumous book On Certainty.12 Jarman proceeds to develop the conceit in ways which amusingly question the notion of certainty. He has ‘Mr Green’ echo a famous lecture by the ‘common sense’ philosopher G. E. Moore by declaring that ‘I know this is a hand … it’s a certain certainty’, only what he is holding up is a green claw. In another scene he states

MUP_Wymer_13_Chap 12

162

7/25/05, 5:21 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

wittgenstein

163

confidently and tautologously that ‘Green is green’ but when he appears at Wittgenstein’s deathbed he has lost his colouring and so ‘Green is not green’ in this case. As an Austrian Jew, whose first language was German and who had never been formally trained in philosophy, Wittgenstein was an alien in Cambridge and when Germany annexed Austria and threatened war with England, he had to acquire a British passport rapidly to avoid the possible consequences of being classified as an ‘enemy alien’ in England or as a ‘German Jew’ if he returned to the country of his birth. When, in the film, he is shown working as a monastery gardener in 1929 and asked to come ‘home’, he replies ‘Home. Where’s that?’ and on being told that it is Cambridge, exclaims ‘God help me’. His largely secret homosexuality probably increased this feeling of alienation which went much deeper than any uncertainty about national identity. Towards the end of his life he wrote ‘[I] feel myself to be an alien in the world’13 but this ‘Martian’ feeling was essential to his philosophical work, to the extent that the phrase ‘alienated intellectual’ could be considered a tautology. Although Eagleton had been aware for some time that his script had been substantially altered, when he saw a rough cut of the film in November 1992 he was furious and declared that it was ‘full of errors’.14 Jarman attempted to appease him by acknowledging that his script was indeed ‘the foundation, without it the film would never have been made’15 but also told him that he needed to recognise that film-making was a collaborative process in which the script was only the starting point. The efforts of Tariq Ali to defuse this quarrel were of no avail and Jarman wrote in his diary that ‘In all my life I have never met such uncouth and surly bad manners.’16 One consequence of this quarrel was that both versions of the script, each with a separate introduction, were published together in a single volume by the British Film Institute. Since the argument continued in a milder form following the release of the film in the spring of 1993, it is worth pointing out that Eagleton did see a good deal to admire in the finished product, writing in the Guardian that, ‘Karl Johnson, a veritable Ludwig lookalike, is splendidly intense and intelligent, and much of the movie scintillates with Jarman’s bizarrely creative imagination’.17 Conversely, when Gary Indiana, in another review, said that ‘The exemplary strength of Jarman’s film is that it really does convey an idea of the way Wittgenstein’s mind worked’,18 he was paying tribute to the way Eagleton’s script (much of which was retained) makes such an effective use of Wittgenstein’s own words, particularly in the three seminar scenes. Most of the reviews were positive and there was near-unanimity that Karl Johnson, a fine actor whose

MUP_Wymer_13_Chap 12

163

7/25/05, 5:21 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

164

derek jarman

ability to suggest spiritual intensity had been apparent in his performance as Ariel in The Tempest as well as in his more recent role of Christ in the famous 1985 National Theatre production of the Mysteries, had achieved an eerily exact mimicry of Wittgenstein’s looks, mannerisms, and tone of voice, even down to the trace of a Viennese accent. Eagleton continued to think that Jarman had shifted the film towards ‘character’ and away from ‘ideas’ and that this was because ‘Jarman, for all his admirable radicalism, has a very English middle-class sensibility, which is light years removed from the austerity and intellectual passion of his subject’.19 Others, including Ray Monk, thought that Jarman had remained deeply faithful to his subject whilst making a picture which, though it was a commissioned project and had been co-written and codirected, was in every important respect ‘A Derek Jarman Film’, as announced in the credits. For the remainder of this chapter I want to examine some of the reasons for Jarman’s close emotional and intellectual identification with Wittgenstein rather than emphasising, as Eagleton does, the differences in their sensibility. One effect of this will be to move Wittgenstein from its current rather marginal position in Jarman’s work to a place much nearer the centre. When Jarman wrote in his introduction to the script that ‘I have much of Ludwig in me’,20 the obvious way of interpreting this for many people, though perhaps it is not finally the most important, would be in terms of a shared and not entirely comfortable homosexuality. The ‘disease’ which Jarman identified in Caravaggio and Pasolini was also present, in a more self-denying form, in Wittgenstein: ‘He was uncomfortable with his sexuality, yet could not believe he was not a part of the world.’21 Both Jarman and Wittgenstein were repeatedly attracted to younger men and in the film the figure ‘Johnny’ (played by Keith Collins) is a composite of the most important young men in Wittgenstein’s life – David Pinsent, Francis Skinner, and Ben Richards. When Jarman has Wittgenstein reflect upon Russell’s charge that he is ‘infecting’ too many young men, the choice of word is not accidental. It is followed by lines which Jarman adapted from a poignant passage about Francis Skinner in Wittgenstein’s notebooks: ‘I have known Johnny three times. And each time I began with a feeling that there was nothing wrong. But after I felt shamed.’ These lines are spoken by Wittgenstein as he crouches on the floor of a huge bird-cage, accompanied by a green parrot which is in its own smaller cage. In 1929 Wittgenstein gave a ‘Lecture on Ethics’ in which he said: ‘My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk on Ethics and Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is

MUP_Wymer_13_Chap 12

164

7/25/05, 5:21 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

wittgenstein

165

perfectly, absolutely hopeless.’22 In the light of this it seems clear that the cage is linguistic as well as sexual. It does not simply represent the self-imprisoning tendencies of a (homo)sexuality which is not at ease with itself ‘in a world where such a love is illegal’. It stands for the whole psychological and linguistic problem of how the self finds meaning and communicates that meaning to others. Although I said these lines were ‘spoken’ by Wittgenstein, they are in fact heard in voice-over as if they were his unspoken inner thoughts, a point of some significance. The scene which follows is titled in the script ‘The Soul is a Prisoner’ and shows Wittgenstein and Johnny in bed together. In it Wittgenstein tries to explain to his lover how his new theory of language demolishes the notion of an isolated philosophical subject which has prevailed since Descartes: WITTGENSTEIN Well, for many years at the centre of philosophy was a picture of the lonely human soul, brooding over its private experiences. JOHNNY Yeah, everyone knows that. WITTGENSTEIN This soul is a prisoner of his own body, and he is locked out from contact with others by the walls of their bodies. I wanted to get rid of this picture. There is no private meaning. We are what we are only because we share a common language and common forms of life.23

This persuasive rendering of one of the central arguments of the Philosophical Investigations is qualified by the fact that the only point when Wittgenstein emerges from his complete absorption in what he is saying to actually look at Johnny is when he asks urgently ‘Do you understand what I’m saying? Do you understand what I’m saying?’ and there is a brief flashback to an anguished Wittgenstein breaking his pencil in frustration as he fails to communicate with the schoolgirl he is supposed to be teaching. The scene ends ambiguously with Johnny smiling comfortingly at Wittgenstein as if words do not really matter. There is, however, a clear implication that Wittgenstein’s soul remains a lonely prisoner and that, unlike that of the hedonistic Keynes, it cannot be satisfied by ‘the warmth of a sated body’. Jarman’s life and art took the form of a quest to find and then be himself and he recognised the same quest in Wittgenstein: ‘Ludwig said, “How can I be myself?” That is modern.’24 In such an attempt at self-definition, other people can seem either irrelevant or threatening, their voices drowning out one’s own thoughts and preventing any true identity from forming. The first two scenes after the credits seem to suggest that hell is indeed other people since we are told by the young Wittgenstein that ‘The horrors of hell can be experienced in a single day’ and we

MUP_Wymer_13_Chap 12

165

7/25/05, 5:21 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

166

derek jarman

then see him surrounded by his tutors, who at first mouth silently and then deafen him with their ceaseless babble, forcing him to cover his ears with both hands. Jarman believed that you can only become an individual by being alone25 but both he and Wittgenstein risked the quite different danger of becoming trapped in a form of solipsism and, although one cannot make out what the tutors are actually saying, the real hell of the scene may be, as the script indicates, that they are mouthing fragments of his own philosophy back to him. Wittgenstein’s argument in the Philosophical Investigations that there is no such thing as a private language seems like a determined attempt to combat his own brooding inwardness and the solipsism of such earlier statements as ‘there is really only one world soul, which I for preference call my soul’.26 The problem of self and others is particularly acute for truly original artists and thinkers since in order to see the world in a new aspect they normally require protracted periods of solitude. Wittgenstein’s need to escape periodically from Cambridge to remote villages in Norway or Ireland found a close parallel in Jarman’s movements between the Charing Cross Road and Prospect Cottage. Jarman understood perfectly well that Wittgenstein needed silence and solitariness as much as he or Caravaggio had done, and at one stage he planned to ‘hold the whole [film] together with Wittgenstein in his empty room, philosophies of silence that cannot be understood, only felt’.27 Yet a thought or a work of art which is so ‘private’ that it can neither be understood nor felt by anyone else is an absurdity, and a remarkable feature of the film as it was eventually made is that all Wittgenstein’s philosophical thinking takes place in the company of others. There is no clear distinction between the emergence of a thought and the effort to communicate it to other people and the three seminar scenes give a splendid picture of philosophy as an activity rather than a set of doctrines, an activity only meaningful as a dialogue or special form of language game played with others. Despite the repeated assertions that ‘nothing is hidden. Everything is open to view’, there is a continued tension arising from Wittgenstein’s failures to make himself fully understood, resulting in outbursts of anger and frustration as well as moments of comedy. The tension between staying true to something deep inside oneself and engaging meaningfully with others is as much of a problem in art, life, sex, and love, as it is in philosophy and it is a problem which Jarman experienced at times almost as painfully as Wittgenstein, though in the highly interactive and collaborative creativity of film making he found his own partial solution. At the end of Jarman’s film, as Wittgenstein lies dying, Keynes sums up his life for him in an eloquent fable (which was part of Eagleton’s

MUP_Wymer_13_Chap 12

166

7/25/05, 5:21 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

wittgenstein

167

original script) about ‘a young man who dreamed of reducing the world to pure logic’ and actually succeeded in doing so. However, he found that he could not live in this pure world of ice and ‘as he grew into a wise old man, he came to understand that roughness and ambiguity aren’t imperfections. They’re what make the world turn.’ This fable effectively represents the change in Wittgenstein’s thinking during the 1930s, but his move back to ‘the rough ground’ of existence does not lead to a happy ending because ‘something in him was still homesick for the ice, where everything was radiant and absolute and relentless … So now he was marooned between earth and ice, at home in neither. And this was the cause of all his grief.’ What in some sense is a fable about one man’s understanding of the relationship between logic and grammar is also, of course, a fable about the spirit and the flesh. In Culture and Value Wittgenstein speaks of ‘The greater “purity” of objects which don’t affect the senses, numbers for instance’.28 Jarman had little understanding of the more technical aspects of Wittgenstein’s work in mathematics and logic but he too, when younger, had been immersed in philosophies which were haunted by a dream of pure spirit, the NeoPlatonic and alchemical thinking which influenced all his early films. Although now older, wiser, and closer to Keynes than Wittgenstein in his attitude to the flesh, he never entirely repudiated that dream of pure spirit. When he complained in a diary entry written shortly after he had filmed Wittgenstein that viewers of Sebastiane had seen its hero only as ‘a naked, handsome man, they did not see him as a spirit’, he went on to say, ‘No character in my films is more than a spirit, Ariel, they are not flesh and blood by any imagination.’29 Ray Monk says of Wittgenstein that ‘in a way that is centrally important but difficult to define, he had lived a devoutly religious life’30 and the connection of Jarman’s protagonist with Sebastian has been made by Michael O’Pray: ‘His anguish and sublimation are reminiscent of Sebastian’s denial of his sexuality and religious martyrdom.’31 The crucial difference is that by the time he made Wittgenstein Jarman’s emotional identification with such ‘tortured’ figures was counterbalanced by a greater degree of ironic detachment. Wittgenstein frequently cuts a rather absurd figure, as if Jarman is now able to look back on aspects of his younger self with mockery as well as sympathy. This ‘balanced’ attitude is not a characteristic of most of his work but he wrote that ‘I am very happy I have made a sophisticated comedy that more accurately reflects my state of mind than all the previous films.’32 Wittgenstein’s inability to achieve such a comic detachment from his own spiritual struggles is itself a source of amusement. On his deathbed he tells Keynes that he would ‘like to have composed a philosophical work consisting

MUP_Wymer_13_Chap 12

167

7/25/05, 5:21 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

168

derek jarman

entirely of jokes’ and, when asked why he didn’t, replies, ‘Sadly, I didn’t have a sense of humour.’ Wittgenstein apparently once told the philosopher Gilbert Ryle that ‘not only had a good British film never been made, but such a thing was an impossibility’.33 It is not clear whether this statement should be classified as an induction from previous experience, in which case it should be open to subsequent correction, or whether it should be regarded as stating a more fundamental form of logical impossibility. One would like to think that Wittgenstein would have accepted that Jarman’s film was a refutation of his proposition but since his taste was mainly for Hollywood Westerns and musicals, he might well not have done.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23

Christopher Tayler, The Times Literary Supplement (7 February 2003), p. 19. Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 235. Bertrand Russell, Autobiography (London: Unwin, 1975), p. 329. Derek Jarman, Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script, The Derek Jarman Film, p. 5. Ibid., pp. 35–6. At least two, and probably three, of Wittgenstein’s brothers did kill themselves. Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 295. Ray Monk, ‘Between Earth and Ice: Derek Jarman’s Film of the Life of Wittgenstein’, The Times Literary Supplement (19 March 1993), p. 16. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990; repr. London: Vintage, 1991), p. 497. Ibid., p. 496. In the picture which appears in the script, two of them are making an alternative hostile gesture with the middle finger but in the film itself all three are making Vsigns. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, pp. 260–1. Remark 430 begins ‘I meet someone from Mars and he asks me “How many toes have human beings got?” ’ (Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), p. 56e. Ibid., p. 516. Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 246. Ibid., p. 247. Ibid., p. 247. Terry Eagleton, ‘A Suitable Case for Treatment’, Guardian (18 March 1993). Gary Indiana, ‘Philosopher in the Bedroom’, The Village Voice (21 September 1993). Eagleton, ‘A Suitable Case for Treatment’. Jarman, Wittgenstein, p. 67. Ibid., p. 64. Jarman told Michael O’Pray that ‘it was the torture of the philosopher’s repressed sexuality that made him an appealing subject’ (O’Pray, Dreams of England, p. 199). Quoted by Ray Monk in Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 277. Jarman, Wittgenstein, p. 132.

