A Very Englishman Gentleman.
A Man Who Guides My Spirit and Heart.
“I'm not afraid of death but I am afraid of dying. Pain can be alleviated by morphine but the pain of social ostracism cannot be taken away.”
Derek Jarman.
Those words right there, sum it up for me. They summed it up when I first read them five years ago when I was fifteen and they still sum it up. Then the words, the same words meant something else, they paraphrased a battle that raged inside of me, I knew I was gay a queer a fag even but how to tell friends I had known for years, family, how to construct a personality from that? Forays into the ‘professional gaydom’ that is central London’s Soho had already made me realise as I watched fashionable young things sashay along London’s one gay street (WTF is that about) that there was nothing of any meaning or interest there for me, it seemed as constricting as the closet I was already in with its strict dress and behaviour codes and no way was I going to give up the friends I loved for that scene. So I went further into Jarman’s world, a world of paintings, films, videos and most importantly at that time diaries, the diaries of a man dying from aids, (well already dead as I read them). As I read. this is what I understood and maybe here my understanding is wrong, but it’s what I understood and took away nevertheless, Life was the problem not being Gay or Queer or whatever, it was my life I wanted accepted not just a sexuality, and that’s why Derek Jarman will always be important to me. Through those diaries I realised a Life lived was a life where you accepted who and where you, as a person were at that moment in time, in terms of yourself and your thoughts, those things might all be at odds with each other, they could be maybe anarchistic and traditional, they could be subversive, aggressive and submissive all at the same time, it just didn’t matter, what mattered is that all those things whatever they were formed you as a person and what made you an individual, it wasn’t the battle with my sexuality that worried me, it was the battle to become an individual that raged and still I guess does.
Through my readings Derek taught me you could not hide from yourself, you had to encompass and embrace all of yourself and lay it out there in your relationships, work, art, whatever and in doing that you would start to find yourself and in doing that find the essential secret that is you, So that’s why Derek Jarman’s so important to me, he just allowed me to be me and even now he still does that, when I worry or am depressed or face what feels like an insurmountable problem, I at some point think ‘what would Derek have done’ and the answers always the same, he would do something, anything, because it takes you from here to another place and he would do it with his head held so fucking high his neck must have ached and that in turn is what I try to do. Moving forward, learning, laughing, crying, raging, making mistakes, even getting it right sometimes but most of all never, ever standing still. Derek gave me a confidence to move forward, I think he must have been an uncompromising individual, I think, he realised to be yourself you had to be uncompromising with yourself and that’s what I did, I refused to compromise myself any further, I came out to my friends and family, I lost a few friends, but most finally understood me and our friendships became closer somehow and besides I made loads more than I had lost so woop woop to me. My family well there’s always a downside to uncompromising but that’s their problem not mine.
So even though Derek’s been dead for sixteen years today there’s still the spirit of him and maybe at the end of the day, at death, that’s all we can ever hope for, that our spirit will be taken forward by others and developed, I just hope I do you Justice Derek.
His Life
Jarman was born Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman in Northwood, Middlesex, boarded at Canford School in Dorset, and from 1960 studied at King's College London. This was followed by four years at the Slade School of Art, University College London, starting in 1963. He had a studio at Butler's Wharf, London, and was part of the Andrew Logan social scene in the 1970s. Jarman's fame, however, mostly derived from his outspoken homosexuality, his never-ending public fight for gay rights, and his personal struggle with AIDS.
On 22 December 1986, Jarman was diagnosed HIV positive, and was notable for discussing his condition in public. His illness prompted him to move to Prospect Cottage, Dungeness in Kent, near to the nuclear power station. In 1994, he died of an AIDS-related illness in London, aged 52. He is buried in the graveyard at St. Clements Church, Old Romney, Kent.
Films
Jarman's first films were experimental super 8 mm shorts, a form he never entirely abandoned, and later developed further in his films Imagining October (1984), The Angelic Conversation (1985), The Last of England (1987) and The Garden (1990) as a parallel to his narrative work.
