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International Journal of Jungian

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‘A cinema of small gestures’: Derek

Jarman's Super 8 – image, alchemy,
individuation
a
Christopher Hauke
a
Society of Analytical Psychology, Jungian Psychoanalytic
Association, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK
Published online: 06 May 2014.

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To cite this article: Christopher Hauke (2014) ‘A cinema of small gestures’: Derek Jarman's Super
8 – image, alchemy, individuation, International Journal of Jungian Studies, 6:2, 159-164, DOI:
10.1080/19409052.2014.905969

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 International Journal of Jungian Studies, 2014
Vol. 6, No. 2, 159–164, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19409052.2014.905969

‘A cinema of small gestures’: Derek Jarman’s Super 8 – image,

alchemy, individuation
Christopher Hauke*

Society of Analytical Psychology, Jungian Psychoanalytic Association, Goldsmiths, University of

London, London, UK
(Received 14 March 2014; accepted 16 March 2014)
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The Super-8 films of Derek Jarman (1942–94) are discussed in the light of the artist’s
involvement with gay politics and his sense of being an outsider. This led him to identify
with elements in Jung’s psychology, especially his work on alchemy. Jarman’s
manipulation of Super-8 film images was comparable to an alchemical processing of
the material contributing to his personal development – a process that Jung called
individuation. The author argues that Jarman’s radical approach to filmmaking is not
only an active challenge to the assumption of film images as representative of reality but,
in the hands of a politically gay filmmaker, also challenges normative assumptions of
sexuality.
Keywords: Jarman; Derek; film; Super 8 camera; Jungian psychology; alchemy; gay
politics

Start: ‘That sort of filmmaking, my own peculiar sort of filmmaking, is really my

filmmaking’
Derek Jarman had already worked as a production designer on Ken Russell’s film The
Devils when, in the summer of 1972, he met Marc Balet, an architectural student and
Super-8 enthusiast who came to visit the ‘Andy Warhol of London’ – albeit a ‘Warhol’ at
an embryonic stage. James Mackay, Derek Jarman’s producer on many films and now
keeper of the entire Super-8 archive, tells me that Jarman had use of cameras before this
date (Personal communication, 14 February 2014) but was particularly impressed by the
new, user-friendly Nizo Super 8 handheld camera, which required little technical ability.
As his biographer Tony Peake notes, ‘He had been pointed towards a way of populating
his empty canvases, of putting people where there had only been landscape … geometric
shapes or a set designed to dwarf its inhabitants’ (Peake, 2000, p. 179). As a painter,
Jarman felt overtaken by the Hockneys of the world; he could not compete with their
talents. Using the Super 8 camera to film ‘home movies’ documenting the life he was
leading with his friends, Derek Jarman found his voice, his own visual language, and thus
found himself. Carl Jung calls this process of self-discovery individuation – the process
of becoming the person you truly are, the person you were always intended to be. In
psychotherapy, individuation may be explored through talking and listening and
sometimes with pictures; but for Jarman, the film images replaced language. In Dancing
Ledge (1984), he says:

*Email: c.hauke@gold.ac.uk

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

 160 C. Hauke

This is the way the Super-8s are structured from writing: the buried word-signs emphasize
the fact that they convey a language. There is the image and the word, and the image of the
word. The ‘poetry of fire’ relies on the treatment of word and object as equivalent: both are
luminous and opaque. The pleasure of Super-8s is the pleasure of seeing language put
through the magic lantern. (in Halter, 2009, p. 109)