MUP_Wymer_13_Chap 12

168

7/25/05, 5:21 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

wittgenstein

169

24 Ibid., p. 64. 25 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 75. 26 Quoted by Hans Kluga in ‘“Whose House is That?” Wittgenstein on the Self’, in The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, ed. Hans Kluga and David G. Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 320–53 (p. 330). 27 Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 142. 28 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright in collaboration with Hekki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 26e. 29 Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 255. 30 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 580. 31 O’Pray, Dreams of England, p. 200. 32 Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 238. Later on, as he prepared for the interview with Jeremy Isaacs which would be his last appearance on television, he wrote: ‘I want to convey some of the fun of my life and less of the doom and gloom. The balance I have achieved in Wittgenstein much more clearly reflects my situation than Edward II or, for that case, Caravaggio – if torture crept into my life it was with the HIV and nowhere else’ (Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 306). 33 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 275.

MUP_Wymer_13_Chap 12

169

7/25/05, 5:21 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘I want to share this emptiness with you’: Blue (1993)

13

Wittgenstein had been a completely unexpected commission which Jarman, despite his failing health, had rapidly and brilliantly converted into ‘A Derek Jarman Film’ through his usual intense personal identification with his subject. By contrast, his final film Blue was the outcome of nearly twenty years of creative thinking. Although the combination of an unchanging blue screen and a soundtrack which included many reflections upon the physical ravages inflicted on him by AIDS seems to indicate a self-consciously terminal document, the film evolved from an idea he first had in 1974. Following an exhibition of the work of the French avant-garde artist Yves Klein at the Tate in March 1974, Jarman wrote in one of the notebooks which he often used to sketch out his future projects: ‘the blue film for Yves Klein’.1 Yves Klein, who had died in 1962 at the age of 34, had spent the last few years of his short life on a number of projects which tested the boundaries of artistic form in a drive towards the expression of an inner spiritual meaning. These projects included a series of monochrome paintings in red, purple, orange, yellow and blue which were first exhibited in 1956, the construction of ‘Le Vide’ (The Void) in 1958 by painting an art gallery white and leaving it empty, the exchange of ‘Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility’ in 1959 for a specified weight of gold which was later thrown into the Seine, the use of human bodies as ‘living brushes’ to create what he called ‘Anthropométries’ in 1960, and the composition of a Symphonie Monotone consisting of only one musical note.2 His use of monochrome clearly has some resemblances to the work of ‘colour field’ painters like Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still who formed a sub-group within the American Abstract Expressionism movement. For Klein, like them, the line might travel towards infinity, but colour was infinity itself. However, Klein attached particular symbolic significance to certain colours, deriving some of this symbolism from the seventeenth-century Rosicrucian

MUP_Wymer_14_Chap 13

170

7/25/05, 5:22 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

blue

171

philosopher Max Heindl who believed that blue was the highest of all colours and represented the spirit freed from matter. Rosicrucianism was one of the forms taken in the seventeenth century by the occult and alchemical traditions which so fascinated Jarman, and the Philosopher’s Stone itself was later referred to by Thomas Vaughan, the twin brother of Henry Vaughan the poet, as ‘an azure heaven’.3 Blue became Klein’s favourite colour and he found a way of fixing the pure pigment of a deep ultramarine blue so that it lost none of its life or luminosity, in contrast to pigments ground in oil which he found ‘dead’. He patented the result of his new process as International Klein Blue (IKB) and used it for several years both for his monochromatic paintings and his Anthropométries, in which IKB was smeared over the nude bodies of female models before they pressed themselves against white paper. Even without the knowledge of some other intriguing facts about Klein, for instance that he was a Knight of the Order of St Sebastian, it is clear why Jarman would have identified strongly with such a man. His formal radicalism, which attracted a good deal of media attention, was not an attempt to provoke shock and outrage for its own sake, but a serious effort to locate and express something deep within himself, something which he recognised in the occult philosophies of the Renaissance and in Eastern techniques of action and contemplation (he became an expert in judo). Jarman saw Klein’s avant-garde artistic practices, like his own, as part of a protest against the postmodern ‘cacophony of voices’ and ‘pandemonium of image’, as part of the solution rather than part of the problem, but permanently vulnerable to misrepresentation and exploitation by the mass media. When asked in 1989 to take part in a television programme about Klein, Jarman wrote in his diary: ‘I agreed to cooperate only if the work explained Yves and didn’t turn him into a circus – perhaps an interview followed by as many minutes or seconds of blank blue soundless TV? Of course all they really wanted was to have me as a ringmaster whilst they stripped off some girl to offend the public – that was the measure of their ambition.’4 Jarman did not see it as a coincidence that Klein had suffered a fatal heart attack shortly after some of his activities had been shown in the deliberately sensationalist and exploitative Mondo Cane (1962). After completing the editing of The Last of England in 1987, Jarman made a serious attempt to develop his earlier idea of ‘the blue film for Yves Klein’, by filling a notebook (painted blue with gold panelling) with extracts from Klein’s writings, imaginary dialogues with Klein, and some poetry of his own. Some of this material eventually went into Blue while one of the poems, ‘Sunday’ (which begins ‘I want to share this emptiness with you’) was adapted to form part of the voice-over in The Garden.5 The

MUP_Wymer_14_Chap 13

171

7/25/05, 5:22 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

172

derek jarman

plan at this point was to make a film which complemented The Last of England, the projected title Bliss making clear that it would be the blue Paradise to set against the fiery Inferno of the earlier film and would create ‘A world to which refugees from that dark space might journey’.6 In the event, The Garden, with its purgatorial glimpse of redemption through suffering, became the middle term in a loosely conceived trilogy which deliberately echoed that of Dante. Over the next two years, Bliss assumed many different titles – International Blue, Blue is Poison, Into the Blue, My Blue Heaven, A Blueprint for Bliss, and Blueprint – as well as many different forms. The original idea of a film with an unchanging blue screen was rejected, only temporarily as it turned out, as being unlikely to attract any funding, and more theatrical outlines were written, involving combinations of symbolic spectacle, poetry, dialogue, philosophical allusion, and music which recalled, not for the first time in Jarman’s films, the Renaissance court masque. A charity screening of The Garden on 6 January 1991, to raise money for St Mary’s Hospital where Jarman was being treated for his AIDS-related infections, was prefaced by a performance of the Symphonie Monotone as well as readings by Jarman and Tilda Swinton (dressed in blue) of the poetry and dialogues which Jarman had been writing for Bliss. A film loop was used to project onto the screen a continuous image of one of Klein’s monochrome paintings in IKB and a young boy handed out to the audience pebbles painted either blue or gold, the colours associated with the medieval heaven and the Philosopher’s Stone, colours which ‘have affinity in eternity’.7 These performances, the nearest thing yet to the film which was eventually produced, continued for the next eighteen months at a variety of venues, the film loop eventually being replaced by a blue gel, after getting stuck in the projector on a number of occasions. Meanwhile, James Mackay had succeeded in persuading Channel Four to put up some money for script development and during 1991, after completing Edward II, Jarman worked on several new outlines for Bliss, which evolved further and further from the original starting point of a tribute to Yves Klein and eventually metamorphosed into a cartoonlike satirical musical called Pansy. After Channel Four rejected this at the end of 1991, Jarman began, in the summer of 1992, to combine some allusive, epigrammatic, and poetic passages about the colour blue, which he was writing for Chroma, with grimly realistic extracts from his diaries detailing the progress of his various diseases and their treatment. This created the basis of a very powerful soundtrack to accompany his first and purest form of tribute to Klein, an unchanging and imageless blue screen. The entire script found its way into Chroma, most of it

MUP_Wymer_14_Chap 13

172

7/25/05, 5:22 PM

blue

173

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

appearing in the ‘Into the Blue’ chapter, with two paragraphs (one of them rewritten) going into ‘The Perils of Yellow’. It was now a film about Jarman rather than a film about Klein but it was founded on a genuine identification with Klein’s thoughts and, once such an identification had taken place, Jarman cared little about literal biographical details. Earlier, he had written: Yves Klein’s life, like most artists is of no interest at all. It was his conceptual ideas which interested me and the fact that the blue was akin to the ultimatte used for video effects. If I was to make a bio-pic I would completely invent Yves Klein’s life and change his sexuality, just as Hollywood did with pictures about Michelangelo, turning him into a narcissistic character like Mishima, with an ending like Pasolini and a sexuality to match.8

Funding was obtained from the Arts Council, Channel Four (the education and independent film and video departments), Takashi Asai of Uplink, and BBC Radio Three, resulting in an agreed budget of £90,000 by the end of 1992. The completed film, using a blue field generated electronically, was premiered in June 1993 at the Venice Biennale Festival, then screened at Edinburgh in August (where it won the Michael Powell award for best British film), before opening in London in September, just before it was simultaneously broadcast on Channel Four and Radio 3. Listeners who did not have access to a television were invited to apply for a blue postcard which they could stare at during the transmission. Blue was one of a cluster of films addressing the issue of AIDS which were released in the early 1990s, the period when ‘HIV/AIDS was at the height of its public visibility’.9 The films were a mixture of mainstream, art house, and independent video productions and included Cyril Collard, Les Nuits Fauves (English title: Savage Nights) (1992), Gregg Araki, The Living End (1992), Jonathan Demme, Philadelphia (1993), Tom Joslin, Silverlake Life: The View from Here (1993), and Peter Mackenzie Litten, To Die For (American title: Heaven’s a Drag) (1994). The aesthetic interest of Blue seems to me to be of a quite different order of magnitude from that of all the other films in this group, but a question which naturally arises is – to what extent is viewing this film a genuinely pleasurable experience? Its most famous cinematic predecessor, Guy Debord’s Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952), in which an hour of imageless black screen (when the soundtrack was silent) was interrupted from time to time by twenty minutes’ worth of imageless white screen during which a dialogue between five speakers could be heard, was not intended to give pleasure to its audiences. It was

MUP_Wymer_14_Chap 13

173

7/25/05, 5:22 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

174

derek jarman

intended to provoke them to baffled fury, which it frequently did, particularly after they had sat through the last twenty-four minutes of the film, during which the screen remained obstinately black and mute.10 It might seem difficult to persuade even quite sophisticated viewers that spending seventy-six minutes watching an unchanging blue screen might constitute ‘a good night out’, or even ‘a good night in’ for that matter, and Tony Peake records, in a delightfully deadpan way, some of the audience reaction to the first television broadcast of the film: ‘Of the 252 calls taken by the Channel Four duty office after the screening, the majority expressed horror and disappointment. Ten queried problems with the transmission and four declared a preference for red.’11 However, the testimony of many reviewers, who of course saw the film in a cinema rather than on television, and the more considered response of many later critics (including myself) should carry some weight and the almost unanimous opinion has been that not only is this an ‘interesting’ film to discuss, it is one which provides a deeply pleasurable and absorbing viewing experience. Instead of alienating its audiences like Debord’s film, Blue seduces them, drawing them into an experience which is both shared with Jarman and yet remains entirely individual. As Nigel Andrews wrote in the Financial Times: It [Blue] gives you the freedom to flee if you wish … But finally you do not want to escape. The soundtrack is too rich, too astonishing: with Jarman’s words etching life out of death while Simon Fisher Turner’s music works its eerie, elemental magic. And the imagery – that pool of colour that beckons and absorbs your attention and then absorbs it rebaptised, re-sensitised – is too pliant, too precious to be resisted by any filmgoer brought up on the rude unchanging colours of commercial cinema.12

The difficulty of maintaining full concentration throughout the film is one of the reasons why each spectator’s experience of Blue is wholly unique, allowing the screen to be filled with half-formed private associations and desires. ‘Watching’ becomes a rather different experience, at once active and passive. You work to make sense: to assimilate this rather demanding experience and perhaps even to stay awake. But you also accept that your own attention will fade in and out, as your associations take you elsewhere. That drifting vision is an inescapable part of watching Blue.13

If one accepts that Jarman’s film can indeed give a good deal of pleasure to its viewers, there remain further important questions to be asked about the point of such an experience. And part of the point is certainly moral and political. The blank screen promotes an empathetic