Jarman first became known as a stage designer, getting his break in the film industry as production designer for Ken Russell's The Devils (1970). He later made his debut in "overground" narrative filmmaking with the groundbreaking Sebastiane (1976), arguably the first British film to feature positive images of gay sexuality, and the first film entirely in Latin. Sebastiane is a story about the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, which created a stir on the art cinema market because of its overt depiction of homosexual desire. Its stylistic tendency to camp was enhanced by its dialogue being in Latin.
He followed this with the film many regard as his first masterpiece, Jubilee (shot 1977, released 1978), in which Queen Elizabeth I of England is transported forward in time to a desolate and brutal wasteland ruled by her twentieth century namesake. Jubilee was arguably the first UK punk movie, and among its cast featured punk groups and figures such as Wayne County of Wayne County & the Electric Chairs, Jordan, Toyah Willcox, and Adam and the Ants.
This was followed by Jarman's unconventional adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest in 1979. Praised by several Shakespeare scholars, but dismissed by some traditionalist critics, the film contains a considerable amount of nudity (mostly male, but also some female, including a scene in which Caliban's mother Sycorax breast-feeds her son), some unconventional casting (Toyah Willcox's Miranda hardly suggests innocent purity) and an unusual setting (a crumbling mansion as opposed to an island). Throughout the film, Jarman is liberal with Shakespeare's text, using it as a springboard for his own interpretation.
During the 1980s Jarman was still one of the few openly gay public figures in Britain and was a leading campaigner against "anti-gay" legislation. He also worked to raise awareness of AIDS. His artistic practice in the early 1980s reflected these commitments, perhaps most famously in The Angelic Conversation (1985), a film in which the imagery is accompanied by a voice reciting Shakespeare's sonnets, obviously chosen for their openness to a homoerotic re-reading.
Jarman spent seven years making experimental super 8 mm films and attempting to raise money for Caravaggio (he later claimed to have rewritten the script seventeen times during this period). With the advent of Channel 4 funding in the mid-80s and the ensuing wave of internationally distributed low-budget British art cinema, Jarman was able to develop his status as a major European auteur.
Released in 1986, the film attracted a comparatively wide audience (and is still, barring the cult hit Jubilee, probably Jarman's most widely-known work). This is partly due to the involvement, for the first time, of the British television company Channel 4 in funding and distribution. Funded by the BFI and produced by film theorist Colin MacCabe, Caravggio became Jarman's most famous film, and marked the beginning of a new phase in Jarman's filmmaking career: from now on all his films would be partly funded by television companies, often receiving their most prominent exhibition in TV screenings. Caravaggio also saw Jarman work with actress Tilda Swinton for the first time. Here, his trademark aesthetics flourished: overt depictions of homosexual love, narrative ambiguity, and superb visuals, particularly the live representations of Caravaggio's most famous paintings, are all prominent features of the work.
The conclusion of Caravaggio also marked the beginning of a temporary abandonment of traditional narrative in Jarman's films. Frustrated by the formality of 35 mm film production, and the institutional dependence and resultant prolonged inactivity associated with it (which had already cost him seven years with Caravaggio, as well as derailing several long-term projects), Jarman returned to and expanded the super 8 mm-based form he had previously worked in on Imagining October and The Angelic Conversation.
The first film to result from this new semi-narrative phase, The Last of England told the death of a country, ravaged by its own internal decay and Thatcher's economic restructuring. "Wrenchingly beautiful…the film is one of the few commanding works of personal cinema in the late 80's – a call to open our eyes to a world violated by greed and repression, to see what irrevocable damage has been wrought on city, countryside and soul, how our skies, our bodies, have turned poisonous," wrote The Village Voice. This film re-interpreted Ford Madox Brown's famous painting of emigrants leaving the English shores for a life in the New World, and has been compared to Humphrey Jennings's documentary Listen to Britain (1941) which constitutes its very antithesis. Where Listen to Britain indulges in the idyllic, The Last of England tries to expose the decay.
