The Two Gardens of DEREK JARMAN

Author(s): Harlan Kennedy

Source: Film Comment , NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1993, Vol. 29, No. 6 (NOVEMBER-
DECEMBER 1993), pp. 28-31, 33-35
Published by: Film Society of Lincoln Center

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43456895

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 THE TEMPEST: Toyah Willcox. THE ANGELIC CONVERSATION. WITTGENSTEIN.

The Two Gardens of

DEREK JARMAN
by Harlan Kennedy

THE ANGELIC CONVERSATION.

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You do not yet taste some subtilties o' the Ledge and Modern Nature , two of five
isle , that will not let you believe things books of discursive self-portraiture he's
certain
published, have bits of gay confessional
that read like a Cruiser's Guide to Lon-
don's Heathland. His canvases range
from early Pop abstracts impaled with
Extinguish
Extinguish position;position; welcome slip
slip yourwelcome mind your
your
to the mind intointoto a thea receptive
preconceptions;
world receptive world 3-D trimmings (real water faucets), via
of British filmmaker Derek Jarman. satiric crucifixions, to the paintings gath-
Those who enter it are seldom the same
ered for his 1989 exhibit "Queer":
again. And those who stand back to smears of excremental impasto over cut-
frown or censure condemn themselves
out newspaper headlines (SEX BOYS POR
to miss out on one of the oddest, brav- SALE AT QUEEN'S GROCERS). And when-
est bodies of work in modern cinema.
ever Jarman has a spare moment, he
We knew what we were in for, or
jumps on the TV screen to slam hetero-
could have guessed, 23 years ago. Jar- sexual-supremacist culture or Tory poli-
mans first movie- called Derek Jarman
tics. To crown a great career as the artist
Film Diary or Studio Bankside- was On THE LAST OF ENGLAND. laureate of Up Yours, Jarman was
shot on Super-8 in 1970. A ten-minute arrested by the police during an equal
cut-up impromptu filmed in his Thame-once or never was. And he finds his alter
rights demo.
side studio in London, it looks like the egos among men-who-came-after like
Today Jarmans rebel romanticism sits
brainstorm of a demented home-movie the philosopher Wittgenstein, kicking
oddly- but oddly majestically- on a 51-
freak. Chairs, flower vases, paintings, aagainst classical philosophy, or year-oldthe
man who, as everyone in Britain
mannequin, a pair of spectacles, faces ofpainter Caravaggio, warping quattro-
knows, is dying of AIDS. (If the newspa-
friends .... Like a series of jagged-cento idealism into the gymnastic pers emo-
don't tell you, Jarmans say-it-from-
angled flashbulb snaps the images flaretional articulations that would lead on to the-rooftops candor will.) His latest film,
and die, punctuated by semisubliminal Baroque. which may be his last, is called Blue ,
shots of a glowing red wire. Jarmans art- not just his films but his
and may not be a film at all: it depends
All this and, just under the floor-caustic-melancholy poetry and tachist- on the elasticity of your definitions. Blue
boards, the ghost of William Shake-lyrical paintings- is a bonfire of human is 76 solid minutes of blue screen. And
speare. For Jarmans studio, now vanity. It rejoices in the possibility that if
we don't mean special effects thrown
demolished, was on the sight of noneyou reduce Progress, Prosperity, andinto a hi-tech magic surface. We mean
other than the old Globe Theatre. This established cultural Priorities to ashes,
B-L-U-E screen.
adds weight to the suspicion some Brit-you'll find a new Phoenix in there some-
ons have long had: that Derek Jarman iswhere that will rise and soar. The charm That single color is projected sans
old Bill the Bard himself, reborn for theof that high romanticism- and of Jarman alteration, inflection, or interruption.
late 20th century. himself, a gawky, garrulous human Only the odd blemish on the celluloid or
His career sits up and begs for the champagne bottle, forever fizzing with explosion of scratches at end of reel
phrase "renaissance man." He's a poetideas and humor- may explain why he affords variety: those and the volatile
and diarist, painter and designer (fromhas spent two decades getting away withperceptions of the viewer, nudged to see
opera and ballet to Ken Russells Thenear-murder (scandal, outrage, gale- subtle visual changes even when there
Devils and Savage Messiah ), and theforce controversy) as an artist-commen- aren't any (see under K for Kuleshov) by
the film's amazing soundtrack.
most perversely independent filmmakertator in Britain.
in England. He made the homoerotic Born in the genteel county of Mid- This aural cut-up of voices, music,
Sebastiane , the punk Tempest , thedlesex, son of an RAF officer and a dressand sound effects could be a career
Thatcher-bashing The Last of England ,designer's assistant, he threw ofF thebookend to the imagistic cut-up with
the gay-rights Edward //, the pop-Brech-cucumber sandwich milieu at 18 and which Jarman and we began. There are
tian Wittgenstein. He's also an occa-joined the bohemian set at London Uni- musings on art, color, and infinity: "Blue
sional actor- in his own Caravaggio andversity and the Slade School of Art transcends the solemn geography of
The Garden- as well as a gay activist (alma mater to David Hockney, human limits." There are dispatches
Patrick
and prolific interviewee. Caulfield, & Co.). After épatermg fromthe the AIDS front-line: "The doctor in
St. Bartholomew's Hospital thought he
But Jarman isn't Mr. Renaissance, he'sbourgeoisie with his first movie designs
Mr. Post-Renaissance. Thaťs the secret -a white-bricked Loudun in The Devils could detect lesions in my retina. . .
of his place in British cinema and his that looked to some like a giant British4 Look up, look down. . .blue flashes in
uniquely powerful (nec)romantic vision. public toilet- he repeated the medicine my eyes." There are fantasy sound-trips
That first short movie was the work of awith his first feature as director. Sebas- to far-off times or places: a café in Bos-
tiane ('76), stuffed with nude saints and nia, a scene from Marco Polo's travels
bricolage artist in love not with perfec-
soldiers, shocked Britain's moralists and (wind, goat bells, barking dogs, human
tion but with fallen perfection; not with
harmony but with the forensic fragments then won a pornhouses-only certificate cries). And there is Simon Fisher Turn-
and lost chords of a bygone Utopia, anin America. More cinescandals followed, er's astounding music: Jarmans longtime
unrecapturable past. including his rude-to-the-Royals Jubilee composer pulling out all elemental stops
Like his idol and spiritual ancestor and his Molotov cocktail lobbed at Mag- as he places individual effects against an
gie's Britain, The Last of England.
Michael Powell ("the only British feature ostinato of chiming eternity (glocken-
director whose work is in the first Just as mischief-making have been spiel, Aeolian harp, wind chimes).
his writings, paintings, sayings, and
rank"), Jarman is a looker-back at golden The movie doesn't so much move
ages: chiefly at an England/Europedoings. that His diary-memoirs Dancing forward as swell around us. It's about an