MUP_Wymer_14_Chap 13

174

7/25/05, 5:22 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

blue

175

engagement with the problem of Jarman’s own failing eyesight, destroyed by an ‘invisible’ virus and threatening to worsen soon into total blindness. This empathy is achieved without turning Jarman himself into a pitiable ‘spectacle’, the object of horror and disgust as well as pity. Gabriele Griffin offers an interesting discussion of how the film’s central formal conceit allows it to contribute to a continuing and never-to-be-resolved debate about the ‘politics of visibility’.14 When minority groups seek greater recognition of their identities, their needs, and their rights, when they demand to be seen, they render themselves vulnerable to even harsher levels of social control as dormant prejudices are reawakened to gaze at a newly visible and disconcerting otherness. Gaining the appropriate kind of attention is not an easy matter. When we hear on the soundtrack the words, ‘How are we perceived, if we are perceived at all? For the most part we are invisible’, are we hearing an implicit plea to be seen and acknowledged or something more tentative and ambiguous? There is certainly an unresolved ambiguity about who ‘we’ are, which I shall return to later, but the film’s form suggests that the most welcome kind of attention would be for people to listen rather than to gaze. When the radical American group ACT UP [AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power] demonstrated against an exhibition of photographs of people with AIDS held at the New York Museum of Modern Art in the late 1980s, their slogan was: ‘Stop looking at us: start listening to us.’15 This contemporary political standpoint has interesting connections with much older traditions claiming that true understanding is conveyed through the auditory channel rather than through the superficiality of visual spectacle. Ben Jonson, in his Prologue to The Staple of News (1626), tells the audience at the Blackfriars Theatre that ‘He’d have you wise / Much rather by your ears than by your eyes’ and makes the same point in a second Prologue, written for a performance of the play at court, when he distinguishes ‘scholars, that can judge and fair report / The sense they hear’ from ‘the vulgar sort of nutcrackers’ (the Renaissance equivalent of popcorn eaters) ‘that only come for sight’.16 One source of this distrust of the visual by a number of Renaissance writers, and by Jarman himself, is Plato’s famous distinction between the world of appearance and the transcendent realm of ideal forms which can be apprehended only by the mind rather than by the senses. Another source is the Judeo-Christian suspicion of ‘graven images’. When Jarman’s film tells us ‘From the bottom of your heart, pray to be released from image’, it is aligning itself with Plato’s distrust of appearance and Judeo-Christian warnings against idolatry as well as registering a protest against the postmodern ‘pandemonium of image’ created by global capitalism.

MUP_Wymer_14_Chap 13

175

7/25/05, 5:22 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

176

derek jarman

It is also aligning Jarman himself with the still potent archetype of the ‘blind bard’, the poet or prophet whose ability to see the inner truth is ironically correlated with a literal blindness in relation to the physical world. Homer, Tiresias, and Milton are the most famous embodiments of this archetype and Milton’s lines on his blindness in Book III of Paradise Lost the most eloquent expression of it (‘Thus with the year / Seasons return; but not to me returns / Day, or the sweet approach of ev’n or morn … So much the rather thou, celestial Light, / Shine inward’).17 The implication of this archetype is that the most powerful forms of artistic imagination are released from any dependence on image (despite the apparent etymological link) and Jarman makes a direct allusion in his film to one of the many visual conceits in Paradise Lost which resists straightforward visualisation (‘Blue is darkness made visible’).18 Within this tradition, which was eagerly embraced by Jarman’s favourite Romantic poet Blake, the visionary becomes opposed to the visual, rather than being an intensification of it, and the sensory perception of the external world ‘is challenged by an alternative seeing, which has the intensity, at times, of blindness’, and which prefers to gaze on objects without clear forms or boundaries, like the bleak Alpine landscapes celebrated in a number of Romantic poems.19 Or like the blue paintings of Yves Klein. These paintings, just as much as Shelley’s poem on ‘Mont Blanc’, Milton’s descriptions of ‘the dark unbottomed infinite abyss’ through which Satan must journey, or the work of an American ‘colour field’ painter like Barnett Newman, are attempts to express and evoke a feeling of the sublime and it is within this context that Jarman’s film needs to be considered. Central to the film’s meaning are some of the transcendental, ‘sublime’ connotations of the colour blue and their relation to the material human body, whose sufferings are recorded on the soundtrack. Because blue is the colour of the sky, it is easy to assume that the connotations of the spiritual and the infinite which it carried for Max Heindl, Carl Jung, Yves Klein, and Jarman himself are in some way natural and ‘objective’. However, the current orthodoxy among historians and theorists of colour perception such as John Gage or Michel Pastoureau is that there are no transcultural, essential ‘truths’ about the meanings of different colours, though neither are such meanings purely personal: Any history of color is, above all, a social history. Indeed, for the historian – as for the sociologist and the anthropologist – color is a social phenomenon. It is society that ‘makes’ color, defines it, gives it its meaning, constructs its codes and values, establishes its uses, and determines whether it is acceptable or not. The artist, the intellectual, human

MUP_Wymer_14_Chap 13

176

7/25/05, 5:22 PM

blue

177

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

biology, and even nature are ultimately irrelevant to this process of ascribing meaning to color. The issues surrounding color are above all social issues because human beings live in society and not in solitude.20

To give a simple example, the connotations of hope and joy which grey possessed in the late Middle Ages would be unlikely to shape any modern reader’s response to the famous opening sentence of William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984): ‘The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.’21 Both Gage and Pastoureau point out that blue was not a symbolically important colour in either Greek or Roman antiquity, and nor was it in the earlier Middle Ages. Only in the twelfth century did it take on the spiritual significance which it has had ever since within Western culture, becoming, among other things, the conventional colour of the Virgin’s robe. ‘The union of blue and gold that became so prevalent in Western art, and that remains so to this day, had its origins in the twelfth-century desire to evoke divine light and presence.’22 The Romantic secularisation of religious impulses at the end of the eighteenth-century did not involve any change of chromatic symbolism in this respect and the enormously influential novel by Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), centred on a medieval troubador’s quest for a small blue flower seen in a dream. Established as the colour of dreams in the nineteenth century, it was hardly surprising that during the twentieth century ‘in the period between the wars numerous film posters used blue to attack the passerby’s eye with an invitation to come dream in dark movie halls’.23 Of course, the meanings attached to any colour over time far exceed the symbolic coherence which a particular work of art might aim for and there is an element of self-conscious arbitrariness in the way Jarman seizes on certain colour associations for his own purposes in Chroma. There are also a number of associations which he does not choose to mention, which would have been highly germane to his film – such as the use of blue in ancient Egyptian funerary rites to protect the dead in the afterlife.24 However, there is nothing idiosyncratic or arbitrary about his central claim that ‘Blue transcends the solemn geography of human limits’ since he is working within a convention of Western art established since the late Middle Ages that blue can represent the infinite, the disembodied, or, more precisely perhaps, can mediate between the material and the spiritual, since ‘Souls do not have colour.’25 When the soundtrack tells us that blue is ‘an open door to soul / An infinite possibility / Becoming tangible’, the last word starts to open up something very important about Jarman’s film, Yves Klein, and Jarman’s entire philosophy of life and art. Klein’s gestures towards transcendence

MUP_Wymer_14_Chap 13

177

7/25/05, 5:22 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

178

derek jarman

were grounded in the materiality of his art, in the specific blue pigment he developed and patented. This is why Jarman’s paragraph on Klein in Modern Nature ends with the words ‘IKB spirit in matter’.26 Similarly, Klein’s use of ‘living brushes’ resulted in impressions of the human figure which were at once rather abstract and ethereal, yet retained an intimate connection with real human bodies, even at times to the point of near-obscenity, as they reproduced ‘the face of the lower abdomen – a vertical smile’ with a realism recalling Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde. Sacred relics such as the Turin Shroud or the Oviedo cloth, to which Klein’s Anthropométries bear some resemblance, have this similar paradoxical character of being ghostly, spiritual images ‘not made by human hand’, yet perhaps owing their existence to flows of blood and sweat from a human body. If the unchanging blue screen and the passages of lyric poetry represent the desire for transcendence, then the soundtrack also reminds us repeatedly that ours is a life of matter and death in which the body will suffer horrible indignities and will perhaps find its only real release in the act of sex, in fucking. This tension between the sublime and the relentlessly physical is what structures Philip Larkin’s well-known poem ‘High Windows’, where the deliberately coarse opening lines (‘When I see a couple of kids / And guess he’s fucking her and she’s / Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm’) are balanced by the thought in the closing lines of what lies beyond the panes of high windows – ‘the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless’.27 Larkin was more reserved and sceptical than Jarman in his gestures towards the sublime and in an early draft of the poem, the concluding word ‘endless’ is followed, at some distance, by the further phrase ‘and fucking piss’.28 In Blue the inescapable physicality of existence is conveyed chiefly by the catalogues of all the ills which flesh is heir to, including ironically those which might arise as side-effects of the drug treatments Jarman was receiving. After giving us a list of the potential side-effects of DHPG (Ganciclovir), a list which continues for half-a-page of the script and includes ‘fever, rash, abnormal liver function, chills, swelling of the body (oedema), infections, malaise, irregular heartbeat, high blood pressure … shaking, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite (anorexia), diarrhoea, bleeding from the stomach or intestine (intestinal haemorrhage), abdominal pain’, Jarman reveals that ‘In order to be put on the drug you have to sign a piece of paper stating you understand that all these illnesses are a possibility.’ It is rather reminiscent of the moment in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall (1928) when Paul Pennyfeather is told by the prison doctor that he has been certified as capable of undergoing the full range of punishments, including ‘restraint of handcuffs, leg-

MUP_Wymer_14_Chap 13

178

7/25/05, 5:22 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

blue

179

chains, cross-irons, body-belt, canvas dress, close confinement, No. 1 diet, No. 2 diet, birch-rod, and cat-o’-nine tails’. His dismayed response is, ‘But must I have all these at once?’29 The return to the suffering human body – the blue screen representing not only ‘an open door to soul’ but also the after-image on the retina left by ‘the shattering bright light of the eye specialist’s camera’ – is also a return to politics. In a fine article called ‘Blue and the Outer Limits’, Paul Julian Smith has drawn attention to some of the differences between French cultural responses to the AIDS crisis, such as Cyril Collard’s Les Nuits Fauves, which have ‘often been metaphysical (seeking release from pain in transcendence, in a universal love without limits)’ and the Anglo-American approach to AIDS which ‘has been largely political (protesting against the injustice and ignorance of government policies)’.30 Blue, however, moves easily between the political and the metaphysical, becoming, in the cultural context of the 1990s, ‘a vital link between Anglo-American activism and French abstraction’.31 A comparison with Collard’s film also brings out how delicately Jarman seeks to avoid any hint of facile optimism whilst also avoiding giving in to complete despair. Les Nuits Fauves is at times a raw and powerful film, much the best of the other AIDS films of the early 1990s, but the images of redemption and transcendence in its final few minutes come very close to the formulaic. The bisexual protagonist, played with considerable energy and charisma by Collard himself in the only film he completed before dying of AIDS-related infections, renounces the dark, sadomasochistic homosexual subculture in which he has intermittently participated to seek out again a woman, Laura, whose willingness to sacrifice everything for his love has driven her to the brink of madness. Standing on a cliff edge, he watches the sun sink into the sea before rising again from it the following morning and declares, ‘The world is no longer a thing apart, outside of me. I am part of it … I am within Life.’ In contrast, Jarman declares ‘I shall not survive this virus’ and, in what seems like a direct response to Collard’s images of rebirth, says, ‘In the setting sun your love fades / Dies in the moonlight / Fails to rise.’ Blue is undoubtedly a more self-consciously political film than Les Nuits Fauves and includes overtly polemical passages such as the following: ‘Charity has allowed the uncaring to appear to care and is terrible for those dependent on it. Charity is big business but we go along with this, so the rich and powerful who fucked us over once fuck us over again and get it both ways.’32 However, the film’s politics, at least in the narrower sense of the word, are not the real source of its power. The defiantly ‘queer’ refusal to conform to any recognisable social or

MUP_Wymer_14_Chap 13

179

7/25/05, 5:22 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

180

derek jarman

sexual identity (‘I am a cock sucking / Straight acting / Lesbian man’) could be called ‘political’ but, in a parody of a Hollywood musical, it is promptly echoed by a chorus, and when we come to the phrase ‘laddish nymphomaniac politics’, the backing voices come in rather precipitately, drowning out the last word and then omitting it from their own rendering of the line, the only time they fail to echo the soloist precisely. It is psychological and existential questions which Jarman is really pursuing, and the political is a by-product of these concerns rather than the driving force behind them. The blue which fills the screen, and which Caravaggio had feared as ‘poison’, represents the dissolution of individual identity in death but also a more positive loss of self through reunion with the lost mother. This is why ‘Blue is the universal love in which man bathes – it is the terrestrial paradise’, a line which is spoken by Tilda Swinton, rather than by Nigel Terry, who is responsible for most of the voice-overs. In Modern Nature Jarman recalls that ‘During my mother’s lifetime the house [at Northwood] was uncomfortably empty.’33 There were only two paintings and one of them was ‘an oil of an ice-blue empty sea’.34 The sound of the sea, ‘our great sweet mother’, is heard in many Jarman films, and it is the last thing we hear on the soundtrack of Blue. It usually signifies the approach of death, but it is a death which is desired as well as feared. ‘Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.’35 This half-acknowledged desire does not dispel the melancholy with which Jarman contemplates the transience of all things, the melancholy which pervades all his films even when they seem at their most ‘camp’ and outrageous. The penultimate passage of the film is: Our name will be forgotten In time No one will remember our work Our life will pass like the traces of a cloud And be scattered like Mist that is chased by the Rays of the sun For our time is the passing of a shadow And our lives will run like Sparks through the stubble.