During the making of his film The Garden, Jarman became seriously ill. Although he recovered sufficiently to complete the work, he never attempted anything on a comparable scale afterwards, returning to a more pared-down form for his concluding narrative films, Edward II (perhaps his most politically outspoken work, informed by his Queer activism) and the Brechtian Wittgenstein, a delicate tragicomedy based on the life of the eponymous philosopher. It was a later complaint of Jarman's that with the disappearance of the Independent Film sector it had become impossible for him to get finance. Jarman made a side income by directing music videos for various artists including Marianne Faithfull, The Smiths and the Pet Shop Boys.
In 1989, Jarman's film War Requiem brought out of retirement the legendary actor Laurence Olivier. It turned out to be Olivier's last performance.
By the time of his 1993 film Blue, Jarman was losing his sight and dying of AIDS-related complications. Blue consists of a single shot of saturated blue colour filling the screen, as background to a soundtrack composed by Simon Fisher Turner, and featuring original music by Coil and other artists, in which Jarman describes his life and vision. When it was shown on British television, Channel 4 carried the image whilst the soundtrack was broadcast simultaneously on BBC Radio 3, a collaborative project unique for its time.
His final testament as a film-maker was the film Glitterbug made for the Arena slot on BBC Two, and broadcast shortly after Jarman's death. Compiled and edited from many hours of super 8 footage shot with friends and companions throughout his career, it is a moving collage of memories, people and moments lost in time, accompanied by a specially commissioned soundtrack from Brian Eno.
Other works
Derek Jarman's garden, Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, taken in May 2007
Jarman's work broke new ground in creating and expanding the fledgling form of 'the pop video' in England, and in gay rights activism. Several volumes of his diaries have been published.
Jarman also directed the 1989 tour by the UK duo Pet Shop Boys. By pop concert standards this was a highly theatrical event with costume and specially shot films accompanying the individual songs. Jarman was the stage director of Sylvano Bussotti's opera L'Ispirazione, first staged in Florence in 1998.
Jarman is also remembered for his famous shingle cottage-garden, created in the latter years of his life, in the shadow of the Dungeness power station. The house was built in tarred timber. Raised wooden text on the side of the cottage is the first stanza and the last five lines of the last stanza of John Donne's poem, The Sun Rising. The cottage's beach garden was made using local materials and has been the subject of several books. At this time, Jarman also began painting again (see the book: Evil Queen: The Last Paintings, 1994).
Jarman was the author of several books including his autobiography Dancing Ledge, a collection of poetry A Finger in the Fishes Mouth, two volumes of diaries Modern Nature and Smiling In Slow Motion and two treatises on his work in film and art The Last of England (also published as Kicking the Pricks) and Chroma. Other notable published works include film scripts (Up in the Air, Blue, War Requiem, Caravaggio, Queer Edward II and Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script/The Derek Jarman Film), a study of his garden at Dungeness Derek Jarman's Garden, and At Your Own Risk, a defiant celebration of gay sexuality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Jarmanorg/wiki/Derek_Jarman
Those words right there, sum it up for me. They summed it up when I first read them five years ago when I was fifteen and they still sum it up. Then the words, the same words meant something else, they paraphrased a battle that raged inside of me, I knew I was gay a queer a fag even but how to tell friends I had known for years, family, how to construct a personality from that? Forays into the ‘professional gaydom’ that is central London’s Soho had already made me realise as I watched fashionable young things sashay along London’s one gay street (WTF is that about) that there was nothing of any meaning or interest there for me, it seemed as constricting as the closet I was already in with its strict dress and behaviour codes and no way was I going to give up the friends I loved for that scene. So I went further into Jarman’s world, a world of paintings, films, videos and most importantly at that time diaries, the diaries of a man dying from aids, (well already dead as I read them). As I read. this is what I understood and maybe here my understanding is wrong, but it’s what I understood and took away nevertheless, Life was the problem not being Gay or Queer or whatever, it was my life I wanted accepted not just a sexuality, and that’s why Derek Jarman will always be important to me. Through those diaries I realised a Life lived was a life where you accepted who and where you, as a person were at that moment in time, in terms of yourself and your thoughts, those things might all be at odds with each other, they could be maybe anarchistic and traditional, they could be subversive, aggressive and submissive all at the same time, it just didn’t matter, what mattered is that all those things whatever they were formed you as a person and what made you an individual, it wasn’t the battle with my sexuality that worried me, it was the battle to become an individual that raged and still I guess does.