One Last Walk, One Last Look: Bankside (1972) is shot in black-and-white and, with its
short takes of faces, objects, angles of buildings and the river, seems at first to be led by the
content of the images. But it is the selection and combination of what we see – flowers,
paintbrushes, an LP cover, all in close-up just like the faces or part-faces we are shown –
that conveys parts of images that are greater than the whole: the whole that is Jarman’s life
and psyche at the time. As Bela Balazs put it back in 1924 when film was still new, ‘The
close-up is the deeper gaze, the director’s sensibility. The close-up is the poetry of the
cinema’ (1924/2010, p. 41). Elsewhere, Balazs points out how everything, even the
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inanimate, has a ‘face’ (in Hauke, 2013, p. 14): the objects that surround Jarman have a
physiognomy as loved and as familiar as the faces of old friends. They would be a natural
subject for his Super 8 lens to fall upon and capture as an expression of the artist himself.
A culmination of the early filming for Jarman would be to gather his friends for an
evening of viewing at the ‘gay Butlins’ of Butler’s Wharf (Peake, 2000, p. 277) or Sloane
Square, wherever he was living. However, his efforts were not always appreciated, ‘The
first viewers wracked their brains for a meaning instead of relaxing into the ambient
tapestry of random images’ (Peake, 2000, 201/DL:129). Jarman emphasised that ‘I do not
make films; I make moving pictures’ (in Peake, 2000, p. 326). He would have understood
Balazs’ position when he points out that while words can be meaningless, there is no such
thing as a meaningless image (Balazs, 1924/2010, p. 57).
Perhaps Jarman’s viewers were – and still are – looking for signs, rather than taking in
the symbols. For Jung, a sign points to something already known while a symbol refers to
something unknown that, as yet, cannot be expressed in any other way. ‘Furthermore,’ Jung
writes, ‘every psychological expression is a symbol if we assume that it states or signifies
something more or other than itself which eludes our present knowledge. This assumption
is absolutely tenable wherever a consciousness exists which is attuned to the deeper
meaning of things’ (1921, para. 817). In this way, what we see in Jarman’s Super-8s may be
understood from a Jungian perspective; in fact, it was by turning to the writings of Carl
Jung – especially the psychological interpretation of alchemical imagery and practice – that
‘gave Jarman the confidence to let his dream images “drift and collide at random”’ (Peake,
2000, p. 192/DL: 128). It is through the dream-like colliding of colour and light, which
quite overrides the content of their imagery, that Jarman’s Super-8 films find their form.
When he was a four-year-old boy, Jarman’s parents had bought young Derek a book of
Beautiful Flowers and How to Grow Them; his visual sensibility would ever remain with
this type of gaze, staring into the colour and the shape of the flower, more as the effect of
light-and-form-making-image rather than the flower as ‘thing’. This is how content has
found progressively less and less of a place in Jarman’s Super-8s.
Starting with Sebastiane (1976), Derek Jarman did ‘progress’ to making feature films
with content and story to some extent, although he would hardly have regarded it as
‘progress’. Speaking in Dancing Ledge (1984), he says: ‘The feature films were an
attempt to make a rapprochement between [the world of Super 8] and the more formal
world of filmmaking …. I thought perhaps I would be able to carry on making bigger
films and somehow keep my subject-matter …. [but] it turned out to be quite impossible’
(Peake, 2000, p. 325; Solanus, 1985).
 International Journal of Jungian Studies 161

We need to recall that Derek Jarman was a gay filmmaker and artist working under
the cloud of the Thatcher government’s call for a ‘return to Victorian values’. For artists
like Jarman, this meant not only surviving in a growing regime of commercialization of
the arts and the withdrawal of public support; he was also up against Section 28, which
made it unlawful to ‘promote’ or ‘encourage’ gay lifestyle or culture. Derek had not only
found that ‘“narrative is the first trap of commercial cinema”, [and] scripts the first form
of censorship’ (Peake, 2000, p. 326; Meerbeek, 1984), but that ‘There was no consistent
funding for the smaller feature film. The Gay element made it even more difficult … I
went back to doing Super-8s …. and last year [1985] I finally had the courage of my
convictions to say right, that sort of filmmaking, my own peculiar sort of filmmaking, is
really my filmmaking’ (Jarman in Peake, 2000, p. 325; Solanus, 1985).
The screening of his longest Super-8 compilation, In the Shadow of the Sun, blown up
to 16 mm for the Berlin Film Festival in 1981, met with rapturous approval. Jarman
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found ‘the impact of his footage and its “blaze of impressionistic colour” truly awe-
inspiring when played before “a large audience on an enormous screen” …. It showed
him that what he came to call his “cinema of small gestures” could be thrillingly
expanded into a public statement’ (Peake, 2000, p. 330). But later that year, at a screening
at the ICA in London, the response was far less flattering, with the Time Out critic
sighing, ‘with a running time of just over 54 minutes, it’s just not possible to keep your
mind from wandering out to make a baloney sandwich’ (Rose, 1981 in Peake, 2000,
p. 331). In his enthusiasm and zeal, Derek could not understand how his experimental,
narrative-free work could not be received in the same way as his The Tempest; ‘he simply
did not see a difference between the two strains of work’ (Peake, 2000, p. 331).

Keeping it a playground – of an unmistakably grown-up nature

Derek Jarman has been quoted as saying that ‘In all home movies is a longing for
paradise’. One of the earliest semi-scripted Super-8 efforts was called The Siren and the
Sailor. It had elements of what was to come in terms of gay themes, masks and myths.
Filmed with friends in Dorset on the Isle of Purbeck, a location well known to Jarman
from his childhood, this was – as much as Bankside (1972) – a ‘home’ movie; but one
where ‘Jarman was reclaiming the landscape of his childhood and stamping it with the
idiosyncrasy of his adult vision; keeping it a playground, but of an unmistakably grown-
up nature’ (Peake, 2000, 181).
One of the earliest films we have – both in its original form and re-cut into In the
Shadow of the Sun – is of the saturated glow of England depicted in A Journey to Avebury
(1971). Starting with a number of travelling shots, followed by static frames,
the English countryside is painted in blocks of green, brown and amber; the stones of
Avebury coming next as they occupy a new space in the frame with their heavy, dark
stillness. We see trees, fields, a country lane; but these are less the things they represent
and more patterns of light, colour and shape – the style that is to typify Jarman’s Super-8s
as he pursues the medium. After the Avebury filming Jarman returned to draw and paint
the Avebury stones, recreating their images on paper as well as on celluloid.
Beyond any content, beyond symbols and themes, Jarman drew out the textures of
Super-8 filming. Even when there are people present in the frame – like William Burroughs
with Jarman’s friends in Pirate Tape (1982) – the slow-motion, blurred images are more the
shifts of light and colour dissolving against each other than any representation of people in
the material world. ‘The effects gave his small-gauge films a feel of lyrical materialism
 162 C. Hauke

quite different from the hard-edged structuralism practised by his contemporaries at the
London Film-makers Co-op’ (Halter, 2009, p. 108).
Jarman called his superimpositions of film on film, light on light in In the Shadow of
the Sun ‘the wedding of light and matter – an alchemical conjunction’ (Halter, 2009,
p. 108). With its slow motion and stop motion, the viewing of one image through another
image, it is also very much like dreaming. Jarman had first encountered the alchemists in
his search for images to use in the design of Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) and
eventually came upon Jung’s approach to alchemy as a metaphor for individuation. For
Jarman, ‘alchemy was simply a repository of ideas, scenarios and languages upon which
to draw at will’ (Peake, 2000, p. 193); in other words, an inspired borrowing, much like
Jung’s own. In Jarman’s case, he was seeking a metaphor of his psyche as visual imagery,
a word description of what he liked to see projected on the screen, while Jung saw in
alchemy a projection of the mind onto the matter of alchemical processes.
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Light is shone directly at the viewer in many of Jarman’s films: light reflected into our
eyes, bouncing off a mirror, or a jewel; light that goes into the camera, which we then see
reflected in a mirror framed as the camera is pointed into it. Dr John Dee – the magus and
advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, who held great fascination for Jarman, and inspired him to
write a screenplay – had an obsidian mirror (now in the British Museum) that he used for
his magick. In The Art of Mirrors, aka Burning of Pyramids (1973), the viewer is dazzled
with the sun’s reflection and is ‘looking on glass or glass and light, and is perhaps being
invited to step through it. Jarman is exploring how the medium of film itself is allied to
journeying between the temporal and the spiritual, to establishing and exploring one’s
own true nature’ (Peake, 2000, p. 546). Jung writes of the intellect as ‘a function of the
human soul, not a mirror but an infinitesimal fragment of a mirror such as a child might
hold up to the sun, expecting the sun to be dazzled by it’ (Jung, 1963, p. 77).

Reframing reality with film, we derive a less fragmented view of ourselves

What makes an artist like Derek Jarman so at home with film, and with Super-8 film in
particular? We use film to reframe reality; naturalistic film images – especially when
combined with a narrative – seem like reality. In the early days of film, folk would flock
to see short films of their town and themselves at work and play. As Patricia Berry (in
Hauke and Alister, 2001, pp. 70–79) has written, they enjoyed the reframing of their
reality as it was projected in front of them in the moving pictures on a screen; turning life
into art, framed and projected, film delivered something back to the psyche that was
needed. Similar to the way in which the self-reflectivity of psychoanalysis met a
modernist need to grasp the self, watching reality gathered and returned as a projected
film met a further need in modern populations suddenly up against a reality much harder
to process due to the complexity and speed of modern urban life. As an individual, Derek
Jarman reframed his reality, his lived experience, through projecting it on a rectangular
wall; life is made artifice, but at the same time it satisfies a need. The need for a sense of
himself. Possibly, we all derive a less fragmented sense of ourselves from the moving
image.
But, despite appearances, film is itself fragmented. Film is full of gaps; there are the
gaps that the sprocket needs to pull the film through the aperture gate, and then to pull it
again through the gate of the projector when viewed. There is a minute gap between each
separate frame of the film, 24 gaps per second. By shooting at different speeds and
projecting at other speeds again, Jarman takes advantage of the gaps in film to shift it
away from any attempt to become ‘reality’ or a simulacrum of it. Jarman uses film to
 International Journal of Jungian Studies 163