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artists vision intensifying with failing undifferentiated in the Renoirian sun- nets recited on the soundtrack (by
sight. "In the bottom of your heart," says light, in Picnic at Rae's (75); color- Dame Judi Dench) while the screen
the voiceover, "you pray to be released filtered landscapes swelling and dis- shimmers to sun-blazed rockscapes, sil-
from image." And we are: released from solving with a dark/bright Turneresquever-flaking seas, and two male bodies
it into new-created powers of seeing. beauty in Fire Island (74). baptized and rebaptized in their own
The color blue suggests all the things Another early film, Pontormo Punks and the water's embrace.
Jarman most loves: sea and sky, favorite at Santa Croce ('82), showcases a fresco The Last of England ('87)- loathed
plants (cornflowers, delphiniums). It is by the Italian Renaissance artist, trav- by British critics almost as much as The
also for Jarman the AIDS victim the port- eled over in Jarmans stop-start slow Angelic Conversation was loved-
cullis of his mortality: blue, the color he motion- every detail of faces, gestures, applies the same visual pixilations to a
kept seeing when doctors treated his and drapery fixed on for that serial milli- landscape where past beauty is under
deteriorating sight. second that will store it in the witness's threat from present brutality. The film's
Blue has its meaning and power for memory bank. Later medium-length title comes from a Victorian painting
the audience, too. At first as featureless- experimental films like Imagining Octo- showing two exile-bound newlyweds in a
looking as a trampoline, it soon ber ('84) and In the Shadow of the Sun boat gazing their last at British shores.
becomes as versatile and animating. ('80) extend the style of flicker-book In Jarmans metaphor for 1986, the
Thoughts bounce off it higher and expressionism while reemphasizing itswhole population is looking its last on
higher, propelled by its elastic invoca- roots in painting. October is about the Britain as the land falls foul of greed,
tions from ocean depth to furthest firma- act of painting: 27 minutes of fire-lickeddecay, and Thatcherite government ter-
ment. Colors creep in where there are images depicting the creation of arorism. The visual Walpurgisnacht, shot
none: blink and you see its polar hue in Socialist Realist-style canvas of British in an ugly unreclaimed corner of Lon-
the spectrum, orange. Space is dis- soldiers carrying a red flag. (The filmdon's dockland (supposedly Mrs. T's
placed: blink again and the single was inspired by a trip to Russia.) capitalist New Jerusalem), climaxes in a
screen-rectangle overlappingly multi- Shadow weaves together earlier Jarman pyrotechnic danse macabre. Tilda Swin-
plies like a Cubist painting. And other footage- from Fire Island , Tarot ('72), ton tears her white wedding-dress in a
invocations flood in from art or litera-and A Journey to Avebury ('71)- into a long, hypnotic, jagged-rhythmed ballet
ture. Blue the color of forbidden erotic mystical collage wedding pastoral to that suggests Salome's famous party
cinema; blue the color of Arcadian mel-paranormal. piece filmed by that other well-known
ancholy from Poussin to Picasso. Above In his book Dancing Ledge , Jarman terpsichorean, St. Vitus.
all, that "little tent of blue" Wilde saw gives an idea of how painterly in another All these technically adventurous
through his jail cell window that becamesense- the budget-improvising, artist-in- movies, long and short, seek out the
one gay martyr s badge of dissonant free-garret sense- movies like In the Shadow hidden atomic energy in places, people,
dom handed down to others. of the Sun were. "The camera I used and events by splitting the atom of the
was a simple NIXO 480 which cost £140. image or the sequence itself. Action is
Most of the sections were filmed for the filmed, then un-filmed (i.e., slowed to
Blue1 omyomys triumph
thaťs beenthaťs beenheart
at the is toofatJar-
dissolve the heart a dichot- of Jar- price of the stock, usually about £20- virtual standstill), then re-filmed. Never
man's cinema for twenty years. He some lavish sequences, the fiery images deconstructionist in the dry sense- Jar-
himself has talked of the "uncomforta-
for instance, had a budget: costumes £5, man once said that branch of avant-gard-
bleness" between his Super-8/experi- sawdust £4, paraffin £2, roses £10, can- ism was "like calling water H2O"- the !
mental work- nonnarrative, oblique, dles £4.50, notebook £1, taxis £5." films take a dead past or elusive present
hallucinatory- and his feature films, Jarmans technique in these films and use their fissioning imagery to cre-
with their hi-fi visuals, dialogue, andextends that lyrical shoestring staccato ate what Jarman calls "a shimmering
characters: story-structures strained but first fashioned in Derek Jarman Film mystery/energy."
seldom snapped by subversive devices Diary . One of his standard methods is It's a cine-optical version of what
like anachronism, non sequitur, and sur- to film on Super-8 at three to six frames goes on in his other artworks. Opera
real mise-en-scène. Both these arms of per second, then project the footage atdesigns for a Gielgud-produced Don