If these lines seem to achieve a distinctively Biblical form of eloquence, it is because they are a close rendering of several verses from the Apocryphal ‘Wisdom of Solomon’ (2:4, 2:5, and 3:7).36 This work, which was probably written in the first century AD by an Alexandrian Jew, is one of the thirteen Apocryphal texts which were traditionally printed alongside the more canonical ones in pre-Reformation Bibles and which

MUP_Wymer_14_Chap 13

180

7/25/05, 5:22 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

blue

181

were still included in the 1611 Authorized Version, disappearing from it only in the early nineteenth century.37 It seems peculiarly fitting that Jarman should take as his source a text which is both non-canonical and yet deeply traditional. He could have found similar expressions of mutability and transience in the better-known Ecclesiastes but the final two lines, in their original context, constitute a particularly pointed reply to all those who claimed to see his disease and imminent death as a form of divine punishment. The relevant verses leading up to them are worth quoting in full: But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them. 2 In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die: and their departure is taken for misery, 3 And their going from us to be utter destruction: but they are in peace. 4 For though they be punished in the sight of men, yet is their hope full of immortality. 5 And having been a little chastised, they shall be greatly rewarded: for God proved them, and found them worthy for himself. 6 As gold in the furnace hath he tried them, and received them as a burnt offering. 7 And in the time of their visitation they shall shine, and run to and fro like sparks among the stubble.38

The mention of ‘gold in the furnace’ carries additional alchemic connotations, of course, and the ‘sparks among the stubble’ are another version of the flashes of golden fire which are glimpsed at the end of Jarman’s favourite story of how Helios the young sun god, after becoming ‘lost in the mirror maze’ and ‘maddened by his own burning reflections’, finally ‘stumbled blindly from the Labyrinth and dived into the blue lake’.39 In the version of the story which we hear in Blue, the sparks are described as ‘a poetry of fire’ which has been excavated from the labyrinth and which will no doubt still be visible after the death of the Helios figure, now referred to as ‘Blue’. From the impersonal wisdom of (non-canonical) tradition, we return, in the last line of the film, to something more personal: ‘I place a delphinium, Blue, upon your grave.’ When heard in the cinema, ‘Blue’ sounds like a belated adjective, qualifying ‘delphinium’. In print, the capitalisation makes it clearer that it is a form of address, but an address to whom? At some points in the film, Blue appears to be Jarman himself, as in the version of the Helios fable. At other times, Blue is

MUP_Wymer_14_Chap 13

181

7/25/05, 5:22 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

someone who was loved and now mourned by the narrator. There is the usual erosion, as in many of Jarman’s other films, of any sharp distinction between self and other, which amounts here also to an erosion of the distinction between artist and audience, and between the artist and his art. ‘The I, facing death, faces death literally here in the grave of the other. This other is a ‘you’ whose undefinability raises questions about the identity alluded to. Is it the laying to rest of the film Blue? Does it imply the laying to rest of all others, whose deaths are also an inevitability?’40 Although Jarman has put himself at the centre of his film, his use of personal pronouns is frequently calculatedly ambiguous and inclusive. Who is the ‘you’ in the film’s first line – ‘You say to the boy open your eyes’? Who are the ‘we’ who ‘for the most part … are invisible’? Homosexuals? Bisexuals? People with AIDS? Authentic artists? Who is it who must inevitably die? As Jarman declared in At Your Own Risk, ‘Understand that we are you.’41 When he wrote about the proposed television documentary on Yves Klein, he seemed to regret the fact that it would be made with a mass audience in mind. His preference was for a ‘private programme of the void’,42 but his own film making, however private and intimate, however formally radical, always reached out well beyond the inner circle of friends, lovers, and fellow artists to make all of us ‘accomplices in the dream world of the soul’. His work has an important political dimension but he did not want to hector us: ‘All you can do is point the direction that everyone in the audience who wishes to “travel” has to take … When everyone has taken the path we are all art and no audience.’43

Notes 1 Peake, Derek Jarman, p. 196. 2 An informative summary of Klein’s various activities, many of which were photographed or filmed, is available in a short film directed by Alain Joubert, called Yves Klein – Traces of the Blue Period (1996). There is a good account of Klein’s importance for Jarman in Peter Wollen, ‘Blue’, New Left Review n.s. 6 (November/December 2000), 120–33. 3 Quoted in Abraham, Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, p. 15. 4 Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 82. 5 The Blue notebook is to be found in the BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 16. The full text of ‘Sunday’, along with that of another important poem, ‘Silence is Golden’, is given in Peake, Derek Jarman, p. 400. 6 Peake, Derek Jarman, p. 398. 7 Jarman, Chroma, p. 104. 8 BFI Jarman Collection II, Box 16. 9 Gabriele Griffin, Representations of HIV and AIDS: Visibility Blue/s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 1.

MUP_Wymer_14_Chap 13

182

7/25/05, 5:22 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

blue

183

10 There is a good account by Greil Marcus of this film and its initial reception in Paris and later in London, in Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 331– 36. 11 Peake, Derek Jarman, p. 527. 12 Nigel Andrews, ‘Shades of Blue, Pink and Yellow’, Financial Times (12 August 1993). 13 Jonathan Romney, ‘Living Colour Slowly Fades’, New Statesman and Society (10 September 1993). 14 Griffin, Representations of HIV and AIDS, pp. 13–29. 15 See Paul Julian Smith, ‘Blue and the Outer Limits’, Sight and Sound 3:10 n.s. (October 1993), 18–19 (p. 18). 16 Ben Jonson, The Staple of News, ed. Anthony Parr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988; repr. 1999), pp. 69 and 71. 17 John Milton, Paradise Lost, in Poetical Works, ed. Douglas Bush (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), Book III, ll. 40–52. 18 The allusion is to the lines ‘No light, but rather darkness visible / Served only to discover sights of woe’ (Paradise Lost, Book I, ll. 63–64). 19 See Angela Leighton, Shelley and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). The quotation is from the chapter on ‘The Sublime in the Eighteenth Century’, p. 16. 20 Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color [2000], trans. Markus I. Cruse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 10. See also John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993; repr. 1999) and Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999). 21 William Gibson, Neuromancer [1984] (London: Grafton Books, 1986), p. 9. Ironically, in the years following the novel’s publication, blue has come to replace grey as the default screen setting for a poorly tuned television and the opening section of the novel is in fact titled ‘Chiba City Blues’. 22 Pastoureau, Blue, p. 44. 23 Ibid., p. 166. 24 Ibid., p. 22. 25 Jarman, Chroma, p. 129. 26 Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 82. 27 Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: The Marvell Press and Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 165. 28 Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 355. 29 Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall [1928] (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1937; repr. 1967), p. 163. 30 Smith, ‘Blue and the Outer Limits’, p. 18. 31 Ibid., p. 19. 32 The version of this passage which appears in the published script is slightly different. See Blue: Text of a Film by Derek Jarman (London: Channel Four Television and BBC Radio 3, 1993), p. 21. 33 Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 266. 34 Ibid. 35 Philip Larkin, ‘Wants’, in Collected Poems, p. 42. 36 I am grateful to Suzanne Paul for locating these references for me. In his diary entry for 11 July 1989 Jarman notes that he ‘Spent the morning reading Matthew and Wisdom’ and quotes a slightly different version of the lines which appear in Blue. See Modern Nature, p. 109.

MUP_Wymer_14_Chap 13

183

7/25/05, 5:22 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

184

derek jarman

37 See The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, with introduction and notes by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 384–6 and 390–2. 38 Other passages of ‘The Wisdom of Solomon’ which would have been important to Jarman include several warnings against the worship of images (as mentioned in Chapter 1), a reference to the ‘corruptible body’ pressing down the soul, and an explanation that the Sodomites were destroyed because of their failure to show hospitality to strangers (rather than for any sexual transgressions). 39 BFI Jarman Collection I, Box 3, Jubilee Item 2 (p. 24). 40 Griffin, Representations of HIV and AIDS, p. 26. The ambiguity about whose grave is being referred to was echoed and partially resolved in Jarman’s insistence that Keith Collins should eventually be buried with him. 41 Jarman, At Your Own Risk, p. 6. 42 Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 82. 43 Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, p. 236.

MUP_Wymer_14_Chap 13

184

7/25/05, 5:22 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Filmography

As designer The Devils, 1971, dir. Ken Russell Savage Messiah, 1972, dir. Ken Russell

As director Some of the problems in arriving at an accurate list of the short films are discussed in Chapter 2. The following is based on the work of Michael O’Pray, James Mackay, and Tony Peake, and is a simplified and slightly amended version of the list given in Tony Peake’s biography of Derek Jarman. Some of the dates are not certain, but one thing which is fairly certain (despite a good deal of published information to the contrary including statements by Jarman himself) is that none of Jarman’s super-8 films, beginning with Studio Bankside, can be earlier than the summer of 1972, which is when he was first shown a super-8 camera by Marc Balet. Short films Electric Fairy, 1971, 16mm Studio Bankside, 1972, super-8, col. and b/w The Siren and the Sailor, 1972 (aka At Low Tide), super-8, col. Miss Gaby, 1972 (aka Miss Gaby Gets it Together or All our Yesterdays), super-8, col. Andrew Logan Kisses the Glitterati, 1973, super-8, col. Andrew, 1973, super-8, col. Red Movie, 1973 (aka Tourist Film), super-8, col. shot through red filter

MUP_Wymer_15_Filmog

185

7/25/05, 5:23 PM

186

filmography

Stolen Apples for Karen Blixen, 1973, super-8, b/w Gerald Plants a Flower, 1973, super-8 Gerald Takes a Photo, 1973, super-8 Tarot, 1973 (aka The Magician), super-8, col. A Garden in Luxor, 1973 (aka Garden of Luxor), super-8, col.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Kevin Whitney, 1973, super-8, col. The Art of Mirrors, 1973, super-8, col. Beyond the Valley of the Garden of Luxor Revisited, 1973, super-8, col. Burning of Pyramids, 1973, super-8, col. Death Dance, 1973, super-8, col. Arabia, 1973, super-8, col. and b/w Green Glass Bead Game, 1973, super-8, col. Sulphur, 1973, super-8, col. Journey to Avebury, 1973, super-8, col. Ashden’s Walk on Mon, 1973 (aka Walk on Mon or Space Travel, A Walk on Mon), super-8, col. Shad Thames, 1973, super-8, b/w Cafe in Tooley Street, 1973, super-8 Miss World, 1973, super-8, b/w and shot through pink filter Fred Ashton Fashion Show, 1974, super-8, col. Bill Gibb Show, 1974, super-8, col. Duggie Fields at Home, 1974 (aka Duggie Fields), super-8, col. Picnic at Rae’s, 1974 (aka Lunch at Rae’s), super-8, col. Herbert in NYC, 1974 (aka New York Walk Don’t Walk), super-8, col. New York City, 1974 (aka NYC), super-8, col. Dinner and Diner, 1974, super-8, b/w The Devils at the Elgin, 1974 (aka Reworking the Devils or Sister Jean of the Angels), super-8, b/w Fire Island, 1974, super-8, col. My Very Beautiful Movie, 1974, super-8, col. The Kingdom of Outremer, 1974, super-8, col. In the Shadow of the Sun, 1974–1980, 50 min., super-8 blown up to 16mm in 1980, col. Production company: Dark Pictures Producer: James Mackay Music: Throbbing Gristle

MUP_Wymer_15_Filmog

186

7/25/05, 5:23 PM

filmography

187

Sloane Square, 1974–76 (aka Removal Party), super-8, col. Corfe Film, 1975 (aka Troubadour Film), super-8, col. Ken Hicks, 1975, super-8, col. Sebastiane Wrap, 1975 (aka Sebastiane Mirror Film or Mirrors or A Break from Sebastiane), super-8 blown up to 16mm in 1981, col.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Karl at Home, 1975, super-8, b/w

Gerald’s Film, 1975, super-8, col. The Sex Pistols in Concert, 1976, super-8, b/w, included in The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, dir. Julien Temple (1980) Ulla’s Fete, 1976 (aka Ulla’s Chandelier), super-8, b/w Houston Texas, 1976, super-8, col. The Sea of Storms, 1976 (aka Kingdom), super-8, b/w Jordan’s Dance, 1977, super-8, col., sections of this included in Jubilee Jubilee Masks, 1977 (aka Jean-Marc Makes a Mask), super-8, b/w Art and the Pose, 1977 (aka Arty the Pose), super-8, b/w, later blown up to 16mm and included in The Dream Machine (1984) Every Woman for Herself and All for Art, 1978, super-8 blown up to 16mm in 1981, b/w The Fountain, 1978, super-8, col. The Pantheon, 1978, super-8, col. Italian Street Scene, 1978, super-8, col. Italian Ruins, 1978, super-8, col. Broken English: Three Songs by Marianne Faithfull, 1979, 12 min., super-8 and 16mm blown up to 35mm, col. and b/w, includes ‘Witches Song’, ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’, and ‘Broken English’ TG Psychic Rally in Heaven, 1981, 8 min., super-8 blown up to 16mm, col. Jordan’s Wedding, 1981, super-8, col. Rakes Progress, 1982, super-8, col. Pontormo and Punks at Santa Croce, 1982, super-8, col. B2 Movie, 1982, super-8 transferred to video, col. and b/w Waiting for Waiting for Godot, 1982, super-8 and video, col. and b/w Pirate Tape, 1982, super-8 later transferred to 16mm and video Diese Machine ist Mein Antihumanistiches Kunstwerk, 1982, super-8, b/w Touch the Radio, Dance!, 1983, promotional video for Steve Hale, col. Dance with Me, 1983, promotional video for Lords of the New Church, col.

