Richard Watts remembers the
late British film-maker and gay saint, Derek Jarman.
 Dexter Fletcher (young Caravaggio) as 'Boy with a Basket of Fruit' in Jarman's Caravaggio.
Derek Jarman was a true renaissance man.
Through his books, his paintings and especially his films,
the English artist and activist was an eloquent and passionate spokesman for
gay rights at a time when Britain’s
conservative government, under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was doing its
best to stamp out gay culture forever.
In 1988, even as an entire generation of gay men were being
ravaged by the AIDS crisis, Thatcher’s government introduced a notorious piece
of legislation, Section 28; which forbade ‘the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of
homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.
But instead of silencing gays and lesbians the introduction
of Section 28 galvanised them; uniting a community that until then had largely
been divided along gender lines, and prompting the largest queer rights
demonstrations the UK
had ever seen.
It was in these turbulent times that Jarman’s creativity was
at its peak, as a new documentary about his life and work, to be shown at the
Melbourne International Film Festival later this month, so aptly demonstrates.
Derek, directed by
Issac Julien and narrated by the Academy Award-winning actress Tilda Swinton,
is a fitting and long overdue testimony to Jarman’s life and prolific output.
(By the time he died of an AIDS-related illness in 1994, just a few short years
after being declared a gay saint by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Jarman
had made more than 50 short films and features.)
“You were
the first person I met who could gossip about St Thomas Aquinas and hold a
steady camera at the same time,” Swinton says in voiceover in the documentary,
in an open letter to Jarman, with whom she worked on a number of films.
“I
thought it would be good to hang out with you for six weeks: I guess we had
things to say. Our outfit was an internationalist brigade. Decidedly
pre-industrial. A little loud, a lot louche. Not always in the best possible
taste. And not quite fit, though it saddened and maddened us to recognise it,
for wholesome family entertainment.”
Jarman’s feature films may not have been considered ‘wholesome’ in their
day, but the director’s unique blending of his artistic sensibility and overt
gay sexuality has ensured that they will long be remembered and celebrated.
In works such as Edward II
(about the openly gay English king of the same name, adapted from the play by
Christopher Marlowe, a gay contemporary of William Shakespeare) and Caravaggio (a biopic of the bisexual 16th
century rogue and artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio) Jarman’s unique
aesthetic is lucidly and beautifully displayed.
 Derek Jarman on the set of Caravaggio.
Caravaggio was a poet of the low-life who employed pimps and
prostitutes as the models for the saints and angels he painted so lovingly; an
artist whose work captivated the Italian society of the day even as his
unconventional life shocked and scandalised them. As Jarman told the English
newspaper The Guardian in 1986, “[Caravaggio]
burnt away decorum and the ideal...knocked the saints out of the sky and onto
the streets...his St John
pictures are a succession of male nudes - straight forward physique
photographs.”
In making Caravaggio,
which is released on DVD this week, Jarman strove to capture the Italian
painter’s innovative style as much as he sought to explore his unorthodox life.
The film is shot in the way Caravaggio would have painted it, with lovingly lit
scenes in which the painter’s works come to life on the screen; and narrated by
Caravaggio himself (played by Nigel Terry) as he lies on his death bed,
reflecting on his art and recalling his ménage
à trois with the bare-knuckle boxer Ranuccio (Sean Bean) and Ranuccio’s
girlfriend, the prostitute Lena (Tilda Swinton).
The deliberate inclusion of anachronisms - courtiers in
doublets pounding away at upright typewriters, the sound of a train passing through
a medieval city – ensures the story’s twined themes of creativity and passion
are eternal.
Even as he himself was dying, Jarman found time to reflect
on these themes anew, and their relevance to his own rich life.
“I am tired tonight. My eyes are out of focus, my body
droops under the weight of the day, but as I leave you Queer lads let me leave
you singing,” Jarman wrote in his 1992 autobiography, At Your Own Risk. “I had to write of a sad time as a witness – not
to cloud your smiles – please read the cares of the world that I have locked in
these pages; and after, put this book aside and love. May you of a better
future, love without a care, and remember we loved too. As the shadows closed
in, the stars came out.
“I am in love.”
Derek Jarman’s films Caravaggio and Wittgenstein are out now on DVD through Umbrella Entertainment.
Isaac Julian’s
documentary about Jarman, Derek, screens
at the Melbourne
International Film Festival later this month.
www.melbournefilmfestival.com.au
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