his art are faithful to Jarman s vision: that the same rate (often on his livingroomGiovanni (skittery abstract shapes sug-
lyrical-satirical post-Utopianism secure wall) while recording it anew on normal- gesting predatory tricorn hats) or for a
alike in camp mockery, golden longing,speed VHS video. Result: a fluid, dream- Ken Russell Rake's Progress (giant dino-
and sulphurous scorn. But the two styleslike stop-motion that, together with the saur skeleton as proscenium arch; last
come at their targets from differentblurry-oneiric textures of the "degraded" scene set in a subway station) subject
flanks, wielding different weapons. footage, makes the movie resemble aclassic texts to a wittily seismic molecu-
The "experimental" movies- not just painting half-come to life. lar reconstruction. And his paintings-
the early shorts but the feature-length The Angelic Conversation and Theeven the semilyrical landscapes of his
ballads or broadsides in nonnarrative Last of England- and parts of The Gar-beloved Dungeness- seek a destructive
form like The Angelic Conversation or den- push this Hallucination-as-Style toenergy in their subjects' cores as a war-
The Last of England- are direct exten- feature dimensions. Blown up to 16 or ranty of the desired rebirth. The key to
sions of Jarmans work as a painter. death is the key to life. Who else, after
35mm, the infinite annihilates the finite
in a series of form-dissolving "brush-
Inspiration is visual/aural/intuitive/prelit- all, with the whole of England to choose
erate. The nonjudgmental randomness stroke" swirls. If Jarmans paintings arefrom, would live in a country cottage
of his short subjects is itself a plea for anchored
an in tachisme, so is his most next to a nuclear power station?
Edenie pantheism. Shadows and sun-
intense experimental cinema. The
light on a ruined Victorian boathouse Angelic
in Conversation ('85) is a power-
Gerald's Film (75); camera flickering fully beautiful meditation on nature andJumping cinema fromto
cinema to hishis
Jarmans
moremore experimental
mainstream mainstream
over faces, hands, and paper plates, love: a selection of Shakespeare's son-story-films should shock us with con-
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 tory. One of his early shorts, The Art of
Mirrors (73), an eerie arabesque involv-
ing three costumed figures playing light-
semaphore with a square of glass, could
be a mocking template for his later
approach to story cinema. Modern sen-
sibility is used to reflect and refract the
past- to offer reversals, multiplications,
dazzlements- and the invocations here
are literary as much as painterly. If the
experimental movies are indebted to
Blake and Turner, the narrative feature
films owe as much to Jonathan Swift or
Laurence Sterne.
Dystopie worlds lit by shafts of bil-
ious humor. Characters in whom gran-
deur and aspiration are punctured by
bathos and shaggy-dog non sequitur.
Where Jarmans experimental films shat-
ter form with lyric formlessness, his
story-films and biopics use satire, surre-
alism, anachronism, and comic lèse-
trast, and sometimes does. In Jubilee majesté to crack the tablets of received
and Caravaggio and Edward II there are wisdom about what makes political,
clear lines- narrative, visual, thematic- intellectual, or artistic "greatness."
and well-known actors reciting recogniz- In Jubilee (78), Elizabeth I (Jenny
able dialogue in recognizable (if some-Runacre) is a time-tripping monarch vis-
times spoofed-up) settings. But a similar iting the New Elizabethan age- London
decon-recon impulse is at work. Thein the year of Liz IPs silver jubilee- and
manner changes, not the post-Renais-finding a world of punks, drug addicts,
sance matter, nor the hunger for a lostand grafflti-scrawlers. Buckingham Pal-
wholeness of soul and society that ace has become a recording studio.
stands Jarman in the same relation to Westminster Cathedral hosts an orgy.
post-greatness Britain as Caravaggio to And Deptford, once the River Thames'
Italy-after-Michelangelo or Webster and welcome-home point for New World
Jonson to England-after-Shakespeare. explorers, is a giant waste tip. (Not far
Jarmans narrative movies are a mir- wrong: take a look today.) Jubilee , reel-
ror-play between different phases of his- ing in Queen Bess from the depths of
luxurious oblivion and throwing her
twitching on the riverbank of UK-Today,
mm m is one fish-out-of-water movie we'd never
expect from Hollywood: savage, absurd-
ist, rude: using incongruity as a form of
perceptual rape. In Wittgenstein , made
at the other end of Jarmans career ('92),
the Viennese-born philosopher is
thrown no less incongruously- if more
authentically- on the banks of a near-
cartoonish Cambridge, England. Here
Bertrand Russell, Maynard Keynes, et
al., plus a Green Martian, gambol about
in funny costumes, making a monkey of
the notion that Great Thoughts come
from sculptured dignitaries adopting
Rodin postures. Wittgenstein is cartoon
iconoclasmi but tenderized by a moving
central performance (Karl Johnson's
Ludwig) and a wry playoff between
Wittgenstein's austere idealism in public
and the modest guilts of his private life
(gay lovelife, fondness for B movies).
Between these two movies came Jar-
man's most ambitious and longest-nur-
tured bio feature, Caravaggio ('86): six
years in the planning and once intended