MUP_Wymer_15_Filmog

187

7/25/05, 5:23 PM

188

filmography

Home Movie Dong, 1983 (aka The Dong with the Luminous Nose), super-8 fragment Willow Weep for Me, 1983, promotional video for Carmel, 16mm, col. Dance Hall Days, 1983, promotional video for Wang Chung, col. Working for Pleasure, 1984, super-8, b/w

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Wide Boy Awake, 1984, promotional video for Billy Hyena, 16mm, col. Catalan, 1984, promotional video for Jordi Vallis, 16mm, col. Barcelona, 1984, super-8, col. and b/w What Presence, 1984, promotional video for Orange Juice, 16mm, col. Oxford Medley Show, 1984, super-8, col. Imagining October, 1984, 27 min., super-8 and video blown up to 16mm, col. and b/w

Producer: James Mackay Executive producer: Francesca Forbes Moffat Text: Shaun Allen and Derek Jarman Editing: Cerith Wyn Evans, Richard Heslop, Derek Jarman, and Peter Cartwright Artwork: Christopher Hobbs Music: Genesis P-Orridge and David Ball Tenderness is a Weakness, 1984, promotional video for Marc Almond, 16mm, col. Windswept, 1985, promotional video for Bryan Ferry, 16mm, col. Short film for ‘Action Against Aids’ gala performance of Walter Reynolds’s Young England at the Adelphi Theatre, 18 June 1986, super-8 Untitled promotional film for Matt Fretton, 1986, super-8

The Queen is Dead: Three Songs by the Smiths, 1986, super-8 edited onto video and blown up to 35mm, col. and b/w, includes ‘The Queen is Dead’, ‘There is a Light that Never Goes Out’, and ‘Panic’ Ask, 1986, promotional video for the Smiths, super-8, col. Whistling in the Dark, 1986, promotional video for Easterhouse, super8, col. and b/w 1969, 1986, promotional video for Easterhouse, super-8, col. and b/w Depuis le Jour, 1987, sequence in portmanteau film Aria, super-8 and 35mm, col. and b/w Producer: Don Boyd Sequence producer: James Mackay Photography: Chris Hughes (super-8) and Mike Southon (35mm) Editing: Peter Cartwright and Angus Cook

MUP_Wymer_15_Filmog

188

7/25/05, 5:23 PM

filmography

189

Production design: Christophe Hobbs Music: Gustave Charpentier from his opera Louise Costumes: Sandy Powell Leading players: Aimée Delamaine (incorrectly credited as Amy Johnson), Tilda Swinton, Spencer Leigh

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Out of Hand, 1987, promotional video for the Mighty Lemon Drops, super-8 and 16mm, col. I Cry Too, 1987, promotional video for Bob Geldof, super-8 and 8mm video, col. In the Pouring Rain, 1987, promotional video for Bob Geldof, super-8 and 8mm video, col. It’s a Sin, 1987, promotional video for the Pet Shop Boys, 35mm, col. Rent, 1987, promotional video for the Pet Shop Boys, 35mm and super8, col. and b/w L’ispirazione, 1988, super-8 edited on video and blown up to 35mm, col. Backdrops for Pet Shop Boys Concert, 1989, eight short films made as backdrop projections for the 1989 Pet Shop Boys Tour, super-8 and 16mm blown up to 70mm, col. and b/w, includes ‘Opportunities’, ‘Heart’, ‘Paninaro’, ‘Nothing Has Been Proved’, ‘It’s a Sin’, ‘Domino Dancing’, ‘King’s Cross’, and ‘Always on my Mind’ Highlights: Pet Shop Boys on Tour, 1990, film of the Pet Shop Boys in concert at Wembley in July 1989 and including the eight films made as backdrops, super-8 and 16mm transferred to video, col. and b/w Red Hot and Blue, 1990, video of Cole Porter songs sung by different artists, includes extracts from Jarman’s home movies to accompany Annie Lennox singing ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’ Little Emerald Bird, 1993, promotional video for Patti Smith, super-8, col. Projections, 1993, release on video of seven of the eight films made as backdrops for the Pet Shop Boys (the missing one is ‘Nothing Has Been Proven’), together with two further songs, ‘Violence’ (to an excerpt from Garden in Luxor) and ‘Being Boring’ (to an excerpt from Studio Bankside), col. and b/w Glitterbug, 1994, 60 min., montage of super-8 footage shot by Jarman between 1971 and 1988, super-8 blown up to 35mm, col. and b/w Production company: Basilisk Communications and BBC Producer: James Mackay Associate director: David Lewis Editing: Andy Crabb Music: Brian Eno

MUP_Wymer_15_Filmog

189

7/25/05, 5:23 PM

190

filmography

Feature films

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Sebastiane, 1976, 86 min., 16mm blown up to 35mm, col. Co-director: Paul Humfress Production company: Distac Producers: James Whaley and Howard Malin Screenplay: Derek Jarman and James Whaley Photography: Peter Middleton Editing: Paul Humfress Music: Brian Eno Sound: John Hayes Leading players: Leonardo Treviglio (Sebastian), Barney James (Severus), Neil Kennedy (Max), Richard Warwick (Justin), Ken Hicks (Adrian), Donald Dunham (Claudius), Janusz Romanov (Anthony), Steffano Masari (Marius), Daevid Finbar (Julian), Gerald Incandela (Leopard Boy), Robert Medley (Diocletian)

Jubilee, 1978, 104 min., 16mm and super-8 blown up to 35mm, col. Production company: Whaley-Malin Productions for Megalovision Producers: Howard Malin and James Whaley Screenplay: Derek Jarman and James Whaley Photography: Peter Middleton Editing: Nick Barnard Music: Brian Eno Sound: John Hayes Costumes and design: Christopher Hobbs Leading players: Jenny Runacre (Bod/Queen Elizabeth I), Little Nell (Crabs), Toyah Willcox (Mad), Jordan (Amyl Nitrate), Hermine Demoriane (Chaos), Ian Charleson (Angel), Karl Johnson (Sphinx), Linda Spurrier (Viv), Neil Kennedy (Max), Orlando/Jack Birkett (Borgia Ginz), Wayne County (Lounge Lizard), Richard O’Brien (John Dee), David Haughton (Ariel), Helen Wallington-Lloyd (Lady-in-Waiting), Adam Ant (Kid), Donald Dunham and Barney James (Policemen), Ulla Larson-Styles (Waitress), Howard Malin (Schmeitzer)

The Tempest, 1979, 95 min., 16mm blown up to 35mm, col. Production company: Boyd’s Company Producers: Guy Ford and Mordecai Schreiber Associate producer: Sarah Radclyffe Executive producer: Don Boyd Screenplay: Derek Jarman, based on the play by William Shakespeare Photography: Peter Middleton Editing: Lesley Walker

MUP_Wymer_15_Filmog

190

7/25/05, 5:23 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

filmography

191

Art direction: Ian Whittaker Music and electronic sound: Wavemaker Sound: John Hayes Costumes and design: Yolanda Sonnabend Leading players: Heathcote Williams (Prospero), Karl Johnson (Ariel), Toyah Willcox (Miranda), Peter Bull (Alonso), Richard Warwick (Antonio), Elisabeth Welch (Goddess), Jack Birkett (Caliban), Ken Campbell (Gonzalo), David Meyer (Ferdinand), Neil Cunningham (Sebastian), Christopher Biggins (Stephano), Peter Turner (Trinculo), Claire Davenport (Sycorax), Helen Wallington-Lloyd and Angela Whittingham (Spirits), Kate Temple (Young Miranda)

The Angelic Conversation, 1985, 78 min., super-8 edited on to video and blown up to 35mm, col. and b/w Production company: British Film Institute and Channel Four Producer: James Mackay Screenplay: Fourteen Shakespeare sonnets (read by Judi Dench) Photography: Derek Jarman and James Mackay Editing: Cerith Wyn Evans and Peter Cartwright Music: Coil Sound editing: Richard Anstead and Peter Christopherson Leading players: Paul Reynolds, Philip Williamson, Dave Baby

Caravaggio, 1986, 93 min., 35mm, col. Production company: British Film Institute in association with Channel Four and Nicholas Ward-Jackson Producer: Sarah Radcliffe Executive producer: Colin MacCabe Screenplay: Derek Jarman from an original idea by Nicholas Ward-Jackson Photography: Gabriel Beristain Editing: George Akers Design: Christopher Hobbs Art Direction: Mike Buchanan Music: Simon Fisher Turner Sound: Billy McCarthy Costumes: Sandy Powell Leading players: Nigel Terry (Caravaggio), Sean Bean (Ranuccio), Tilda Swinton (Lena), Spencer Leigh (Jerusaleme), Gary Cooper (Davide), Dexter Fletcher (Young Caravaggio), Nigel Davenport (Giustiniani), Robbie Coltrane (Scipione Borghese), Michael Gough (Cardinal del Monte), Noam Almaz (Boy Caravaggio), Dawn Archibald (Pipo), Jack Birkett (Pope), Jonathan Hyde (Baglione), Emil Nicolaou (Young Jerusaleme), Zohra Segal (Jerusaleme’s grandmother)

MUP_Wymer_15_Filmog

191

7/25/05, 5:23 PM

192

filmography

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Last of England, 1987, 87 min., super-8 and video blown up to 35mm, col. and b/w Production company: Anglo International Films for British Screen, Channel Four, and ZDF Producers: James Mackay and Don Boyd Associate producers: Yvonne Little and Mayo Thompson Photography: Derek Jarman, Christopher Hughes, Cerith Wyn Evans, and Richard Heslop Editing: Peter Cartwright, Angus Cook, John Maybury, and Sally Yeadon Production design: Christopher Hobbs Sound design: Simon Turner Sound: Matthew Evans and Chris Gurney Sound editing: Budge Tremlett Voice-over: Nigel Terry Costumes: Sandy Powell Leading players: Tilda Swinton, Spencer Leigh, Spring, Matthew Hawkins, Gerrard McArthur, James Mackay, Adam Elliott

War Requiem, 1989, 93 min., super-8 and 35mm, col. and b/w Production company: Anglo International Films Producer: Don Boyd Associate producer: Chris Harrison Executive producer: John Kelleher Screenplay: Derek Jarman Photography: Richard Greatrex Editing: Rick Elgood Video editing: John Maybury Design: Lucy Morahan Sound: Garth Marshall Original recording of Britten’s War Requiem: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (baritone), Peter Pears (tenor), Galina Vishnevskaya (soprano) Costumes: Linda Alderson Leading players: Nathaniel Parker (Wilfred Owen), Tilda Swinton (Nurse), Owen Teale (Unknown Soldier), Sean Bean (Enemy Soldier), Patricia Hayes (Mother), Rohan McCullough (Enemy Mother), Nigel Terry (Abraham), Claire Davenport (Charge Sister/Britannia)

The Garden, 1990, 92 min., super-8, video, and 16mm blown up to 35mm, col. Production company: Basilisk in association with Channel Four, British Screen, ZDF, and Uplink Producer: James Mackay

MUP_Wymer_15_Filmog

192

7/25/05, 5:23 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

filmography

193

Photography: Christopher Hughes Editing: Peter Cartwright Music: Simon Fisher Turner Sound: Gary Desmond Sound editing: Nigel Holland Voice-over: Michael Gough Costumes: Annie Symons Leading players: Tilda Swinton (Madonna), Johnny Mills and Kevin Collins (Lovers), Peter Lee-Wilson (Devil), Spencer Leigh (Mary Magdalen), Jody Graber (Young Boy), Roger Cook (Christ), Philip Macdonald (Judas)

Edward II, 1991, 90 min., 35mm, col. Production company: Working Title in association with British Screen and BBC Films Producers: Steve Clark-Hall and Antony Root Executive producers: Sarah Radclyffe, Simon Curtis, and Takashi Asai Associate director: Ken Butler Screenplay: Derek Jarman, Stephen McBride, and Ken Butler, based on the play by Christopher Marlowe Photography: Ian Wilson Editing: George Akers Production design: Christopher Hobbs Art direction: Rick Eyres Music: Simon Fisher Turner Sound: George Richards Costumes: Sandy Powell Leading Players: Steven Waddington (Edward II), Andrew Tiernan (Gaveston), Tilda Swinton (Isabella), Nigel Terry (Mortimer), Kevin Collins (Lightborn), John Lynch (Spencer), Jody Graber (Prince Edward), Jerome Flint (Kent), Dudley Sutton (Bishop of Winchester)

Wittgenstein, 1993, 75 min., 35mm, col. Production company: Bandung for Channel Four, the British Film Institute, and Uplink Producer: Tariq Ali Executive producers: Ben Gibson and Takashi Asai Executive in charge of production: Eliza Mellor Associate director: Ken Butler Screenplay: Derek Jarman, Terry Eagleton, and Ken Butler Photography: James Welland Editing: Budge Tremlett Art direction: Annie Lapaz Music: Jan Latham-Koenig

MUP_Wymer_15_Filmog

193

7/25/05, 5:23 PM

194

filmography

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Sound: George Richards Sound editing: Toby Calder Costumes: Sandy Powell Leading Players: Karl Johnson (Ludwig Wittgenstein), Michael Gough (Bertrand Russell), Tilda Swinton (Ottoline Morrell), John Quentin (Maynard Keynes), Kevin Collins (Johnny), Clancy Chassay (Young Ludwig Wittgenstein), Nabil Shaban (Martian), Jill Balcon (Leopoldine Wittgenstein)

Blue, 1993, 79 min., 35mm, col. Production company: Basilisk Communications and Uplink in association with Channel Four Producers: James Mackay and Takashi Asai Associate director: David Lewis Screenplay: Derek Jarman Music: Simon Fisher Turner Sound design: Marvin Black Voice-overs: Nigel Terry, John Quentin, Tilda Swinton, and Derek Jarman

MUP_Wymer_15_Filmog

194

7/25/05, 5:23 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Select bibliography

Books by Derek Jarman Dancing Ledge (London: Quartet Books, 1984; repr. 1991). The Last of England (London: Constable, 1987); reissued as Kicking the Pricks (London: Vintage, 1996). Modern Nature (London: Century, 1991; repr. London: Vintage, 1992). At Your Own Risk: A Saint’s Testament (London: Hutchinson, 1992; repr. London: Vintage, 1993). Chroma (London: Century, 1994; repr. London: Vintage, 1995). derek jarman’s garden (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995). Smiling in Slow Motion, ed. Keith Collins (London: Century, 2000).

