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.
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