Feature by Peter Fraser
‘Toto, there’s no place like home…’
Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz
Like William Blake, and particularly in his Super 8 films, Derek Jarman sought:
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour...”
What are the facts of someone’s life? Where is the thread to lead you through the maze? Jarman addressed similar questions in his films about Caravaggio and Wittgenstein, both of whom he believed to be homosexual like himself. Like the globe shattering into fragments at the beginning of Citizen Kane, just as life reaches its unity it becomes irretrievably multitudinous, shorn of the Self whose narrative makes it whole. Thus final words acquire a talismanic aura. Is there one thing that can explain the life, a microcosm that reveals the macrocosm? Can the life of a person reveal the secrets of the universe? Infinity, like a globe about to shatter, held in the palm of your hand. Heaven, a childhood idyll, hidden in a rosebud, a wild flower yet to bloom. A keen gardener, it’s not too much to say that Jarman saw heaven in a flower.
His final words were: ‘I want the world to be full of fluffy little ducks.’ Not quite on a par with Oscar Wilde’s ‘Either this wallpaper goes or I do’ but with its own anarchic charm.
If Jarman had lived then he planned to raise a statue to Wilde on the centenary of the writer’s death. Wilde was jailed for homosexuality; Jarman wanted someone in authority, perhaps the Queen herself, to unveil the statue as a gesture of inclusion. It shows that despite his anti-establishment films and latter-day political activism Jarman, not unlike Wilde, valued inclusion and respected ancient English institutions. It also points to Jarman’s fascination with martyred homosexuals, either literally martyred like the Roman soldier Sebastiane or metaphorically through repression like Wittgenstein. Jarman was to join those martyred ranks in the eyes of gay rights and AIDS awareness activists as well as the tabloid press, whose ‘serves you right’ attitude when Jarman contracted AIDS amounts to something similar, from a very different perspective.
So no wonder that Jarman identified with outlaws, the persecuted and the unrepentant, such as his hero the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini and the subjects of his own films.
There was Sebastiane, the martyred Roman soldier, and Caravaggio, the wild Florentine painter who, like Pasolini and Christopher Marlowe, original author of Jarman’s Edward II, lived a volatile life and died an early death. Jarman took homosexual icons from history as a means to legitimate his identity in a modern society where homosexuality was still officially considered unnatural. It was not until the sixties that he began to experience the London nightlife and the seventies that he publicly expressed his sexuality. He was not fully politicised until the late eighties when he joined activists, in particular Outrage!, to march against legislation that he considered indicative of the intolerance of Margaret Thatcher’s government.
It’s easy to see how Derek Jarman’s life and art became politically important. Platitudinous perhaps that art mirrors life but it’s fascinating – and perhaps rather too tempting - to see how the destinies of Jarman’s iconic subjects such as Caravaggio, who had a death sentence hanging over him, and Sebastiane, shot full of arrows, seem to foreshadow his own fate. Or better perhaps, how they provide prisms through which his fate might be viewed. This approach is not so wrong-headed, or necessarily so glib, as it might sound.
Although Derek Jarman may not have expected to die young he had good reason to identify with the persecutions undergone by Caravaggio and Sebastiane, Edward II and Wittgenstein, and there’s no doubt that he was drawn to these subjects because of a personal empathy. Particularly in the case of Caravaggio there were broader correlations. Caravaggio was an artist and Jarman irredeemably so. He said that he always considered himself a painter rather than a filmmaker. Political activism came reluctantly.
In Jarman’s Caravaggio the artist’s life is perceived through his major works of art, perhaps as any artist would wish to be perceived, and the biography embodies the apparent contradiction between Caravaggio’s wild life and his classical art. The chiaroscuro between life and art, the personal and the impersonal, the private and the public, is both epitomised and complicated by the fact that Caravaggio’s lovers are depicted as saints in his paintings. Thus his life enters his art and his art enters his life. Jarman may have identified with Caravaggio’s persecution in life but he also saw Caravaggio’s innovation in art as an ideal to aspire to.
Like Caravaggio Jarman included lovers and friends in his work, partly because he wanted to have fun, partly because he didn’t have the budgets for name actors. As with Caravaggio his private life seeped into his work in sublimated form until his private life finally became very public.