Film scripts by Derek Jarman Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986). War Requiem: The Film (London: Faber and Faber, 1989). Queer Edward II (London: British Film Institute, 1991). Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script, The Derek Jarman Film (London: British Film Institute, 1993). Blue: Text of a Film by Derek Jarman (London: Channel Four Television and BBC Radio 3, 1993). Up in the Air: Collected Film Scripts (London: Vintage, 1996).

Other works consulted Abraham, Lyndy, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; repr. 2001). Barnaby, Karin and Pellegrino D’Acierno (eds), C.G. Jung and the Humanities: Towards a Hermeneutics of Culture (London: Routledge, 1990). Bersani, Leo, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, October, 43 (1987), 197–222.

MUP_Wymer_16_Bibliography

195

7/25/05, 5:24 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

196

select bibliography

Bersani, Leo, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995; repr. 1996). Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio (London: British Film Institute, 1999). Biga, Tracy, ‘The Principle of Non-Narration in the Films of Derek Jarman’, in By Angels Driven: The Films of Derek Jarman, ed. Chris Lippard (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1996), pp. 12–30. Bray, Alan, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982). Bray, Alan, ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England’, History Workshop 29 (Spring 1990), 1–19. Bray, Alan, The Friend (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy [1860], trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (Oxford: Phaidon, 1944). Burnett, Mark Thornton, ‘Edward II and Elizabethan Politics’, in Marlowe, History, and Sexuality: New Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Paul Whitfield White (New York: AMS Press, 1998), 91–107. Burnett, Mark Thornton and Ramona Wray (eds), Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). Cady, Joseph, ‘“Masculine Love”, Renaissance Writing, and the “New Invention” of Homosexuality’, in Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context, ed. Claude J. Summers (New York: Haworth, 1992), pp. 9–40. Carpenter, Humphrey, Benjamin Britten: A Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). Carroll, Robert and Stephen Prickett (eds), The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Cartelli, Thomas, ‘Queer Edward II: Postmodern Sexualities and the Early Modern Subject’, in Marlowe, History, and Sexuality: New Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Paul Whitfield White (New York: AMS Press, 1998), pp. 213–23. Chedgzoy, Kate, Shakespeare’s Queer Children: Sexual Politics and Contemporary Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Clulee, Nicholas H., John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion (London: Routledge, 1988). Collick, John, Shakespeare, Cinema and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). Cooke, Mervyn, Britten: ‘War Requiem’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Cooke, Mervyn (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Davidson, Nicholas, ‘Marlowe and Atheism’, in Christopher Marlowe and

MUP_Wymer_16_Bibliography

196

7/25/05, 5:24 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

select bibliography

197

English Renaissance Culture, ed. Darryll Grantley and Peter Roberts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), pp. 129–47. Deats, Sara Munson, ‘Myth and Metamorphosis in Marlowe’s Edward II’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 22:3 (1980), 304–21. Digangi, Mario, ‘Marlowe, Queer Studies, and Renaissance Homoeroticism’, in Marlowe, History, and Sexuality: New Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Paul Whitfield White (New York: AMS Press, 1998), 195– 212. Dollimore, Jonathan, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Dollimore, Jonathan, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998). Driscoll, Lawrence, ‘“The rose revived”: Derek Jarman and the British Tradition’, in By Angels Driven: The Films of Derek Jarman, ed. Chris Lippard (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1996), pp. 65–83. Dyer, Richard, Now You See It: Studies on Gay and Lesbian Film (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). Dyer, Richard, The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations (London: Routledge, 1993). Eliot, T. S., Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 1974). Ellis, Jim, ‘Strange Meeting: Wilfred Owen, Benjamin Britten, Derek Jarman and the War Requiem’, in The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference, eds Richard Dellamora and Daniel Fischlin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 277–96. Ellis, Jim, ‘Queer Period: Derek Jarman’s Renaissance’, in Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 288–315. Ellis, Jim, ‘The Erotics of Citizenship: Derek Jarman’s Jubilee and Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels’, Southern Quarterly, 39:4 (2001), 148–60. Ellis, Jim, ‘Conjuring The Tempest: Derek Jarman and the Spectacle of Redemption’, Gay Literature Quarterly, 7:2 (2001), 265–84. Field, Simon and Michael O’Pray, ‘On Imaging October, Dr. Dee and Other Matters: An Interview with Derek Jarman’, Afterimage, 12 (Autumn 1985), 40–59. Frantze, A. J., ‘Tears for Abraham: The Chester Play of Abraham and Isaac and Antisacrifice by Wilfred Owen, Benjamin Britten, and Derek Jarman’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31:3 (Fall 2001), 445–76. Fraser, Peter, Images of the Passion: The Sacramental Mode in Film (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1998). French, Peter, John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus (London: Routledge, 1972). Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Libido Theory and Narcissism’, in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 461–81.

MUP_Wymer_16_Bibliography

197

7/25/05, 5:24 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

198

select bibliography

Freud, Sigmund, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 11 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 65–97. Freud, Sigmund, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 11 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 269–338. Friedman, Lester (ed.), British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires were Started (London: UCL Press, 1993). Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1975; repr. 1979). Fyler, Anson C., Jr., ‘Self-Unification: An Archetypal Analysis of Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, Hartford Studies in Literature, 3:1 (1977), 45–50. Gage, John, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993; repr. 1999). Gage, John, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999). Gardner, David, ‘Perverse Law: Jarman as Gay Criminal Hero’, in By Angels Driven: The Films of Derek Jarman, ed. Chris Lippard (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1996), pp. 31–64. Gomez, Joseph A., ‘The Process of Jarman’s War Requiem: Personal Vision and the Tradition of Fusion in the Arts’, in By Angels Driven: The Films of Derek Jarman, ed. Chris Lippard (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1996), pp. 84–102. Griffin, Gabriele, Representations of HIV and AIDS: Visibility blue/s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Hacker, Jonathan and David Price, Take Ten: Contemporary British Film Directors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Hammond, Paul, Love between Men in English Literature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). Harris, Diana, and MacDonald Jackson, ‘Stormy Weather: Derek Jarman’s The Tempest’, Film/Literature Quarterly, 25:2 (1997), 90–8. Hawkes, David, ‘“The shadow of this time”: The Renaissance Cinema of Derek Jarman’, in By Angels Driven: The Films of Derek Jarman, ed. Chris Lippard (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1996), pp. 103–16. Hibberd, Dominic, Wilfred Owen: A New Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2002). Higson, Andrew (ed.), Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (London: Cassell, 1996). Higson, Andrew, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Hill, John, British Cinema in the 1980s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). Hill, John, ‘The Rise and Fall of British Art Cinema: A Short History of the 1980s and 1990s’, Aura 6:3 (2000), 18–32.

MUP_Wymer_16_Bibliography

198

7/25/05, 5:24 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

select bibliography

199

Horger, J., ‘Derek Jarman’s Film Adaptation of Marlowe’s Edward II’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 11:4 (1993), 37–40. Humphrey, Daniel, ‘Authorship, History and the Dialectic of Trauma: Derek Jarman’s The Last of England’, Screen 44:2 (Summer 2003), 208–15. Jackson, Claire and Peter Tapp, The Bent Lens: A World Guide to Gay and Lesbian Film (St Kilda Victoria, Australia: Australian Catalogue Company). Jackson, Russell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Jung, C. G., Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. Cary F. Baynes [1933] (London: Routledge, 1961; repr. 1989). Jung, C. G., Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953; 2nd edn 1968). Jung, C.G., Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959). Jung, C.G., The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959). Jung, C. G., Alchemical Studies, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967 [1968]). Kaye, Richard A., ‘Losing his Religion: Saint Sebastian as Contemporary Gay Martyr’, in Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). Kenny, Anthony, Wittgenstein (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1973). Kermode, Frank. ‘Ideas Strangle Director’, The Times Literary Supplement (16 May 1980). Klein, Yves, Yves Klein 1928–1962: Selected Writings, trans. Barbara Wright (London: Tate Gallery, 1974). Kuhn, Annette, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (London and New York: Verso, 1995). Kumar, Krishan, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Kuriyama, Constance, Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980). Langdon, Helen, Caravaggio: A Life (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998; repr. London: Pimlico, 1999). Laplanche, J. and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis [1967], trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Hogarth Press, 1973; repr. London: Karnac Books, 1988). Lippard, Chris (ed.), By Angels Driven: The Films of Derek Jarman (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1996). McAlindon, T., English Renaissance Tragedy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986). MacCabe, Colin, ‘A Post-national European Cinema: A Consideration of Derek Jarman’s The Tempest and Edward II’ [1992], reprinted in The Eloquence of the Vulgar (London: British Film Institute, 1999), pp. 107–15. Mackay, James, ‘Low-Budget British Production: A Producer’s Account’, in

MUP_Wymer_16_Bibliography

199

7/25/05, 5:24 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

200

select bibliography

New Questions of British Cinema, ed. Duncan Petrie (London: British Film Institute Working Papers, 1992), pp. 52–64. MacLure, Millar (ed.), Marlowe: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1979). Marcus, Greil, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989). Marlowe, Christopher, Edward II, ed. Charles R. Forker, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). Miller, James, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993). Milton, John, Poetical Works, ed. Douglas Bush (London: Oxford University Press, 1966). Mishima, Yukio, Confessions of a Mask, trans. Meredith Weatherby (London: Peter Owen, 1998; repr. 2001). Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990; repr. London: Vintage, 1991). Monk, Ray, ‘Between Earth and Ice: Derek Jarman’s Film of the Life of Wittgenstein’, Times Literary Supplement (19 March 1993), p. 16. Murphy, Robert (ed.), British Cinema of the 90s (London: BFI, 2000). Murray, Timothy, Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera and Canvas (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). Nash, Mark, ‘Innocence and Experience’, Afterimage, 12 (Autumn 1985), 30–5. Nicholl, Charles, The Chemical Theatre (London: Routledge, 1980). Normand, Lawrence, ‘“What passions call you these?”: Edward II and James VI’, in Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture, eds Darryll Grantley and Peter Roberts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), pp. 172–97. O’Pray, Michael, ‘Derek Jarman’s Cinema: Eros and Thanatos’, Afterimage, 12 (Autumn 1985), 6–15. O’Pray, Michael, Derek Jarman: Dreams of England (London: British Film Institute, 1996). O’Pray, Mike [Michael], ‘Damning Desire’, Sight and Sound 1:6 n.s. (October 1991), p. 10. Owen, Wilfred, Collected Letters, ed. Harold Owen and John Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). Owen, Wilfred, The Complete Poems and Fragments, ed. Jon Stallworthy, 2 vols. (London: Chatto and Windus, The Hogarth Press, Oxford University Press, 1983). Pastoureau, Michel, Blue: The History of a Color [2000], trans. Markus I. Cruse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Peake, Tony, Derek Jarman (London: Little, Brown, 1999). Pencak, William, The Films of Derek Jarman (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland, 2002). Pinfold, Michael John, ‘The Performance of Queer Masculinity in Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane’, Film Criticism 23:1 (1998), 74–83.

