As a friend of the Screengrab pointed out a few weeks ago when we did our Gay Pride list of great movies with homosexual symbolism and thematic content, we missed a bet by not including the innovative, daring British filmmaker Derek Jarman in our tally of the most influential gay filmmakers of the 20th century. Always fiercely political at the same time he was deeply personal, Jarman -- who worked wonders in both experimental and narrativef formats --was not only one of the earliest and best gay directors of modern cinema, but also arguably the first true punk rock filmmaker, beating out even his countryman Alex Cox for the privelege of that title. (See his astonishing film Jubilee for an especially choice example of Jarman's many and often contradictory tendecies blending together perfectly.)
Almost fifteen years after Jarman's death from complications related to AIDS, Sam Adams at the Museum of the Moving Image pens a thoughtful and informative appreciation of the man and his art, which even today is far more internally contradictory than many imagine: "Sometimes fusing the personal and political, and sometimes pitting them against each other," Adams writes, "Jarman's films are animated by the interplay between past and present, accuracy and anachronism, nostalgia and protest. They are, quite often and quite openly, at war with themselves, tied to national and cinematic traditions and rebelling against them." Noting the irony of Film London's Jarman Award, which aims to celebrate directors who are to their time what Jarman was to his, he notes "if there were a Derek Jarman of today, he or she might be as proccupied with shunning Jarman's influence as succumbing to it.
The article -- which also contains useful links to other Jarman scholarship, including a sensitive treatment of his legacy by contemporary writer Jon Savage and a letter to Jarman in his final days from Tilda Swinton -- concludes by discussing the director's refusal to be driven into the softness of metaphor by his own confrontation with the AIDS epidemic. "As AIDS hysteria and homophobia mounted in the 1980s,Jarman sharpened his knives and strengthened his stance." Even the eventual loss of his sight to the disease didn't stop him from expressing his feelings in a visual medium: Jarman's films became literally and figuratively darker, until finally there was Blue, "a solid, unwavering block of color, matched to a complex audio collage of interwoven voiced and ambient sounds" -- a series of "profane hyms" that "make hash of identity politics" that literalized the polyhonic approach of his visual fims and allowed him the perfect, and final, expression of "divergent, but not conflicting voices".
Related Posts:
The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part One)
The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Two)
The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Three)