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for the full Cinecittà treatment. Two bella. And the rebel Earl Mortimer
early drafts were co-written with Vis- heading up a Home Counties fox-hunt-
conti scenarist Suso Cecchi d'Amico. Its ing crowd, their uppercrust accents as
the filmmakers most serious study of braying as their hunting horns. In addi-
the interface between a man and his tion, Marlowe's dialogue is freely tam-
myth, and between history and hind- pered with, four-letter words thrown
sight. Its also Jarman the painter s study about like shrapnel and tactical-ballistic
of his own craft, using a 17th century line changes like "Is it not strange?"
painter, rebel, and rumored homosexual becoming "Is it not queer?"
as his alter ego. The Tempest and Edward II both
As Nigel Terrys Caravaggio turns his highlight the overlap between Jarman's
life and friends into paint- the canvases- experimental cinema and his up-budget,
in-progress juxtaposed with the straining anti-Masterpiece Theatre canon. Mov-
models, from restless Cardinals to ies like Gerald's Film , Imagining Octo-
dressed-up street urchins- the film itself ber, and The Angelic Conversation
seems to agonize between motion and THE UM déstructuré idyllic frescoes in order to
stillness. And at times between vitality revitalize them. Reality is shaken into a
and torpor. For this is Jarman sailing per- counter on art's cultural time-machine
ilously close to routine biopickery: risk- can be put back to zero suddenly and at
ing entrapment by the very hagiographie will. Thus The Tempest , Shakespeare's
solemnity he's spent his life attacking. late fantasy large with post-Renaissance
But between the sober genius-at-work longing and vanishing magic, becomes
sequences, Jarman slips in the decadent Jarman s elegiac-witty tribute to a Swing-
Cardinals, a high camp Pope (the Great ing Britain turning into the silver age
Orlando, the circus performer who earlier of Punk. Singer Toyah Willcox as a
served as The Tempesťs mincing Cali- street-waif Miranda; artist-playwright
ban), and time-slip incongruities (motor- Heathcote Williams as an aging-hipping
bikes, pocket calculators, Italian Prospero; and for finale, Elizabeth
neorealist clothes). Here his zest for Welch dressed to the Las Vegas nines as
iconoclasm holds history upside down by a showbiz Liz One, surrounded by danc-
the ankles and shakes out all the small ing sailors as she croons "Stormy
change. Caravaggio at its keenest, like Weather."
Sebastiane or The Garden , or like Jar- This was too much for some critics,
mans mischievous early painting seriesincluding Vincent Canby, whose New
"Magic Copes" (mock-religious canvases York Times review- if that word does
designed to be wrapped round the body movie pointillism; the art of perceiving
justice to a delinquent assault by mixed
and celebrating the four elements), dis- metaphor- helped to close The Tempest becomes at once more scientific and
concerts the historical-hieratic by elidingand set back Jarman's U.S. exposure bymore lyrical.
times and spaces; and by washing up allabout a decade. "77ie Tempest would be In the narrative features a different
the witticisms and wisdoms that hind- kind of idyll is dismantled: it's the
funny if it weren't very nearly unbear-
sight can license onto some terminalable," rasped Canby. "It's a finger comfort we feel in the presence
beach of wry retrospection. scratching along a blackboard, sandof ina biopicked "genius" (Caravaggio,
Even when tackling high art rather spinach, like driving a car whose wind- Wittgenstein) or a filmed "masterpiece"
than high artist- when commandeeringscreen is shattered . . . there are no {The Tempest , Edward //, War Requiem).
texts like The Tempest (79) and Edwardpoetry, no ideas, no characterizations, Jarman's postrenaissance impulse, like
II ('91)- Jarman subjects them to rebap-no narrative, no fun." That's the point, the postimpressionist scientism of
tism by hindsight and by forced submer- Vince. Reductio ad absurdum, followed Seurat's pointillism or Cézanne's proto-
sion in his own time and culture. All this by resurrectio ex absurdo. To you cubism,
it demands that Golden Age art
director's movies are about modern Eng-might be rubble: but it's not rubble with-and thought be celebrated not by a
land even when they're about Settecentoout a cause. The received tropes of weak, film-invertebrate nostalgia or hagiogra-
Italy (Caravaggio) or Ancient Rome ing Shakespeare are reduced to debris phy, but by a ruthless restretching of the
(i Sebastiane ). A painter's struggles withso a new and "now"-referential architec- old canvases on modern frameworks.
prejudice and patronage in church-rid- ture can be built. No wonder Jarman gets scant support,
den Italy are readily rhymed with ditto As for Christopher Marlowe in moral or financial, from a mainstream
in class- and censorship-ridden Britain.Edward //, he gets the anachronism British film industry that likes its idylls
And in the Latin-dialogue Sebastianetreatment with a vengeance. Jarman and the jewels in its country's cultural
there is a brief, acerbic reference to oneknows that Gay King Eddie, killed by crown preserved intact. All those char-
"Maria Domusalba": that is, Mary Marlowe with a red-hot poker up his ass iots of fire; all those expensive travel
Whitehouse, scourge of Britain's (no historical corroboration for this), brochures for imperial India; all those
National Viewers and Listeners Associa- could be a gift of a martyr figure for tours-de-Forsters .
tion and for many years the country's modern times. So he modernizes him. Jarman has never made a movie for a
one-woman Moral Majority. Lots of leather, shaven heads, and million
gay pounds sterling in his life. His
Anachronism in Jarman is not just arights demos. Annie Lennox singing most expensive was Edward II at
pretty device. It's a way of yoking Then Cole Porter under a spotlight. Tilda £800,000 ($1.3 million). Lay all his
to Now; of insisting that the distance- Swinton as Joan Collins as Queen Isa- budgets end to end and you might
33