investigate himself and his visual experience; but not as a surrogate reality. His is a re-
reality, a re-making that benefits from his particular style of filming – low on technical
skill, thus avoiding the crispness of ‘replacement realities’ in which he has no interest.
Even when filming a feature like Wittgenstein (1993) on 35-mm stock, the blocks of
colour against a black set (created by the actors’ garishly unreal costumes and faces)
despite being shot in crisp, pristine focus seem to have all reality subtracted by Jarman’s
bold visual style and vibrant colours.
The alchemical altering of reality, its transformation into something else, is at the
heart of this type of filming. It is also at the heart of Jarman’s outsiderness and his radical
identity as a gay man. ‘Part of my fascination with the alchemists was their involvement
in secrecy and closed structures,’ Derek wrote, ‘Why are so many gay filmmakers
involved in closed structures? Surely because they reproduce their isolation in our
society’ (Halter, 2009, p. 109; Wollen, 1996). In At Your Own Risk (1992), Jarman relates
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his all-night rambles around Manhattan, picking up men by the deserted piers and in the
bushes on Fire Island, and in the Continental Baths with saunas, a pool and a hundred
bedrooms – all in a way that reads like the mélange of visual textures and visceral colour
we see in Super-8s like In the Shadow of the Sun. Jarman took his Jungian reading to the
baths with him; handwritten inside the front cover of his Eranos Yearbook – containing
Erich Neumann’s ‘Art and Time’ and Jung’s essay ‘On Synchronicity’ – it reads: ‘St.
Marks Baths, NYC, Friday afternoon, Sept. 20’ (Peake, 2000, p. 211).
In Jung’s psychology, our rejected sense of otherness is called the Shadow. Our
Shadow, for both individuals and the collective, is defined as everything we think we are
not, everything we do not identify with, everything that is ‘not me’. In a dominantly
heterosexual culture, a sense of certainty in sexual orientation is achieved partly through
projecting our sexual Shadow onto the gay community. Another example is the way in
which criminality and violence realistically depicted in cinema films keeps these shadow
qualities of our humanity projected at a safe distance for us to enjoy with impunity.
Through their unreal visual imagery, Derek Jarman’s Super-8s project an otherness that
conventional filming, in its efforts to look real, fails to depict. Thus Jarman’s Super-8
filming – through a subversion of the form – may itself be seen as the Shadow of straight
film’s representation of ‘reality’, which, in the hands of a gay filmmaker, also conveys the
Shadow of heterosexuality.

A force of nature that achieves its end … with tyrannical might

Jung believed that ‘Analysis of artists consistently shows not only the strength of the
creative impulse arising from the unconscious, but also its capricious and wilful
character…. The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves
its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite
regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle’ (Jung, 1930, para. 115).
As I once wrote of Jung himself, I think Derek Jarman ‘is one of those who have the
genius to express something about the condition of humanity for all of us when they are
at their most subjective in expressing themselves, and their own vision’ (Hauke, 2000,
p. 86). In his observation of historical places and characters such as John Dee and the
alchemists, Jarman does not use aspects of past wisdoms in a reactionary or sentimental
yearning for the past. Instead, they serve to offer a refraction of modern consciousness
and modern culture through unlike lenses retrieved from the past. It is strengthening
to discover precursors, antecedents in the alchemists or the important strands of a
biographical past, as Derek did with his journals and his films.
 164 C. Hauke

Although it was not on Super-8, The Garden (1990) can be seen as Jarman’s last
‘home’ movie. Just like the Super-8 films, it came together as a form of what Jung called
active imagination, which he believed was the key to individuation. This is a process
close to dreaming, where the conscious mind is allowed to ‘drop’ so that unconscious
contents may be encountered and, above all, be engaged with in a dialogue. As David
Weaver has written in Harvest, ‘In the making of the film, and in the painstaking
assembling of the result… form emerges from chaos, meaning from randomness’
(Weaver, 2002, p. 70). Tilda Swinton says that ‘when she saw The Garden she felt she
was in Jarman’s dream’ (Weaver, 2002, pp. 74–75). Derek loved the collaboration
involved in filmmaking; and Tilda Swinton, a major collaborator on many projects and
regarded as his muse, may be seen psychologically as an anima figure for Derek – a
projection of the principles of connectedness that lie behind all creativity. ‘It is one of the
anima’s functions to bring to view a vision of the contents of this dream world, the
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images of the unconscious, as (the hero) experiences it’ (Jung and von Franz, 1960,
p. 77). The perception of inner images ‘requires an attitude of feminine receptivity,
whereas the ability to grasp and understand what has been seen is made possible by the
masculine’ (Jung and von Franz, 1960, p. 77).
In his Super-8 films, through his deep engagement with both the feminine and the
masculine, the conscious and the unconscious aspects of his human nature, Derek Jarman
brought us his dream, alchemically turning his life into a treasure of visual gold.

Acknowledgement
This paper was first given as an illustrated talk at the day conference Derek Jarman: Almost Bliss
held at Chelsea Space, University of the Arts, London, on 14 February 2014.

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