Through my readings Derek taught me you could not hide from yourself, you had to encompass and embrace all of yourself and lay it out there in your relationships, work, art, whatever and in doing that you would start to find yourself and in doing that find the essential secret that is you, So that’s why Derek Jarman’s so important to me, he just allowed me to be me and even now he still does that, when I worry or am depressed or face what feels like an insurmountable problem, I at some point think ‘what would Derek have done’ and the answers always the same, he would do something, anything, because it takes you from here to another place and he would do it with his head held so fucking high his neck must have ached and that in turn is what I try to do. Moving forward, learning, laughing, crying, raging, making mistakes, even getting it right sometimes but most of all never, ever standing still. Derek gave me a confidence to move forward, I think he must have been an uncompromising individual, I think, he realised to be yourself you had to be uncompromising with yourself and that’s what I did, I refused to compromise myself any further, I came out to my friends and family, I lost a few friends, but most finally understood me and our friendships became closer somehow and besides I made loads more than I had lost so woop woop to me. My family well there’s always a downside to uncompromising but that’s their problem not mine.
So even though Derek’s been dead for sixteen years today there’s still the spirit of him and maybe at the end of the day, at death, that’s all we can ever hope for, that our spirit will be taken forward by others and developed, I just hope I do you Justice Derek.
His Life
Jarman was born Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman in Northwood, Middlesex, boarded at Canford School in Dorset, and from 1960 studied at King's College London. This was followed by four years at the Slade School of Art, University College London, starting in 1963. He had a studio at Butler's Wharf, London, and was part of the Andrew Logan social scene in the 1970s. Jarman's fame, however, mostly derived from his outspoken homosexuality, his never-ending public fight for gay rights, and his personal struggle with AIDS.
On 22 December 1986, Jarman was diagnosed HIV positive, and was notable for discussing his condition in public. His illness prompted him to move to Prospect Cottage, Dungeness in Kent, near to the nuclear power station. In 1994, he died of an AIDS-related illness in London, aged 52. He is buried in the graveyard at St. Clements Church, Old Romney, Kent.
Films
Jarman's first films were experimental super 8 mm shorts, a form he never entirely abandoned, and later developed further in his films Imagining October (1984), The Angelic Conversation (1985), The Last of England (1987) and The Garden (1990) as a parallel to his narrative work.
Jarman first became known as a stage designer, getting his break in the film industry as production designer for Ken Russell's The Devils (1970). He later made his debut in "overground" narrative filmmaking with the groundbreaking Sebastiane (1976), arguably the first British film to feature positive images of gay sexuality, and the first film entirely in Latin. Sebastiane is a story about the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, which created a stir on the art cinema market because of its overt depiction of homosexual desire. Its stylistic tendency to camp was enhanced by its dialogue being in Latin.
He followed this with the film many regard as his first masterpiece, Jubilee (shot 1977, released 1978), in which Queen Elizabeth I of England is transported forward in time to a desolate and brutal wasteland ruled by her twentieth century namesake. Jubilee was arguably the first UK punk movie, and among its cast featured punk groups and figures such as Wayne County of Wayne County & the Electric Chairs, Jordan, Toyah Willcox, and Adam and the Ants.
This was followed by Jarman's unconventional adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest in 1979. Praised by several Shakespeare scholars, but dismissed by some traditionalist critics, the film contains a considerable amount of nudity (mostly male, but also some female, including a scene in which Caliban's mother Sycorax breast-feeds her son), some unconventional casting (Toyah Willcox's Miranda hardly suggests innocent purity) and an unusual setting (a crumbling mansion as opposed to an island). Throughout the film, Jarman is liberal with Shakespeare's text, using it as a springboard for his own interpretation.
