The Angelic Conversation
( 1985, 78 min, GB )
With Judi Dench's offscreen reading of 12
Shakesperean sonnets providing the audio, this non-narrative,
experimental film by gay director Jarman centers around the
director on a soul-searching mission for meaning in life, this
after he discovers that he is HIV-positive. Action involves the
sensual grace of male youth and rather than an acceptance of early
death is really an affirmation of life.
Starring Judi Dench
Blue ( 1993, 76 min, GB )
Jarman, who died of AIDS in February 1994, had
been battling the disease for six years at the time of making the
film. With impaired eyesight and deteriorating health, Jarman
created a startling experimental film in which he invites his
audience into his sight-deprived world creating a womb-like
meditative state by employing a completely blue screen throughout
the film. A cast including Tilda Swinton and Nigel Terry reads
from Jarman's often poetic journals, recounting the director's
medical complexities, thoughts on the loss of loved ones, and
reflections on his own life and art. Amazingly devoid of anger and
neither sermonizing nor self-pitying, Blue is a fitting closure
to an eventful career.
Starring: Tilda Swinton, Derek Jarman,
Nigel Terry
Caravaggio
(1986, 93 min, GB)
This stylishly bold tribute to the volatile artist stars Nigel
Terry as the controversial painter torn between his rugged lover
(Sean Bean) and his mistress (Tilda Swinton). Jarman sees the
darkly handsome Caravaggio as a passionate man with a liking for
"rough trade." An elegant tale centering around both the
creative process and the touching homoerotic love story of the two
men.
Starring: Nigel Terry, Sean Bean, Tilda Swinton
Edward
II (1991, 91 min, GB)
Not only one of the director's greatest, but one of
the best examples of "New Queer Cinema." A must for
serious film-lovers.
Director Jarman has reworked Christopher
Marlowe's play into a homoerotic, sexually charged, radically
relevant work for our times. Steven Waddington stars as the tragic
King Edward, Andrew Teirnan as his beloved Gaveston, Nigel Terry
as the villainous Mortimer and Tilda Swinton is the jealous and
destructive Queen Isabella. Graphically brutal, moving,
surprisingly funny and always erotic, Jarman blends Marlowe's
prose with contemporary jargon and costumes, replete with positive
portrayals of queer sex, profanity and ACT-UP activists for a
truly mesmerizing experience.
Starring: Steven Waddington, Andrew
Tiernan, Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry
The
Garden (1990, 88 min, GB)
While director Derek Jarman fitfully sleeps in
his garden, his cryptic dreams are played out in their fullest,
queerest glory. The lyrical images of male love and art collide
against a backlash of homophobia and death. An allegory for AIDS
and for his friends who have died of the disease, the film depicts
two young male lovers as they, in the manner of Jesus Christ, are
taunted, arrested, tortured and then crucified for their beliefs.
A stunningly filmed work of art.
Starring: Tilda Swinton, Johnny Mills,
Philip MacDonald
The
Last of England (1988, 87 min, GB)
A beautifully photographed fragmented poem
structured within a series of cross-cutting vignettes and filled
with homoerotic images. A politically charged film that deals with
the destruction of our physical and emotional world of England by
the callous policies of Margaret Thatcher. Nigel Terry provides
the off-screen narration.
Wittgenstein
(1993, 75 min, GB)
Displaying little of the queer militancy that
distinguished his later-career films, and another in a series of
biographies of gay historical figures (Sebastiane, Edward II,
Caravaggio), Jarman's amusing, intellectual portrait of
Austrian-born, British-educated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is
both a startling primer in low-budget filmmaking as well as a
visually exuberant work. Considered one of the century's most
influential philosophers, Wittgenstein's private and professional
life is chronicled -- from his prodigy childhood to his reluctant
life as a professor at Cambridge and a man whose professional life
was burdened with guilt about his homosexuality. Jarman utilizes a
pitch-black background, allowing the richly drawn, outrageously
costumed characters and their witty, thought-provoking dialogue to
take center stage. Karl Johnson plays the eccentric philosopher
and an adult and Clancey Chassey is delightful as Wittgenstein as
a youth. The always delightful Tilda Swinton is lavishly campy as
Lady Ottoline. Shot in less than two weeks for Channel 4, this
film proves to be an invigorating, uncompromising work.
Starring: Karl Johnson, Tilda Swinton
More Films by Derek Jarman:
