Derek Jarman on the set of '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 canonised 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.
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.
This article originally appeared in MCV #391 on Thursday July 3.