In Memoriam

Today, to mark what would have been Derek Jarman's 70th birthday, I would like to post an amended conference paper I recently presented at the University of Kent's 'The End Of...?' conference, titled 'Political and personal apocalypse in the films of Derek Jarman'. I'd love to have more images and clips, but Blogger is telling me the entry is too large!

Derek Jarman is a filmmaker whose work I return to again and again with enternal joy and enthusiasm. Without him, it is highly unlikely I would be carving a future in academia: my undergraduate final paper and my MA thesis were on his Caravaggio (1986), and my PhD thesis is inspired by his relationship and work with Tilda Swinton. Thank you for your inspiration, and happy birthday!

Pete Tainsh - Derek Jarman at the Edinburgh Filmhouse 18/08/91

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To begin, there’s a quote in the prologue to Dancing Ledge, one of Derek Jarman’s later published diaries, that neatly summarises the focus of this paper:

‘On December 1986, finding I was body positive, I set myself a target: I would disclose my secret and survive Margaret Thatcher’. (Jarman, 1991: 7)

Here, Jarman alludes to the two political threads that permeate his films; his negative opinion of the Thatcher-led Conservative party, and his role within the gay-rights movement, which post-diagnosis became more dominantly AIDS activism based. These two positions go hand-in-hand, with Thatcher’s passing of the now infamous Section 28 in 1988, a bill prohibiting the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality, providing the clearest political example of the homophobia that was rife in England at that time. Jarman died in 1994, but outlived Thatcher in terms of political tenure at least: her Prime-Ministerial reign ended in 1990, but Jarman continued to act in a self-appointed position as one of the few outspoken figures of the illness, with his work, as an artist and a filmmaker, becoming an increasing convergence of political and personal concerns; HIV/AIDS awareness necessarily overlapping the two fields.

So then, what about the apocalypse in Jarman’s films? Robin Wood suggests that the metaphysical visualisation of the apocalypse seen as, for example, the end of the world, can often be interpreted within social and political terms. Here, in his brief assessment of the ‘apocalyptic’ in American horror films, these terms are ‘the end of the highly specific world of patriarchal capitalism’ (1984: 192). In Peter Hutchings’ recent exploration of the broad notion of the apocalypse in British cinema of the 70s, it is seen as a cultural and commercial remark of the ‘shared conviction that the current social order is fragile and susceptible to collapse’ (2010: 116). In Jarman’s films, as I shall discuss, the suggested social/political position is clear: the visual imaginings of destitute, apocalyptic England are an unambiguous critique of the Thatcher years, voicing a dominant political statement that runs through much of his work. I’m interested in the apocalyptic images and tone of Jarman’s films, specifically Jubilee (1977) and The Last of England (1987), their expression of political, and then progressively dominant personal concerns, and the culmination of this in the non-representational image and aural narrative of his final film, Blue (1993).

This notion of the ‘apocalypse’ presents itself in various forms in the films. Jubilee imagines its end of the world in a prediction: Elizabeth I calls for the angels to entertain her, and is presented with the social devastation of an anarchic post-monarchic future, coloured by the Punk movement of the 70s. There is little sense of an authoritarian power; the Queen is dead, and even the police seem driven by personal impulse rather than constitutional obligation. The characters go around torturing, maiming, and killing. The state, or what is left of it, is effectively owned by one man: Borgia Ginz, a Rupert Murdoch/Richard Branson media-mogul type figure, who turns Buckingham Palace into a recording studio, and exclaims, through maniacal laughter: “As long as the music’s loud enough we won’t hear the world falling apart”.

The Last of England, in its episodic use of mixed footage, similarly presents the deterioration of the country, in part, through the lack of traditional authority figures. The loosely-structured narrative establishes the Docklands area we are introduced to as controlled by a group of balaclava-wearing men, with additional characters seemingly enslaved by social deprivation and insurgent rule. The images of environmental neglect seen in Jubilee reappear, with desolate, damaged surroundings and derelict buildings, fires, and general urban decay.

Just as Jubilee compares the imperial sovereignty of Elizabeth I to the social decline of the Second’s reign, The Last of England presents the terrorist state in contrast with the footage of the pleasant wartime childhood of Jarman. In both films, the idyll of the garden past is juxtaposed with the derelict urban wasteland of the present – that is the 80s present of the film - recalling Andrew Higson’s view of the Edwardian manor-house and gardens in the Merchant-Ivory type ‘heritage’ films of the 1980s as mournful pastoralism.

