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have said that they find his work hard, or just unintelligible,
but that is part of their charm and power.
Jarman frequently used the camera like a paintbrush,
with the visual quotient of a scene carrying the charge
normally left to the narrative: as it were, painting with
light. However, such concepts are hard to conceive
by a generation who goes to the cinema not to be
challenged, but rather, have their eyes stuffed with
Hollywood bubble-gum. That is not to say that such
films don’t have their place; you just have to learn to
look at films by the likes of Jarman with open eyes.
His films were also frequently of a revisionist tone,
with Jarman looking back at history and re-viewing it
through his own 20th-century eyes, and turning it into
something new, something pertinent. For example,
in 1977 he released his film Jubilee, coinciding with
the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, blending a time-travelling
Elizabeth I and John Dee with oppressed and violent
punks in sharp commentary on contemporary Britain.
This concern for the state of the British nation is also
reflected in his more complex, and yet more visually
rewarding film The Last Of England.
Moreover, Jarman was not afraid of re-evaluating the
classics, and produced his own idiosyncratic revisions
of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the more successful
version of Marlowe’s Edward II. This film, like many
of his later films, utilised the strength of simplicity with
it’s sparse ahistorical sets, and mixture of period and
BUY Derek Jarman books online from and
contemporary costume. Again, Jarman looked to the
past, especially to the hidden ramifications of a possible
gay history, in order to comment on the situation today.
That is to say, by re-examining men such as Edward II,
Ludwig Wittgenstein or Caravaggio Jarman could shift
the emphasis of traditional (read ‘straight’) history, and
trace the previously hidden importance of a succession
of homosexual men in key roles in Western intellectual
culture. However, even though his films were often serious
in tone, Jarman always seemed to have his tongue
firmly lodged in his cheek, and concepts that could
quite easily dissolve into pretentious drivel, frequently
sparkle with irreverent wit.
The paintings displayed at the Barbican are, like most
retrospectives, a mixed bag. We travel from the cold
controlled nature of his early abstract landscapes of his
youth to the fiery anger of his compelling last works,
and so can easily trace Jarman’s origins and subsequent
progression. The curator has also had the chance to assemble
some of the artist’s personal artefacts, and the
fact that people stand in rapt attention looking at such
things as Jarman’s fountain pen or diaries is testament
to the lasting power of the man himself.
The last section of the exhibition is the most striking,
with the gloomy intensity of the pitch paintings and
the dazzling outbursts that constitute the paintings that
were first shown in the Evil Queen exhibition. These
polemical works are Jarman at his most impassioned
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