During the 1980s Jarman was still one of the few openly gay public figures in Britain and was a leading campaigner against "anti-gay" legislation. He also worked to raise awareness of AIDS. His artistic practice in the early 1980s reflected these commitments, perhaps most famously in The Angelic Conversation (1985), a film in which the imagery is accompanied by a voice reciting Shakespeare's sonnets, obviously chosen for their openness to a homoerotic re-reading.
Jarman spent seven years making experimental super 8 mm films and attempting to raise money for Caravaggio (he later claimed to have rewritten the script seventeen times during this period). With the advent of Channel 4 funding in the mid-80s and the ensuing wave of internationally distributed low-budget British art cinema, Jarman was able to develop his status as a major European auteur.
Released in 1986, the film attracted a comparatively wide audience (and is still, barring the cult hit Jubilee, probably Jarman's most widely-known work). This is partly due to the involvement, for the first time, of the British television company Channel 4 in funding and distribution. Funded by the BFI and produced by film theorist Colin MacCabe, Caravggio became Jarman's most famous film, and marked the beginning of a new phase in Jarman's filmmaking career: from now on all his films would be partly funded by television companies, often receiving their most prominent exhibition in TV screenings. Caravaggio also saw Jarman work with actress Tilda Swinton for the first time. Here, his trademark aesthetics flourished: overt depictions of homosexual love, narrative ambiguity, and superb visuals, particularly the live representations of Caravaggio's most famous paintings, are all prominent features of the work.
The conclusion of Caravaggio also marked the beginning of a temporary abandonment of traditional narrative in Jarman's films. Frustrated by the formality of 35 mm film production, and the institutional dependence and resultant prolonged inactivity associated with it (which had already cost him seven years with Caravaggio, as well as derailing several long-term projects), Jarman returned to and expanded the super 8 mm-based form he had previously worked in on Imagining October and The Angelic Conversation.
The first film to result from this new semi-narrative phase, The Last of England told the death of a country, ravaged by its own internal decay and Thatcher's economic restructuring. "Wrenchingly beautiful…the film is one of the few commanding works of personal cinema in the late 80's – a call to open our eyes to a world violated by greed and repression, to see what irrevocable damage has been wrought on city, countryside and soul, how our skies, our bodies, have turned poisonous," wrote The Village Voice. This film re-interpreted Ford Madox Brown's famous painting of emigrants leaving the English shores for a life in the New World, and has been compared to Humphrey Jennings's documentary Listen to Britain (1941) which constitutes its very antithesis. Where Listen to Britain indulges in the idyllic, The Last of England tries to expose the decay.
During the making of his film The Garden, Jarman became seriously ill. Although he recovered sufficiently to complete the work, he never attempted anything on a comparable scale afterwards, returning to a more pared-down form for his concluding narrative films, Edward II (perhaps his most politically outspoken work, informed by his Queer activism) and the Brechtian Wittgenstein, a delicate tragicomedy based on the life of the eponymous philosopher. It was a later complaint of Jarman's that with the disappearance of the Independent Film sector it had become impossible for him to get finance. Jarman made a side income by directing music videos for various artists including Marianne Faithfull, The Smiths and the Pet Shop Boys.
In 1989, Jarman's film War Requiem brought out of retirement the legendary actor Laurence Olivier. It turned out to be Olivier's last performance.
By the time of his 1993 film Blue, Jarman was losing his sight and dying of AIDS-related complications. Blue consists of a single shot of saturated blue colour filling the screen, as background to a soundtrack composed by Simon Fisher Turner, and featuring original music by Coil and other artists, in which Jarman describes his life and vision. When it was shown on British television, Channel 4 carried the image whilst the soundtrack was broadcast simultaneously on BBC Radio 3, a collaborative project unique for its time.