Jarman openly criticised the nostalgic cinema that ruled the British film industry during this period as a Thatcherist parable representing middle-class entitlement, and avoids the trap of the heritage film, as Higson suggests, of the ‘visually spectacular pastiche [which invites] a nostalgic gaze that resists the ironies and social critiques so often suggested narratively’ (2006 [1993]: 91) of these films, by questioning this sense of the historical, striving for a more imaginative treatment of history, and commenting on the role of the past in the construction of the present. So, Jubilee may present an image of the Elizabethan past as a refined haven critical of the anarchic present – a point, perhaps in part, related to the character of the Queen’s alchemist John Dee, a historical figure much admired by Jarman - but the film concludes in the present world with Bod’s gang residing, along with Hitler, in a country manor, that visual staple of ‘heritage’ excess, owned by Borgia Ginz: a figure of the corporate greed encouraged by Thatcher’s government and despised by Jarman.

Beyond images of the garden, the representation of the past in The Last of England, as seen in the Super 8 home-videos by Jarman’s father, is problematic. In one notable montage is it difficult to discern between footage shot by Jarman, footage shot by his father, and archive documentary footage. Thus, the images of burning buildings align the damage caused during the wartime Blitz with the social riots of the 80s, in places such as Brixton, alongside the fictional destruction presented in the terrorist ‘narrative’. Likewise, it is unclear if the gunmen in this sequence are the actors seen earlier in the film, or authentic IRA gunmen from documentary footage.

The wartime footage from Pakistan from this sequence, shot by Jarman’s father, recalls another fitting observation from Andrew Higson: that heritage films set in colonial countries, like David Lean’s Passage to India (1984), document ‘the process of decay, the fall from [an] utopian national ideal: in most cases they chronicle the corrupt and decadent last days of imperialist power’ (2006 [1993]: 104). This sequence, which builds to an editorial frenzy with the musical climax of Elgar’s Land of Hope & Glory, explicitly expresses this, juxtaposing the sense of national pride, associated with the past – demonstrated by the use of the deeply patriotic theme, images of colourful military marches, and national statues – with images of contemporary conflict and degeneration: again, burning buildings, and threatening gunmen. There is often a slow cross-fade between two images, one of the past and one of present, which unambiguously encourages us to consider our own relationship with, or perception of the historical. This culminates with the musical composition drowned out by war sirens, and the frenetic images of empty, abandoned warehouses edited alongside a shot of a floating poppy wreath. This ironic arrangement establishes a clear anti-Thatcher sentiment, connoting the active Falklands conflict, Jarman’s disapproval of the war, and commenting on the perversion of our country’s wartime patriotism and pride in the face of death and destruction.

To return, briefly, to the consideration of the garden in these films, it is worth briefly noting Jarman’s former home in Dungeness in Kent. Prospect Cottage sits on the shingle beach headland, in this strange, desolate environment. Jarman used local plants and gathered flints, shells, and driftwood for sculptures to decorate his garden. There is something apocalyptic about the area and the looming presence of the nuclear power station that dominates the skyline. Jarman became as famous for this garden as he did for his films, with it becoming a distinguished part of his artistic career, and providing the location for his 1990 film The Garden. Significantly, he kept a diary documenting the progress of the garden, which was later published as Modern Nature.

Jarman kept diaries for the production of all of his works, providing, as Jim Ellis summarises, a ‘generically impure blend of personal, familiar, and social history, along with aesthetic and political observations’ (2009: xii-xiv). Elements of this can, of course, be seen in the quote I began this talk with, but this is further exemplified by his autobiographical approach to filmmaking, offering his life and opinions for observation. This sense of the personal is marked explicitly with Jarman’s presence in his films. He has a tiny cameo in Jubilee at The Kid’s – a young Adam Ant - performance for Borgia Ginz. In The Last of England this presence is more instructively manifest from the opening sequence, with Jarman writing at a desk surrounded by books and writing implements, inscribing his thoughts on the pages of his diaries. He reappears at later intervals as, for example, a shadow in the frame, and a young boy in his father’s films. This is further extended in Blue when Jarman’s familiar voice emerges unannounced, from a musical chanting interlude ("I am a Not Gay"), to read a small part of the narration.

Blue provides an excellent example of Ellis’ observation, and my own interests: the combination of aesthetic awareness and the manifestation of political and personal concerns. Jarman’s final feature film before his death is a deeply personal document of his own experience with AIDS, and an acknowledgement of the presence, the shadow, of death fixed on those with, and around, the AIDS illness. In contrast to the conventional images of destruction seen in Jubilee and The Last of England – abandoned houses, fires, rubble, burnt-out cars – Blue presents its apocalyptical vision with the lack of image, or at least of figurative representation: an unchanging blue screen for the duration of the film echoes the illness-related blindness of the director - a visual void that acts as a politicised response to previous unsatisfactory representations of AIDS.

