Of Angels and Apocalypse
Northwest Film Center screens Derek Jarman retrospective

by Christopher McQuain


When Tilda Swinton was awarded her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Michael Clayton earlier this year, it’s a safe enough bet that the majority of the television audience was unaware of her roots as a compatriot of the late, notorious Derek Jarman, an English filmmaker whose work was more queerly avant-garde than anything before and almost anything since. But Swinton, who acted in the majority of Jarman’s films between the mid-1980s and his AIDS-related death in 1994, brought his spirit with her: In the midst of all the high-toned self-congratulation, she saw fit to tease co-star George Clooney about his best-forgotten turn as Batman, making sure to dredge up those notorious batsuit nipples to emphasize—as Jarman always did—the gaudy, disreputable and always potentially homoerotic outrageousness lurking in the corners of our culture.

Swinton appears in, and wrote and spoke the narration for, Isaac Julien’s 2008 documentary Derek (7 p.m. July 11‑13), which kicks off an upcoming Jarman retrospective at the Northwest Film Center. It’s a fine biography of the artist and summarization of his art, with images of Jarman’s life and work cohering around Swinton’s very personal tributes to a man she clearly regarded as a dear friend and important inspiration. As she wanders through modern London, her touching, often wryly funny voice-over venerates and mourns Jarman’s perennially anti-commercial, rebellious artistic spirit, noticeably absent from so much of today’s cinema. Julien’s documentary is an excellent introduction to Jarman’s work for those unfamiliar with it, and it includes a bounty of insights and reminiscences for longtime admirers.

Next up is 1976’s Sebastiane (8:45 p.m. July 11), a retelling of the story of St. Sebastiane explicitly inspired by his status in art history as an enduring icon of homoeroticism. (Before making films, Jarman intended to be a painter, and he continued painting on the side throughout his life.) As in any Jarman film, the “story” is secondary to the visual impression. The almost religiously erotic fervor evoked by a half-dozen or so barely clad, very fit men stuck together in the desert is the film’s real subject, and the film perfectly synthesizes a contemporary softcore aesthetic with a very astute classicism. By turns tender, cruel, languorously and feverishly sexy, the film perfectly bears out Jarman’s claim that his films were not topical but rather “political by their very existence.” Sebastiane’s celebration of homosexual eroticism was a defiant gesture meant to complement the then-blooming Gay Liberation movement, and it certainly has an ongoing value as both a symbol of its time and an ongoing reaffirmation of the vitality of gay desire.

Perhaps a bit more topical, 1978’s Jubilee (8:45 p.m. July 12) is a somewhat backhanded tribute to the dominant, quasi-nihilistic punk music and aesthetic of its time. With its episodically structured glimpses into the casually violent and sexually radical lives of the youth of a phantasmagorically dystopian near-future England, the film expertly captures the saucy, overeducated-and-underemployed attitude of Britain’s punk culture. It’s also, however, a funny, somewhat satirical cautionary tale about the ease with which such showy rebellion can be incorporated and commercialized; for all the affection it has for the punks and their spirit, they hated it. (Watch Derek through the end credits, and you’ll see Jarman telling a hilarious anecdote in which punk fashionista Vivienne Westwood created a T-shirt viciously mocking him, making him the only person besides the queen to receive that particular honor.) In retrospect, Jarman the elder statesman, middle-aged at the time he made Jubilee, was more of an outsider—more “punk”—than most punks, and Jubilee stands as the ribald, anarchic, relentlessly critical film the movement deserved.

1985’s The Angelic Conversation (7 p.m. July 16) is a sonically and visually stark, audacious meditation on same-sex love, with the incantatory voice of Judi Dench reciting Shakespeare’s famous homosexual sonnets while the lovers onscreen wander through various landscapes in a visual metaphor of love’s journey. That sounds simpler than it is: The images are extremely erotic, but their meaning and sensuality are derived through the radical processing that the film stock itself has been put through, giving it a texture that renders it one of the most intensely physical cinematic experiences you’ll ever have.