If Jarman’s work was merely personal then it’s doubtful that it would resonate beyond his circle of friends. Were it merely about his sexuality then it might have a niche audience. However Jarman found in his own situation as an artist, a British citizen, a homosexual, and those of the people he depicted, broader metaphors for sex and power, exile and belonging, resistance and repression, history and art. Even in his final film Blue, which is ostensibly about living with AIDs, radical abstraction ensures that this brave piece of work has a universal resonance. Few artists have achieved such a crowning glory.
Derek Jarman’s last words might have been ‘Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore’ because The Wizard of Oz was not only the first film that he saw but also one of his favourites. It’s easy to see how its imaginative décor and form influenced his own art direction. The film’s moral ‘There’s no place like home’ captures some of Jarman’s contradictions. It’s conservative undertones express a longing for a retreat from the world not unknown to Jarman, as further exemplified by Dorothy’s pronouncement of finding ‘my heart’s desire in my own backyard’, whether it was a longing for a pre-industrial past or some other England. More radically, if we take ‘no place’ literally, then the phrase can mean that there is no home at all. Home becomes a founding myth, a fiction that may be a mental, cultural, historical production.
Throughout his life and art Jarman had a longing for a paradise lost. It was expressed through the home movies of his childhood slipped into his otherwise splenetic though poetic feature-length home movie The Last of England. ‘Home movie’ because while it was released in the cinemas it was the result of a year’s ambient experimentation between Jarman and his circle of collaborators. This was the way in which he had begun making films, shooting 8mm films with friends at parties in the 1970s. He liked to have a fun, collaborative atmosphere on his films sets, even for his most expensive and industrial production Caravaggio, and often declared, whether disingenuously or not, that the process was more important than the result. However The Last of England was not only a home movie in the sense that it was shot on Super-8 in a non-professional manner with a group of friends. It was also a home movie because in its final form it was explicitly about the state of the English homeland in the 80s. It also expressed a sense of loss.
Not however a loss of the Victorian values that Margaret Thatcher held dear and which Jarman abhorred. Rather Jarman reacted against the imperial and industrialised age that the Conservative Party seemed to want to resurrect, harking back to an almost Hellenic vision of England’s past. This was distilled in his love of gardening and the urban decay of his dystopian visions. It tempered his obvious radicalism with a romantic conservatism in which the rebel and the traditionalist within him continually clashed.
Thus in creating a long ‘home video’ about the state of the nation Jarman not only melds personal and national concerns, he also questions what it is to call England a home at all, especially resonant at the time as a gay British citizen. Jarman’s films often returned to the English Renaissance to explore the foundational myths and moments of the English nation. He identified the repression of homosexuality and alternative modes of being and living partly with the rise of capitalism, empire, industrialisation and the rationalisation of sexual relations, subsumed to a punishing work ethic, policed by the state.
In this he was close to the great romantic William Blake and in the suggestively titled ‘Dreams of England Michael’ O’ Pray notes the similarities between the two. ‘Like Blake, Jarman was a Londoner who believed the city physically embodied the woes of his time – in sixteenth-century terms, it was a microcosm.’ Moreover, ‘both created mythological systems spanning the personal and the national […] plundered the cabala, alchemy and the occult philosophies’ and ‘[Jarman] too was a charismatic figure, living frugally, expounding radical views, including free love.’ As a restless temperament it seems that Jarman carried ‘home’ with him and we might suggest that the collaborative ethic of his filmmaking was an attempt to create a sense of belonging, some kind of home. While he may have yearned to escape his sense of exile, self-exile from his middle-class upbringing, he was often solitary. While he was engaged with the issues of the time, his work was personal, and while in person he presented an optimistic face, the tenor of his films is far bleaker. In the well-worn phrase he had ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.’
***
From his work as a set designer for Ken Russell’s The Devils in 1970, in which the medieval town resembles a hospital or an ivory tower, to his first film Sebastiane in 1976, which capitalized on its desert setting, to Blue in 1993, Jarman’s work flaunted a willful modernism. It nurtured a productive tension with his historical subject matter and his fascination with renaissance art, his attraction/repulsion to tradition. It queried the boundaries between high and low art. It exploded the process of artistic creation.
Like Blake, Jarman studied the secret renaissance sciences of alchemy, magic and the occult, which he found comparable to the furtive world of forbidden sexuality and analogous to the role of the artist, who turns base metal into gold. He believed in the alchemical concept of microcosm and macrocosm, that ‘man’ is a miniature world reflecting the greater world, and duality, in which there are two sides to everything that can only be joined through alchemy. The minimalism in the design of most of his films, for example The Devils, arose initially from budgetary considerations but, as well as expressing a modernist aesthetic, became an animistic sense of the significance of every gesture as a sign of the greater whole.