This short section of Jarman’s speech is significant because up until this point the audience may have presumed that Nigel Terry, the main narrator, was ‘performing’ as Jarman: reading his personal memoirs aloud. Instead, there is no stable ‘image’ of the speaker, transforming these personal experiential recollections to others: to the political collective voice of the illness, but simultaneously maintaining Jarman’s presence as an active spokesperson for the illness and the community. As Jarman comments, Blue became ‘a good reason to fill in the blanks and to start putting in the ‘I’ rather than the ‘they’ (2010 [1993]: 30).

For obvious reasons, speech plays a dominant role in Blue, providing the narrative to the film, and presenting the sense of the apocalypse, or end of the world, that is, of Jarman’s world and the world of his friends, through the account of impending death. The other films discussed demonstrate the contribution of words to the envisioning of the political end of the world. In Jubilee, the walls of buildings, the gang’s flat, especially, are adorned with slogans in graffiti. There’s a sense of broad angered politics to some of the graffiti, but much of it is indecipherable. Graffiti also appears in The Last of England, on abandoned buildings and under bridges, but the political use of words exists in the poetry of the voiceover: acting as a precursor to the aural dominance of Blue. Significantly, it is Nigel Terry who is the narrator of The Last of England too, and his voiceover begins to equate the thematic concerns of Thatcherism and AIDS in anticipation of the move towards the explicitly personal in Blue. Politics still play an important role in Blue – there is talk of the Bosnian war, and criticisms of charitable organisations, but the dominant concern is the personal experience of a life with AIDS.

There is one noteworthy sequence in Blue, with a particularly threatening soundscape suited to the subject matter, that presents an example of the poetic/personal content of the film, or as William Pencak posits, ‘the poetic synthesis of […] two juxtapositions […]: first, the (distantly perceived) public and historical versus the (intensely experienced) private and personal worlds; and second, the fantasies we employ versus the reality of death and impending annihilation’ (2002: 165).

The first part of the narration is read by John Quentin, presenting a section of the poetic material imagining the river journey to the afterlife:

“How did my friends cross the cobalt river, with what did they pay the ferryman? As they set out for the indigo shore under this jet-black sky - some died on their feet with a backward glance. Did they see Death with the hell hounds pulling a dark chariot, bruised blue-black growing dark in the absence of light, did they hear the blast of trumpets?”

Here, the sounds of seagulls and the distant bells on the soundtrack connote the funeral toll, creating this incredibly atmospheric mental image of, amongst other things, the gentle rocking of the boat, and the mist on the water. The second section is read by Nigel Terry, focusing on the experiential material of Jarman’s friends’ deaths, describing their decline to the illness, with the tolled bells continuing under this slow rhythmic industrial lull, adding a real sense of the ominous to the already melancholic speech.

This section, incidentally, is one of the few examples of an overtly hostile soundscape in the film. With this in mind, perhaps Blue is more of a transcendent haven, than apocalyptic, or driven by death, in tone. The transition from the overt concern of politics of Jubilee and The Last of England moves towards the personal, and is no less apparent, certainly, but perhaps Blue, and its solitary blue image is the final, ultimate garden; a timeless space of transcendence and possibility, defined by the move from legislation and protest towards social, and indeed personal, acceptance, and a positive – not victimised - representation. As Tim Lawrence posits, perhaps the end is not nigh: ‘Blue […] maintains hope, the possibility that the story is not yet over and that a different, more optimistic end will be available in the future’ (1997: 260).


Bibilography -

Ellis, Jim. (2009). Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations. London: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

Higson, Andrew. (2006 [1993]). ‘Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film’. In Friedman, Lester (ed.), Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism. 2nd Edition. London: Wallflower. 91-109.

Hutchings, Peter. (2010). ‘The Power to Create Catastrophe: The Idea of Apocalypse in 1970s British Cinema’. In Newland, Paul (ed.), Don’t Look Now: British Cinema in the 1970s. Bristol: Intellect. 107-117.

Jarman, Derek. (1991). Dancing Ledge. London: Quartet.

Jarman, Derek. (1992). Modern Nature. London: Vintage.

Jarman, Derek. (2010 [1993]). At Your Own Risk: A Saint’s Testament. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

Lawrence, Tim. (1997). ‘AIDS, the Problem of Representation, and Plurality in Derek Jarman’s Blue’. Social Text. 52/53, Autumn/Winter. 241-264.

Pencak, William. (2002). The Films of Derek Jarman. London: McFarland & Company.

Wood, Robin. (1984). ‘Introduction to the American Horror Film’. In Grant, Barry K. (ed.), Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press. 164-200.

- K.S.