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finance the first twelve minutes of messiah can make The Last of England,Jarman's own childhood (including
Gandhi . He's never claimed a virtue fora blast of hate at the perceived divisions
glimpses of his Royal Air Force dad),
this exigency- Caravaggio ended up at of a new Tory Britain where "Victorian shots of Lord Olivier in his last movie
being wheeled around by nurse Tilda
values," the pursuit of wealth and the
a mere £450,000, though he once had
hopes of a multimillion-pound budget-intended restoration of the nations Swinton (the Olivier voice declaiming
Owens verse on the soundtrack), and a
but he's also never shown fondness for greatness led (he argues) to a storm-
the British big boys who abandonedtrooper climate of suppression, censor- large supply- too large- of religious
their country (as he sees) to chase the ship, and class hatred. Yet Jarmanimagery,
the from crowns-of-thorns to cruci-
bucks in Hollywood. When British Film patriot-romantic can also make afixes, Warmemorializing British martyrdom.
Year tootled its trumpets back in 1985,Requiem ('88), his tribute of tears to a
hailing the Scotts and Parkers and Putt-generation of lost soldiers. This film
nams as our great white hopes, Jarman puts pictures to Benjamin Britten'sWarora-
project, Requiem
project, and seems
and seems it. One was a it. commissioned One doesn't
doesn't
was right in there flinging mud. torio based on the First World War doubt Jarman's sincerity, but it's thinly
This penurious patriotism takes oddpoems of Wilfred Owen. Among those stretched. How thin is demonstrated by
his next and, with Blue , his greatest
and diverse forms. Jarman the misfit pictures: home-movie footage from
film: The Garden ('90). There is patriot-
ism here, too, but it's more mysterious,
more sensual, more touching: a pastoral
paean to England's shingly, majestic,

^kcONTIH I
luminously changeable shoreline. Sud-
denly every passion, every pulsing
pictorial nerve, is in place in a film that
doesn't just reconcile Jarman the por-
traitist of Now with Jarman the chroni-
Robyn Karney, Editor cler/myth-tender of Then, it resolves
THE HOLLYWOOD WHO'S WHO that central "uncomfortableness" be-
The Actors and Directors tween his experimental and feature
„SļflļPļNHM in Today's Hollywood cinema.
■SS« F°r every film buff, the definitive guide to 600 of The Garden is a feature film in that it
Hollywood's top talents at work from the 1960s to tells a story, has actors, and lasts 90
BlPPIj^^ today. 0-8264-0588-6 $18.95 pbk minutes. It's also an experimental film
Ian Cameron, Editor that plays games with continuity,
THE BOOK OF FILM [VOIR rejoices in "forbidden" images (male
Literary-textual, psychological, sociological, and nudity, gay love, mock-crucifixion), and
feminist reflections on film noir from Scarlet Streetuses Jarman's old friends, Super-8 and
video, to turn cinematography into
Jg and Double Indemnity through Blue Velvet and Fatal
painting-by-celluloid. Retelling two
■^HStoryteKTSl Attraction. 150 film stills 0-8264-0589-4 $24.95 Bible stories- the Expulsion and the
storytellers to the nation Crucifixion- it turns them into gay
fables
A History of American Television and surrounds that metamorpho-
Writing
sis with a vaster,
"A rich information source and a compelling read stranger,
.... more volatile
HUAUABUM This is a book to learn from."- New quasi-nuclear
York mythscape.
Newsday
0-8264-0562-2 $24.95 The Garden was filmed on Dunge-
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SHMH^kF STEVEN SPIELBERG
The Man, His Movies, and Their of
Meaning
the looming nuclear power station
man's own pitch-blackened cottage and

"Well-written career biography."- Variety Covers

behind both
it. Self-portraiture and apoca-
Spielberg's television and film work. 30lypse
film stills
swirl round the film's edges. Jar-
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34

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thunder. The metamorphic background among those sending tributes when theenough, multiform enough already; and
so disarms us that we surrender willingly actor later died of AIDS.) And when should Blue be his last film, it will also
to the weird happenings in the fore- Peter Greenaway made Prospero' s be his last act of curious, moving, tran-
ground. Scribes and Pharisees recast as Books in 1989, in which Sir John scendent self-annihilation. Beyond pla-
flashbulbing paparazzi; Adam and Eve Giełgud playing Prospero voiced all thegiarism; beyond the curses of censors or
as Adam and Adam; Christ as a pair of roles, there was no acknowledgment ofthe grappling hooks of philistines. A film
male lovers set before a sauna-bath hulk another piquant precedent. In 1975 with no pictures, no story, no beginning,
crawling serpentlike through the sand Derek Jarman planned a Tempest in middle, or end .... Just an attempt to
clutching a dildo. which Sir John as Prospero "was to haveframe infinity. And to prove that it's a
Not so much faux-naïf as fauve-naïf. played all the characters" (see Dancingsingle color made up from all the colors
The propagandist blasphemies are full-
Ledge , published 1984). Sometimes itof the earthly, finite world that Jarman
frontal and the film comes on at times seems Jarman has all the brainwaves inhas spent a lifetime loving and honoring.
British cinema and those who come
like a school Bible pageant hijacked by
after reap or steal the benefit. Ha
Pasolini. It brings up- how couldn't it? -
the vexed matter of how important gay
What matter. His legacy is rich
Film Comment.

themes are to a gay artist. Whenever he's

away from a movie camera and/or near a
TV camera, Jarman loudly insists that
he's a champion of gay causes first and a
filmmaker or artist second. Sample pro-
nouncement: "The films are of no con-
sequence and no interest. They're only
there for other reasons: to encourage the
debate about law reform and to give a
sense of solidarity to people who may
feel isolated." But the more The Garden
hammers its gay themes, the more it
knocks right through them to find a
broader, louder, more resonant anvil.

There is a planetary pantheism here,

as in all Jarmans best work. We sense it
in the opening metafictions of The Gar-
den's soundtrack, with the directors
voice heard crying "That's all right!
That's a brilliant rehearsal!" The film
itself is to be just one mark on the can-
vas. We are here to celebrate, through
the film, everything around the film.
The process that brought it into being;
the landscape that inspired and cradled
it; the anything-goes input of its cast,
including a rousing "Think pink" musi-
cal number by a girl resembling a
demented Avon lady. Hardly surprising
that Jarman insists, Warhol-like, that he
merely guides the creative process while
his Factory hands man the levers, watch
the dials, make many of the on-floor
decisions. The Garden , he claims, was
even edited in his absence (he was ill at
the time).
Perhaps Jarman believes in a Golden
Age of creative togetherness. Or may-
be he just realizes that every "personal"
signature is written in sand and sooner
or later someone will scuff over the
traces. He himself has been written out
of history more than once. When Ian
Charleson starred in Chariots of Fire ,
the actor was persuaded at producer
David Puttnam's insistence to drop his
credit in the controversial Jubilee , in
which he had also appeared, from his
press filmography. (Jarman was not

35

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