MUP_Wymer_16_Bibliography

200

7/25/05, 5:24 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

select bibliography

201

Plant, Sadie, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London: Routledge, 1992). Porton, Richard, ‘Language Games and Aesthetic Attitudes: Style and Ideology in Jarman’s Late Films’, in By Angels Driven: The Films of Derek Jarman, ed. Chris Lippard (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1996), 135–60. Proser, Matthew N., The Gift of Fire: Aggression and the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Peter Land, 1995). Quinn-Meyler, Martin, ‘Opposing “Heterosoc”: Derek Jarman’s CounterHegemonic Activism’, in By Angels Driven: The Films of Derek Jarman, ed. Chris Lippard (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1996), pp. 117–34. Rayns, Tony, ‘Submitting to Sodomy: Propositions and Rhetorical Questions about an English Film-maker’, Afterimage, 12 (Autumn 1985), 60–5. Richardson, Niall, ‘The Queer Performance of Tilda Swinton in Derek Jarman’s Edward II: Male Misogyny Reconsidered’, Sexualities 6:3–4 (August 2003), 427–42. Robb, Peter, M (Sydney, Australia: Duffy and Snelgrove, 1998; repr. with corrections London: Bloomsbury, 1999). Ruggiero, Guido (ed.), A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). Savage, John, England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (London: Faber, 1991). Shakespeare, William, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomas Nelson, 1997). Shakespeare, William, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Shakespeare, William, The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode, The Arden Shakespeare 2nd series (London: Methuen, 1954). Shakespeare, William, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Shakespeare, William, The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, The Arden Shakespeare 3rd series (London: Thomas Nelson, 1999). Shakespeare, William, The Tempest, ed. David Lindley, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Shannon, Laurie, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Sherman, William, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). Simons, John, ‘Elizabethan Texts in the Work of Derek Jarman’, in Elizabethan Literature and Transformation, ed. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner (Tübingen: Stauffenberg Verlag, 1999), pp. 263–71. Sitney, P. Adams, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974; 2nd edn 1979). Sluga, Hans and David G. Stern (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

MUP_Wymer_16_Bibliography

201

7/25/05, 5:24 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

202

select bibliography

Smith, Bruce, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Smith, Paul Julian, ‘Blue and the Outer Limits’, Sight and Sound 3:10 n.s. (October, 1993), 18–19. Spivey, Nigel, Enduring Creation: Art, Pain and Fortitude (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001). Spufford, Francis, ‘Blank verse and bodily fluids’, The Times Literary Supplement (15 November 1991), p. 19. Stallworthy, Jon, Wilfred Owen (London: Oxford University Press and Chatto and Windus, 1974). Stevens, Anthony, On Jung (London: Routledge, 1990). Stich, Sidra, Yves Klein (Ostfildern, Germany: Cantz Verlag, 1994). Storr, Anthony, Jung (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins). Summers, Claude J., ‘Sex, Politics, and Self-Realization in Edward II’, in ‘A Poet and a filthy Play-maker’: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Constance Kuriyama (New York: AMS Press, 1988), pp. 221–40. Szo…nyi, György E., ‘Ficino’s Talismanic Magic and John Dee’s Hieroglyphic Monad’, Cauda Pavonis, 20:1 (2001), 1–11. Szo…nyi, György E., John Dee’s Occultism: Magical Exaltation through Powerful Signs (Albany: Suny Press, 2005). Taylor, Martin (ed.), Lads: Love Poetry of the Trenches (London: Constable, 1989; repr. London: Duckworth, 2002). Traub, Valerie, ‘Recent Studies in Homoeroticism’, English Literary Renaissance 30:2 (Spring 2000), 284–329. Trevelyan, G. M., Illustrated English Social History, 4 vols. (London: Longman, 1949–52). Tweedie, James, ‘The Suspended Spectacle of History: The Tableau Vivant in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio’, Screen 44:4 (Winter 2003), 379–403. Van Sant, Gus, ‘Freewheelin’: Gus Van Sant Converses with Derek Jarman’, in Projections: A Forum for Film Makers, ed. John Boorman and Walter Donohue, 2 (1993), pp. 89–99. Wilde, Oscar, Plays, Prose Writings and Poems, introduction by Isobel Murray (London: Everyman, 1975; reissued 1990). Wilde, Oscar, De Profundis (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1996). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921], trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London and New York: Routledge, 1961; rev. 1974). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, On Certainty, eds G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969).

MUP_Wymer_16_Bibliography

202

7/25/05, 5:24 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

select bibliography

203

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Remarks on Colour, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. Linda L. McAlister and Margaret Schättle (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). Wollen, Peter, ‘Blue’, New Left Review 6 n.s. (Nov/Dec 2000), 120–33. Wollen, Roger (ed.), Derek Jarman: A Portrait (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996). Wymer, Rowland, ‘Marlowe and Jarman: The Transformation of Edward II’, in Elizabethan Literature and Transformation, ed. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner (Tübingen: Stauffenberg Verlag, 1999), pp. 273–81. Wymer, Rowland, ‘“The Audience is Only Interested in Sex and Violence”: Teaching the Renaissance on Film’, Working Papers on the Web no.4 ‘Teaching Renaissance Texts’ (2002), www.shu.ac.uk/wpw/renaissance/ wymer.htm. Wymer, Rowland, ‘“The Essential Pivot of our Culture”: Derek Jarman’s Engagement with Shakespeare’, in Not of an Age, but for All Time: Shakespeare across Lands and Ages, eds Sabine Coelsch-Foisner and György Szo…nyi, Austrian Studies in English (Braum Iler Verlag, 2004), pp. 295–310. Yates, Frances A., Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964). Yates, Frances A., Shakespeare’s Last Plays: A New Approach (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975). Yates, Frances A., The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979; repr. 1983). Young-Eisendrath, Polly and Terence Dawson (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Jung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Film, television, and radio programmes about Jarman Know What I Mean, television profile of Jarman (Channel Four, 11 May 1989) In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, Jarman in conversation with Anthony Clare (BBC Radio 4, 15 August 1990) The Making of Derek Jarman’s The Garden, dir. Takashi Asai (1990) Derek Jarman: A Portrait, Arena profile of Jarman (BBC2, 18 January 1991) The Media Show, profile of Jarman making Edward II (7 April 1991) Face to Face, Jarman interviewed by Jeremy Isaacs (17 March 1993) L’Amore Vincitore, Jarman in conversation with Roberto Nanni (1993) There We Are John, Jarman interviewed by John Cartwright (1993) A Night with Derek, interviews with many people who knew him (Channel Four, 20 February 1995) Derek Jarman: Life as Art, dir. Andy Kimpton-Nye (2004)

MUP_Wymer_16_Bibliography

203

7/25/05, 5:24 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

2001: A Space Odyssey, 77 Abraham, Karl, 20 Ackroyd, Peter, 72 ACT UP, 175 Agony and the Ecstasy, The, 98, 107 Agrippa, Cornelius, 76 AIDS/HIV, 1, 13, 110, 125, 143, 170, 172–3, 175, 179, 182 Akenaten, 19–20, 29 alchemy, 7–10, 13–14, 77, 139, 167, 171 Aldiss, Brian, 9 Ali, Tariq, 158, 161, 163 Anderson, Lindsay, 43, 111 Andrew Logan Kisses the Glitterati, 25 Andrews, Nigel, 174 Angelic Conversation, The, 2, 4, 8, 11, 27, 29, 83–90, 122, 136 Anger, Kenneth, 8, 22, 25, 28, 30 Ant, Adam, 56, 58 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 22 Arabia, 11, 25 Araki, Gregg, 173 Archaeology of Soul, The, 83 Archibald, Dawn, 104 Aristotle, 161 Artemisia, 2, 99 Art of Mirrors, The, 25, 27–8 Arts Council, the, 173 Asai, Takashi, 173 Ashden’s Walk on Mon, 25

MUP_Wymer_17_Index

204

Ashton, Frederick, 23 At Your Own Risk, 5, 20, 38–9, 158, 182 Au Hasard, Balthasar, 45 Baby, Dave, 89 Bacon, Francis, 85, 90n.7, 153 Baines, Richard, 143 Balet, Marc, 25, 34n.23 Ballard, J. G., 9, 55 BBC, 123, 145, 147, 173 Bean, Sean, 98, 123 Being John Malkovich, 11 Bergman, Ingmar, 7, 22, 98, 118 Beristain, Gabriel, 98, 146 Bersani, Leo, 13–14, 27, 56, 105, 153 Birkett, Jack, 74–5, 99 Black Skin, White Mask, 159 Blake, William, 6, 21, 32, 59–62, 176 Blakelock, Keith, 65 Bliss, 172 Blue, 9–10, 12–13, 27, 29, 170–82 Blue is Poison, 172 Blueprint, 172 Blueprint for Bliss, A, 172 B Movie: Little England/A Time of Hope, 83 Bond, Edward, 64 Bowie, David, 83 Boyd, Don, 70, 112, 122 Brakhage, Stan, 22 Branagh, Kenneth, 71 Bray, Alan, 11, 148

7/25/05, 5:28 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

index Brenton, Howard, 158 Bresson, Robert, 45, 99 Britannia Hospital, 111 British Film Institute, 84, 92, 161 British Screen, 112, 134, 145 Britten, Benjamin, 2, 31, 85, 122–30 passim Broken English, 30 Brown, Ford Madox, 114 Brown, Geoff, 146 Brueghel, Pieter, 7 Buñuel, Luis, 22 Burton, Richard, 71, 146 Butler, Ken, 146, 161 Cabala, 7, 73 Callaghan, James, 110 Cammell, Donald, 45 Camus, Albert, 159 Caravaggio, 2, 6–7, 92–107, 118, 136, 143–4, 153 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 2, 8, 70, 87, 92–107 passim, 116, 144, 153, 164, 169n.32, 180 Cartwright, Peter, 134 Channel Four, 4, 40, 47, 65, 92, 112, 134, 138, 158, 161, 172–4 Chapman, Jake and Dinos, 116–17 Chariots of Fire, 61–2 Charpentier, Gustave, 31 Chedgzoy, Kate, 82n.29 Chroma, 4, 158, 177 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 11 Citizen Locke, 158 Clarke, Ossie, 21 Clash, the, 60 Cocteau, Jean, 12–13, 22, 74 Coldstream, John, 126 Collard, Cyril, 173, 179 Collins, Keith (or ‘Kevin’), 110, 134– 5, 145, 158, 164, 184n.40 Confessions of a Mask, 45–6 Cook, Roger, 135 Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, The, 111

MUP_Wymer_17_Index

205

205

Coppola, Francis Ford, 1 Courbet, Gustave, 178 Cox, Alex, 2, 147 Crowley, Aleister, 8 Crabb, Andy, 25 Dancing Ledge, 20, 28, 33, 93, 103 Dante Alighieri, 112, 172 Dante’s Inferno, 29 Davide (Jarman’s ‘first love’), 20, 34n.12, 106 Death Dance, 25–6 Death in Venice, 26 Debord, Guy, 173–4 Dee, John, 8, 10, 12, 29, 56–8, 63, 73, 76, 114 Deer Hunter, The, 112 Demme, Jonathan, 173 Dench, Judi, 88 De Profundis, 107, 138–9, 142n.23 ‘Depuis le Jour’, 31 Deren, Maya, 22 Derrida: The Movie, 159 Devils, The, 23–4, 33 Dickinson, Thorold, 22 Dido Queen of Carthage, 144 Divine Comedy, The, 112 D.O.A., 56 Doctor Faustus, 144, 146 Donne, John, 13, 21 Doré, Gustave, 112 Dracula, 1 Dr. Dee – The Art of Mirrors and the Angelic Conversations, 8–9, 12, 86, 117 Dreyer, Carl, 22, 136 Duggie Fields at Home, 25 Dunkerley, Piers, 125 Dürer, Albrecht, 7, 138 Dutoit, Ulysse, 13, 27, 56, 105 Dyer, Geoff, 39 Eagleton, Terry, 158, 160, 162–4 Ecclesiastes, 181 Edgar, David, 158 Edward II, 2, 13–14, 24, 40, 57, 74,

7/25/05, 5:28 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

206

index

79, 143–54, 158, 169n.32 Egypt, Egypt, Egypt, 83 Eisenstein, Sergei, 22, 32–3, 85 Electric Fairy, 28, 34n.23 Electric Prunes, the, 22 Eliot, T. S., 21, 30, 57 Elizabeth I, 12, 56–8, 63, 68n.10, 143 Elizabeth II, 54 Ellis, Jim, 62, 76 Eno, Brian, 25 Evans, Cerith Wyn, 31 Faithfull, Marianne, 30, 118 Fanon, Frantz, 159 Fellini, Federico, 4, 22, 37, 40, 56 Ferry, Bryan, 30 Ficino, Marsilio, 6–7 Filth and the Fury, The, 66 Finch, Mark, 98 Fire Island, 25 Fires were Started, 113 Fletcher, Dexter, 102, 106 Forbidden Planet, 78 Ford, Guy, 70 Ford, John (playwright), 146 Foucault, Michel, 152–4, 157n.39, n.45 Frears, Stephen, 153 Frege, Gottlieb, 159 Freud, Sigmund, 10, 118, 153 Freudian, 47 Full Metal Jacket, 112 Gage, John, 176–7 Galas, Diamanda, 119 Garden, The, 2, 9, 11, 29, 31, 45, 84, 132–41, 172 Garden of Luxor, 25 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 24 Gay News, 137 Gay Times, 3, 149 Geldof, Bob, 30 Genet, Jean, 3 Gerald’s Film, 26 Gerry, 2