His final testament as a film-maker was the film Glitterbug made for the Arena slot on BBC Two, and broadcast shortly after Jarman's death. Compiled and edited from many hours of super 8 footage shot with friends and companions throughout his career, it is a moving collage of memories, people and moments lost in time, accompanied by a specially commissioned soundtrack from Brian Eno.
Other works
Derek Jarman's garden, Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, taken in May 2007
Jarman's work broke new ground in creating and expanding the fledgling form of 'the pop video' in England, and in gay rights activism. Several volumes of his diaries have been published.
Jarman also directed the 1989 tour by the UK duo Pet Shop Boys. By pop concert standards this was a highly theatrical event with costume and specially shot films accompanying the individual songs. Jarman was the stage director of Sylvano Bussotti's opera L'Ispirazione, first staged in Florence in 1998.
Jarman is also remembered for his famous shingle cottage-garden, created in the latter years of his life, in the shadow of the Dungeness power station. The house was built in tarred timber. Raised wooden text on the side of the cottage is the first stanza and the last five lines of the last stanza of John Donne's poem, The Sun Rising. The cottage's beach garden was made using local materials and has been the subject of several books. At this time, Jarman also began painting again (see the book: Evil Queen: The Last Paintings, 1994).
Jarman was the author of several books including his autobiography Dancing Ledge, a collection of poetry A Finger in the Fishes Mouth, two volumes of diaries Modern Nature and Smiling In Slow Motion and two treatises on his work in film and art The Last of England (also published as Kicking the Pricks) and Chroma. Other notable published works include film scripts (Up in the Air, Blue, War Requiem, Caravaggio, Queer Edward II and Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script/The Derek Jarman Film), a study of his garden at Dungeness Derek Jarman's Garden, and At Your Own Risk, a defiant celebration of gay sexuality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Jarmanorg/wiki/Derek_Jarman
Interviews
An Audio Interview. Ken Campbell Interviews Derek Jarman at the ICA 1984
http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=024M-C0095X0085XX-0100V0.xml#
A documentary narrated by Tilda Swinton looks at the career of British film-maker Derek Jarman.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_7230000/newsid_7232000/7232041.stm?bw=nb&mp=wm
Network21 pirate TV interviews Derek Jarman at the ICA www.network21tv.co.uk
Paintings
Film
A nice mash up of his films
The Garden. 1990.
Derek’s house and garden in Dungeness Kent where Derek spent a lot of time towards the end of his life.
The Angelic Conversation 1985
Is my favourite Jarman movie. It concerns two young men’s dream worlds of lyrical beauty and magic juxtaposed against violence and state surveillance. Sound Familiar?
The film uses 14 Shakespeare sonnets to provide a context and the soundtrack includes music from Coil.
Sebastiane 1976
Jubilee 1977
Jarman’s punk movie on English history and culture in the Queen’s jubilee year. This film was hated by the punk elite and drew an openly homophobic response from punk icon and designer Vivienne Westwood (nice). Later her business partner Malcolm McLaren would make several albums featuring the disco’ing of opera..hmmm...original Malcolm, original. The film also uses music from The Slits and The Damned...(Neat, Neat, Neat). This clip also references the Germanic origins of the monarchy not something that loyalists like to be reminded of in the UK.
The Tempest 1979
Caravaggio 1986
The film is notable for its texture and attention to detail, the intense performances and the idiosyncratic humor it also features props and dress from outside the period in question
The Last of England 1988
A lyrical rant against the England that was being lost under Thatcherism and free market forces. This film also introduced me to flares, not the trousers the things that light up, that led to a little trouble, but not here OK?
War Requiem 1989
Edward II 1991
The re-queering of English history. An interesting feature of this and other Jarman film’s is that the costumes and props are historically inaccurate, maybe Jarman was making the point that nothing in these stories was as it appears and that the themes contained within them go back to the start of time and are still prevalent within modern society without their being too much progression or change.
Wittgenstein 1993
Other Music Videos
Suede. So Young.
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