Finding Jarman back on the subject of his first passion, painting, 1986’s Caravaggio (8 p.m. July 20) is also probably his most straightforwardly narrative work, and his first film to star future muse Swinton, who plays one of the iconoclastic Italian painter’s demimonde. Like Jubilee before it, Caravaggio is delightfully, nonchalantly anachronistic: One of Caravaggio’s benefactors taps at a credit card calculator, and a critic writes up his attacks on the painter with a Royal typewriter. The film’s central story is that of the tragic, lurid love affair between Caravaggio and one of his life models (a young Sean Bean), although Jarman takes many opportunities to contemplate and comment upon the situation of the artist in society, both then and now.

The next year, after having directed music videos for The Smiths and Pet Shop Boys, Jarman made his (arguable) masterpiece, The Last of England (7 p.m. July 23), which briefly quotes Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and is itself an extended, tortuous, yet overpoweringly beautiful howl of protest against the neoconservative, economically draconian (and, not incidentally, ultra-homophobic) dismantling of English society by Thatcherite policies. Lush, color-saturated footage of middle-class family life in post-World War II socialist England is juxtaposed with modern images of blighted cityscapes and people in grinding poverty, all manipulated and edited for maximum hellishness and accompanied by a soundscape as ominous as anything David Lynch ever concocted. The Last of England is also perhaps Jarman’s highest achievement as a creator of words as well as images; the film’s narration, written by Jarman and spoken by Nigel Terry, is as excoriating, mournful and frightening as the visuals, and the two elements together create a supremely elegiac effect.

With 1993’s Wittgenstein (8 p.m. July 27), Jarman takes an unexpectedly deliberate and restrained approach to the life of the famously intractable, sexually repressed early-20th-century philosopher of the title. Filmed entirely on a soundstage with minimal props, the film uses light, color and space in a way that brings to mind both the obsessively ordered artifice of Jarman’s queer-English-cinema contemporary Terence Davies and the mysterious bare-stage power of Lars von Trier’s Dogville. Jarman finds similar meaning in the life of Wittgenstein to that he found in the life of Caravaggio; his empathy for those with unruly imaginations who must work in and against their time and their society is unmistakable.

In the late ’80s, shortly after completing The Last of England, Jarman tested HIV-positive; Derek documents his compellingly radical activism of this period, during which he joined protest-marching organization Outrage rather than the more polite Stonewall, which counted Ian McKellen as a member and which Jarman apparently considered a cadre of sellouts. 1993’s Blue (7 p.m. July 31) could be described as his “AIDS movie.” But again, he manages to be extremely political while avoiding topicality; Blue is explicitly about AIDS being coped with (or not) by a human body and by society, but it’s not Philadelphia. With its alternating narration, music and dreamlike snippets of sound-—its sole visual a blue screen replicating the retinal effects of AIDS treatment—the film is part journal, part screed and part conceptual art challenge along the lines of Guy Debord’s Howlings in Favour of de Sade, which similarly consisted exclusively of sound and color, forcing viewers to re-evaluate their definition of cinema. Blue is a fitting end to a body of works that are all, in their own ways, both difficult and ornate.

With his embrace of his own queerness in his life and in his work, Jarman belongs, artistically speaking, to a rare cinematic tradition that includes Jean Genet, Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith; his stubbornly skeptical political commitment puts him in the company of Fassbinder and New Queer Cinema successors like Todd Haynes and Tom Kalin. In bringing these essential, unique works onto a big screen, the Northwest Film Center is providing a wonderful and extremely rare opportunity to those interested either in cinema or queer cultural history. It’s an endeavor that deserves our patronage, and an opportunity that should not be passed up; it’s unlikely to come again anytime soon.

The Northwest Film Center presents Of Angels and Apocalypse: The Cinema of Derek Jarman July 11 to 31 at Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 S.W. Park Ave. For a complete schedule visit www.nwfilm.org.

Christopher McQuain is a Seattle freelance writer.