One might say that in alchemy he saw his own mercurial character and its profound duality: a traditional middle class upbringing combined with the sexuality that removed him from that tradition.
Likewise the short 8mm films with which Jarman experimented at parties in the 1970s, prior to making his first feature, were extremely personal. They were painterly when blown up to 35mm. He returned to the form repeatedly throughout his career driven by economic constraints and a minimalist desire to strip things back to their bare essentials, as well as to have fun. He viewed himself as a painter rather than a filmmaker and regarded even his feature films as intensely personal despite their communal creation.
But what was Jarman’s approach to biography? In life he published diaries that contained his reminiscences but in his films he had a modernist scepticism about linear narratives that extended from personal histories to history per se. Stories are contrivances, they imply teleologies or particular ends, whether that be the superiority of capitalism, communism or the British Empire or a warning not to cry wolf, that organise the narrative, impose certain values upon it and select and elide details accordingly. So Jarman strove to depict the past as a cultural production, a state of mind, thereby challenging the historical myths often blithely accepted by ‘prestige’ period films. Such distancing took the form of typewriters in renaissance Italy, an Edward II set amidst concrete blocks and Wittgenstein surrounded by impenetrable darkness.
His anti-realism was partly influenced by Ken Russell as well as Jean Cocteau, probably also Brecht, and his desire to push cinematic boundaries by avant-garde homosexual artists such as Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger, the latter of whom regarded his films as ceremonies of occult magic.
Even in his first feature Sebastiane, where the anachronisms are less obvious, particularly because the actors speak in Latin, the ideas expressed have a prominence that suggests history as a cultural territory whose meanings are open and which therefore can be challenged. This is rather more intelligent than the use of history as a pretty backdrop to soap opera that we come to expect from big-budget period fodder. Having expected a short run at the ICA Jarman was gratified, but a little taken aback, to see crowds attending the film’s first showings in 1976. Soon the film was playing at Leicester Square.
Yet for all the film’s celebratory homoeroticism, that attracted an under-represented homosexual constituency en masse, it is markedly pessimistic and not a little sadomasochistic. Somewhat like Pasolini’s Salo it is more about power than sexuality. In films such as Caravaggio and Edward II the sexuality of the central characters chafes against institutions, the Catholic Church in the former and the repressive apparatus of the English state in the latter, but the homosexual Sebastiane is persecuted for his Christianity.
The film takes place in a far-flung outpost of the Roman Empire at the time of the last purges of the Christians. The soldiers pass the time in bawdy sex games but one of them, Sebastiane, has declared himself a Christian and thus refuses to fight or to return the sexual advances of the camp’s commander. Sebastiane has given his love to God. The commander contrives increasingly malevolent punishments for Sebastiane until finally he orders that the other soldiers tie the Christian to a stake and shoot him full of arrows in a mock crucifixion. This scenario explores the relationship between sex and power, the martyrdom of repressed sexuality and the homoeroticism of much Christian imagery. Sebastiane’s sexuality is sublimated in a spiritual love that he considers purer than the pagan sex games of the other soldiers.
In a sense Sebastiane desires his own death as love’s consummation. Throughout the film the power of sexuality to undermine authority is exemplified by the commander’s thwarted desire for Sebastiane and the symbolic duality between water, in which the soldiers play and have sex, and the sun, which Sebastiane worships as an austere and repressive Christian God. Thus images of sunlight dappling on water become a delicate rendering of duality not unlike the chiaroscuro in Caravaggio. The film also, probably quite mischievously, implies questions regarding Christ’s own sexuality and the motivations of his sacrifice.
For all that, and all its promise, Sebastiane is rough around the edges. Jarman went on to make an even more controversial film, Jubilee, in 1978 in which alchemist Sir John Dee shows Elizabeth I the future of England. In depicting punk girls running riot, killing their lovers, in a country irredeemably in decline, Jarman depicted where England might be going. It was a time of economic recession, the end of empire, and, having filmed the Sex Pistols’ first concert, he felt that the punkish nihilism of ‘no future’ was symptomatic. He thought it would lead to a repressive reaction from the right couched in a revival of imperial rhetoric. With the onset of Thatcherism in the 80s he considered himself vindicated.
In an early draft Jubilee was dedicated to, ‘all those who secretly work against the tyranny of Marxists fascists trade unionists maoists capitalists socialists etc…who have conspired together to destroy the diversity and holiness of each life in the name of materialism…For William Blake.’
In an unrealised script that fed Jubilee Jarman has the Sphinx speak thus to Elizabeth I and John Dee:
Hear me in the Great Silence
woe to the man who replaces the many by the single
for he shall give birth to torment.
Consider the world’s diversity and worship it
for the lesser gods are many and the world is
mirrored in their image.
By denying these gods their multiplicity
You deny your own true nature.
Despite his attachment to certain notions of Englishness, Jarman rejected trends such as conformism, standardisation, industrialisation, vulgar materialism that repressed the radical multiplicity of life, its diversity and infinity of experience, its idealism and spiritualism. Also organised religion – he became an atheist early in life rejecting the Church of England – although presumably the pagan, ‘lesser’, Gods held more appeal than monotheism. Biographer Tony Peake says, ‘[Jubilee] is full of transformations and inversions […] These inversions are a metaphor for gay life, itself an inversion of what Little England would regard as the norm – an attitude, since it marginalised him, that Jarman had always hated.’
The themes of the end of empire, intolerance, terrorism and economic insecurity were to return after 1986’s Caravaggio in The Last of England, in some ways even bleaker than Jubilee but poetic in a way that the stridency of Jubilee for the most part forestalled. It was considered an antidote on the Left to the sentimental Thatcherite nostalgia of Chariots of Fire just as Edward II later challenged Branagh’s Henry V.
In 1987 Jarman discovered that he had AIDS. At that time, with little research into the disease or effective medicine against it, AIDS was a death sentence to which his response was ‘I’ve got to get as much out of life as possible.’ In Life as Art, a documentary about Jarman, Tilda Swinton, the actress who was his muse from the mid-eighties, says, ‘on one level it was devastating but on another it was a gift for an artist. He took it and used it. We got about four films made on the back of the fact that it was Derek’s last film.’
By The Last of England Jarman, although always struggling for finance, still hadn’t spent one million pounds on all his of films put together including Caravaggio, which was the biggest budget he ever had. The more overtly activist Edward II followed, along with The Garden and Wittgenstein, work that some regard as Jarman’s finest. Filmmaker Michael Almereyda wrote, ‘his films, it seems to me, became sharper, increasingly pressurised, and his description of the world became both more convincing and more private.’
Death has a claim to be perhaps the most private event of a person’s life but Jarman dealt with it publicly: He said, ‘I did it for myself, really for my own self respect because my whole life had been a struggle to actually make my life open and acceptable. I found myself potentially in a film of a ghetto really of frightened and unhappy people who felt that they couldn't actually tell the truth about themselves.’
In an interview Jeremy Isaacs asked him whether his uninhibited sex life had brought him happiness: ‘Yes because I've always met people... I mean you know one doesn't have sex with someone and just say goodbye; one usually ends up chatting, and then you start to find out stories and lives’.
‘I wanted to make a film about HIV […] I had this great problem: I couldn't make a film about other people, I had to do it about myself. I really was, I felt that I had to make a self-portrait in the middle […] I thought this was a way of actually doing it with no images - you know the virus - we can't see the virus.’
Jarman often quoted Prospero’s words regarding ‘this poison blue’ from The Tempest, which he filmed after Jubilee. His last film was named Blue. It rejected the ‘pandemonium of images’ and embraced an unchanging blue screen for its entire 77 minute duration. The screen’s constant blue glow in combination with Jarman’s voice-over becomes a transcendent experience in the vein of abstract art such as that of Yves Klein, to whom the film was dedicated. With his monochrome blue paintings Klein sought to create a nirvana-like state devoid of worldly influences; a zone where the viewer is inspired to pay attention to their own sensibilities, to ‘reality’ as opposed to ‘representation’. In conception, execution and the specific circumstances of its artist, Blue is perhaps among the most remarkable films made. Jarman said ‘with Blue I’ve finally succeeded in doing what I’ve always had to do surreptitiously, make a film about myself.’
Another home movie - its last microcosmic words: ‘I place a delphinium, blue, upon your grave.’
Sources:
Almereyda, Michael ‘Notes on Derek Jarman’ in Projections 4 ½: Filmmakers on Filmmaking Faber and Faber 1995
Peake, Tony Derek Jarman Little, Brown 1999
Derek Jarman: Life as Art. Dir Andy Kimpton-Nye UK 2004, 60 mins
Face to Face: Derek Jarman in conversation with Jeremy Isaacs 1993
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