MUP_Wymer_17_Index

206

Gibson, Mel, 2, 137 Gibson, William, 177 Gielgud, Sir John, 23, 74, 81n.21 Ginsberg, Allen, 3, 85 Glitterbug, 25, 28–9, 114 Gnosticism, 27, 95 Gospel According to St Matthew, The, 4, 9, 41, 136 Gough, Michael, 98, 161 Goya, Francisco, 116–17 Gratacolle, William, 35n.34 Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, The, 54, 58, 66 Greenaway, Peter, 74, 111 Griffi, Giuseppe Patroni, 146 Griffin, Annie, 66 Griffin, Gabriele, 175 Halliwell, Kenneth, 153 Harington, Sir John, 151 Harwood, Anthony, 23 Heidegger, Martin, 162 Heindl, Max, 171, 176 Helios fable, 12, 19, 27, 181 Henry V, 70–1 Herbert, George, 13, 21 Herbert, William, 86 Hermes Trismegistus, 7 Hermeticism, 7, 8, 73 Hero and Leander, 144 Heslop, Richard, 31, 111 Hidden Agenda, 118 Hill, John, 113 Hilliard, Nicholas, 11 Hindley, Myra, 67 Hitler, Adolf, 30, 59, 67 Hobbs, Christopher, 3, 26, 97–8 Hockney, David, 21 Hodgson, Clive, 64 Homer, 176 Hopper, Dennis, 56 Horsley, Sebastian, 137 Hour of the Wolf, 98 Hughes, Chris, 31 Hughes, Ted, 9 Humfress, Paul, 36, 37, 40

7/25/05, 5:28 PM

index

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Hurlements en faveur de Sade, 173 Huxley, Aldous, 23 If, 43 Imagining October, 32–3, 83, 110, 117, 122 Indiana, Gary, 163 International Blue, 172 In the Shadow of the Sun, 25, 29–30 Into the Blue, 172 Iris, 158 ‘It Happened by Chance’, 27 James I, 5, 71, 90n.9 Jarman, Elizabeth (Jarman’s mother), 19, 70, 91n.17 Jarman, Lance (Jarman’s father), 18, 112–13, 120, 123 Jennings, Humphrey, 113 Jesus Christ, 11, 31, 41, 43, 45, 47, 62, 103, 105, 106, 125, 134–41 passim, 142n.10, n.25, 143, 145, 164 Jetée, La, 90 Johnson, Karl, 163 Johnstone, Iain, 99 Jones, Jonathan, 97, 116 Jonson, Ben, 146, 175 Jordan, 54, 59 Joslin, Tom, 173 Journey to Avebury, 25–6 Jubilee, 2, 5, 8, 11, 14, 24, 54–68, 70, 83, 114, 136, 141 Julien, Isaac, 62, 159 Julius Caesar, 70 Jung, Carl, 9, 27, 77, 96, 138–9, 176 Jünger, Ernst, 127 Jungian, 47, 57, 77–8, 86, 139 Kant, Immanuel, 159 Kaye, Richard A., 39, 47 Kemp, Lindsay, 40, 47, 62, 75 Kermode, Frank, 72–3 Keynes, John Maynard, 160, 162, 167 Kicking the Pricks, 112, 122, 140

MUP_Wymer_17_Index

207

207

Kirkup, James, 137–8 Klein, Yves, 27, 108n.18, 170–8 passim Kubrick, Stanley, 77, 112 Kuhn, Annette, 113 Larkin, Philip, 22, 178 Last of England, The, 2, 5–6, 29, 31, 56, 78, 84, 110–20, 122, 132, 134, 171–2 Last Temptation of Christ, The, 137 Lawrence, D. H., 78 Lee-Wilson, Peter, 135 Le Guin, Ursula, 1, 9, 35n.28 Leigh, Spencer, 112, 114, 117, 119 Lemon, Denis, 137 Lessing, Doris, 9 Lewis, David, 25 Listen to Britain, 113–14 Litten, Peter Mackenzie, 173 Little, Yvonne, 121n.21 Little Nell, 59 Living End, The, 173 Loach, Ken, 118 Lossiemouth, 115 Love is the Devil, 99 Lust for Life, 98 McBride, Stephen, 145 MacCabe, Colin, 98, 154 Mackay, James, 27–9, 83, 111–12, 118, 134, 172 McKellen, Ian, 143 McLaren, Malcolm, 54–5, 58–9, 66 McNally, Terrence, 138 Magnani, Anna, 98 Malcolm, Derek, 146 Malin, Howard, 36, 54, 70 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 153 Marcus, Greil, 55 Mare, Il, 146 Marker, Chris, 90 Marlowe, Christopher, 2, 57, 143– 54 passim, 155n.1 Marvell, Andrew, 13, 21 Massacre at Paris, The, 144

7/25/05, 5:28 PM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

208

index

Mausolus, 78, 80 Maybury, John, 31, 99, 111, 124 Medici, Lorenzo de, 6 Medusa, the, 100–1 Merlet, Agnès, 2, 99 Michelangelo, 173 Middleton’s Changeling, 147 Mills, Johnny, 135 Milton, John, 21, 133, 176 Miranda, Carmen, 162 Mirandola, Pico della, 8 Mishima, Yukio, 45–6, 153, 173 Miss Gaby, 19 Miss World, 25 Modern Nature, 7, 133, 141, 178, 180 Mondo Cane, 171 Monk, Ray, 161, 164, 167 Moorcock, Michael, 9 Moore, G. E., 160, 162 Morrell, Ottoline, 161, 162 Morris, William, 6 Morrissey, 14 Moulin Rouge, 98 Murdoch, Iris, 159 My Blue Heaven, 172 Narcissus, 11, 151 Narrow Rooms, 158 Nash, Mark, 4 National Film Finance Corporation, 93, 109n.39 NeoPlatonism, 6–8, 10, 73, 167 Neutron, 83 Newman, Barnett, 170, 176 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 154, 157n.45 Novalis, 177 Nuits Fauves, Les, 173, 179 October, 32 Olivier, Laurence, 71–2, 123, 129 Ophüls, Max, 22 O’Pray, Michael, 6, 26, 28, 39, 113– 14, 167, 168n.21 Orange Juice, 30 Orphée, 12, 74 Orton, Joe, 153

MUP_Wymer_17_Index

208

Othello, 72 Out of the Blue, 56 OutRage, 148 O What a Lovely War!, 124 Owen, Wilfred, 2, 122–30 passim, 138 ‘Panic’, 14, 110 Pansy, 172 Paradise Lost, 133, 176 Parker, Nathaniel, 123 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 3, 9, 22, 33, 41, 74, 85, 92, 99, 118–19, 136, 153, 164, 173 Passion of the Christ, The, 2, 137 Pastoureau, Michel, 176–7 Pater, Walter, 6 Peake, Tony, 1, 21, 28, 126–7, 174 Pears, Peter, 128 Performance, 45 Persona, 118 Peter Grimes, 85 Pet Shop Boys, the, 30–1, 35n.38, n.40 Philadelphia, 173 Philosopher’s Stone, the, 8–10, 13, 29, 35n.34, 139, 171 Pianist, The, 128 Picasso, Pablo, 94 Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 29, 150 Pink Narcissus, 42 Pinsent, David, 164 Piotrowska, Agnieszka, 158 Plant, Sadie, 55 Plato, 7, 10, 175 Platonism, 6 Polanski, Roman, 128 P-Orridge, Genesis, 29 Powell, Michael, 173 P.P.P. in the Garden of Earthly Delights, 136 Prick Up Your Ears, 153 Procktor, Patrick, 21 Psycho, 65 Queen is Dead, The, 14, 31, 110

7/25/05, 5:28 PM

index

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Queer Edward II, 147 Quentin, John, 162 Rake’s Progress, The, 24 Red Movie, 25 Reed, Carol, 107 Reed, Oliver, 24 Reid, Jamie, 55 Reni, Guido, 45 Renoir, Jean, 22 Revenger’s Tragedy, The, 2, 14, 147 Reynolds, Paul, 83, 88 Richard II, 5 Richard III, 72 Richards, Ben, 164 Ricotta, 4, 136 Robinson, David, 126 Roeg, Nicolas, 45 Rosicrucianism, 170–1 Rossellini, Roberto, 97 Rothko, Mark, 170 Rotten, Johnny (John Lydon), 54, 64, 66–7 Runacre, Jenny, 59 Russell, Bertrand, 159–61 Russell, Ken, 23–4 Russian Formalists, the, 84 Ryle, Gilbert, 168 Sade, Marquis de, 74, 137 St John (the Apostle), 103, 136, 143, 145 St John (the Baptist), 103 St Sebastian, 36–48 passim, 171 Salò, 9, 33, 74, 118–19 Sassoon, Siegfried, 126 Satyricon, 40 Savage, Jon, 55, 64 Savage Messiah, 24 Schreiber, Mordecai, 70 Scorpio Rising, 31 Scorsese, Martin, 137–8 SCUM manifesto, 63, 68n.19 Sebastiane, 2, 6, 36–48, 54, 63, 136, 138, 167 Sebastiane Wrap, 12

MUP_Wymer_17_Index

209

209

Section 28 (of 1988 Local Government Act), 145, 147, 155n.7 Seventh Seal, The, 7 Sex Pistols, the, 54, 56, 59 Shakespeare, William, 2, 5, 11, 21, 70–80 passim, 85, 99, 116, 143, 145, 155n.1 Shakespeare’s sonnets, 85–90, 145 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 176 Sica, Vittorio De, 97 Silverlake Life: The View from Here, 173 Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the, 39 Situationism, 55, 66 Skinner, Francis, 164 Slade School of Art, 21–2, 70, 82n.33 Sloane Square, 23, 25 Smith, Paul Julian, 179 Smiths, the, 14, 30–1, 110 Socrates, 158 Sod’Em, 144 Solanas, Valerie, 63, 68n.19 ‘Song of Solomon, The’, 103 Sons and Lovers, 105 Soul of Man Under Socialism, The, 138 Spencer, Chris Spinoza: The Apostle of Reason, 158 Spring (actor), 112, 116–17 Spunk, 66 Sraffa, Piero, 162 Staple of News, The, 175 Steede, Patrik, 36 Still, Clyfford, 170 ‘Strange Meeting’, 122, 129 Studio Bankside, 14, 25 Suburbia, 58 Sulphur, 25 Summers, Claude, 152 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 124 Swinton, Tilda, 2–3, 88, 98, 105, 112, 114, 119–20, 123, 126, 128–9, 132, 135, 139–40, 145, 161, 180 Symonds, J. A., 6

7/25/05, 5:28 PM

210

index

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Symonds, Richard, 104 Tarot, 25 Tarsem, 2 Taylor, Elizabeth, 146 Taylor, John Russell, 99 Taymor, Julie, 2 Teale, Owen, 123 Tempest, The, 2, 5, 8, 14, 70–80, 83, 126 Temple, Julien, 54, 56, 66 Terry, Nigel, 98, 102, 107, 124, 145, 180 TG Psychic Rally in Heaven, 29 Thatcher, Margaret, 6, 71, 110–11, 119 Thomas, D. M., 9 Throbbing Gristle, 29 Tiernan, Andrew, 145, 149 Tiresias, 176 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 146 Titus, 2 To Die For, 173 Tolstoy, Leo, 159 Townshend, Pete, 66 Trevelyan, G. M., 5, 11 Treviglio, Leonardo, 41 Turin Shroud, the, 178 Turner, J. M., 113 Turner, Simon Fisher, 3, 174 Ulla’s Fete, 25 Ullman, Liv, 118 Uplink, 134, 145, 161, 173 Van Sant, Gus, 2 Vasari, Giorgio, 38 Vaughan, Henry, 171 Vaughan, Thomas, 171 Vicious, Sid, 59, 66 Vigo, Jean, 139 Vinci, Leonardo da, 14, 67, 85 Visconti, Luchino, 22, 26, 85, 97 Vishnevskaya, Galina, 129 Volpone, 146

MUP_Wymer_17_Index

210

Waddington, Steve, 145 Waddington-Lloyd, Helen, 58 Wanderer, The, 21, 89 Ward-Jackson, Nicholas, 92–3 Warhol, Andy, 3, 22 War Requiem, 2, 31, 122–30, 134, 136 Warwick, Richard, 43 Watkiss, John, 32–3 Waugh, Evelyn, 178 Welch, Elizabeth, 79 Welles, Orson, 71–2 Westwood, Vivienne, 54, 56, 59, 60, 67 Whaley, James, 36–7, 41, 54, 70 White Edmund, 144 Whitehouse, Mary, 37, 47, 137 Who, the, 21, 60, 66 Wild Bunch, The, 102 Wilde, Oscar, 6, 29, 124, 138, 145, 150 Willcox, Toyah, 56, 59, 74–5, 79, 81n.11 Williams, Heathcote, 73, 76 Williamson, Henry, 126 Williamson, Philip, 83, 88 Wilson, Ian, 146 ‘Wisdom of Solomon, The’ 10, 180–1, 183n.36, 184n.38 Wittgenstein, 158–68, 169n.32 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 158–68 passim Wizard of Oz, The, 10 Wollen, Peter, 158 Word, The, 136 Wriothesley, Henry, 86 Yates, Frances, 8, 71, 76 Yeats, W. B., 21, 90 Young Soul Rebels, 62 ZDF (television company), 112, 134 Zèro de Conduite, 139 Zoroastrianism, 27 Zweig, Stefan, 146

7/25/05, 5:28 PM