Derek Jarman -- C/D

can i post a picture from a yahoo photo album? there's one of dave in front of the house.

i'm trying here, if it doesn't work and anyone wants to see it, let me know...

http://f1.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/colettebstevenson/detail?.dir=/spring+2003-ATP+2003&.dnm=dave+at+derek+jarmans+house.jpg

Plus: One time "Blue" was on Ch4, my girlfriend rang me "Our TV has only got a blue screen on Ch4, is it just us?"

Still, it's low odds, worth a postcard.

Enrique, DJ directed videos for PSB's (Rent and It's a Sin, acc. to IMDB) and also did 'Projections' - films to be played against a backdrop during the live show. For the Smiths, he did Panic and Ask plus The Queen is Dead film which features that song and There is a Light That Never Goes Out. But the snookering answer to this question is Suede; DJ filmed the band performing The Next Life to a backdrop of one of his super-8 films a few months before he died (on my birthday, the bastard).

I'm assuming the season at Riverside is to do with marking the 10th anniversary of his death.

Man was a genius, but blokeys/geezers/rockists HATE him. I, on the other hand, loved the bones of him. Oh, and Nick played the Cocksucking Lesbian Man in Blue (the bit where the man sings 'I am a Not-Gay').

Cd be, though they did a Kieslowski season to sort of promote the DVD release of his stuff. I'll ask my main man one-time ed Gareth Evans, who has something to do with it.

dungeness was cool overall. we went up a light house (where the lady's cousin was from michigan), played on the beach, hung out at the miniature railroad and viewed the power plant from afar.

sarah, i'll send you a link with the photo (although it isn't that exciting, as it was taken with a disposable camera)

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/biography/0,,343407,00.html

^^ pretty definitive.

i quite like jarman when he doesn't attempt to do narrative, but the cult of del, as per the recent 'time out' splash, is pretty snouts-in-trough ica writer-in-residence 'curated by'-y. i sense that he's getting a film retrospective, from all this coverage, but it's evidently only four years since the last one. oh well, at least it isn't greenaway.

'Sebastiane' is a great film. love the guy.

it may say more about what kind of teenager i was but i remember that Jarman seemed like a huge cultural figure in the 80s.

He actually was, strange to say.

For some reason, around the mid-80s he was everywhere in the media and I remember being quite awe-struck to see him a few times around in London at that time: in Berwick St Market, at a Psychic TV gig...

I also remember a friend pointing out the location of his Charing Cross Road flat - there was definitely a certain mystique around him at that time.

i was not impressed by isaac julien's doc, 'derek', mainly because of tilda swinton's awful narration, in which she wandered round the City looking glum and bleating random things about focus-groups and the sunday times. it was, i think, the same speech she gave five years ago at edinburgh, which i saw then, and which has since been printed in various places and put on the 'last of england' dvd. it was weak sauce anyway.

the focus was more on the man than the movies -- del himself not so keen on talking shop though, about the business of making films.

hugely irritated by the whole thrust of tilda and del's arguments: that they were renegade outsiders; that they didn't get the respect they deserved. i mean not only did del get film after film funded by channel 4 but he was all over sunday supplements, review sections, face 2 face interviews, documentaries made on him then and now. he was about as much of an insider as it was possible to be, he seemed like a huge cultural presence ...am i misremembering those times? looking at the, mostly incredibly poor, clips in the doc he certainly seems to have received much more praise, funding and mythologising than his talent deserved.

oh well, at least it isn't greenaway.

i'll take The Draughtsman's Contract, ZOO and ...Cook Thief... over anything Jarman made.

i'd quite like to see War Requiem again though.

he was about as much of an insider as it was possible to be

the whole thing was so evasive. he went to public school but of course everyone else was a total shit, racist, and rotter; then he moved to a loft and tennessee williams popped round; then he moved to sloane square; then he made feature films... and what's worse is that he pretty much said he was a 'small-c' conservative who didn't 'get' politics (even in the 80s) and had catholic leanings; and yet there is lady di's old schoolmate tilda telling us he represents... what exactly?

yeah draughtsman's contract slays, true.

'war requiem' is the one i most want to see, and the least shown. it's on in march, the weekend i leave the country for the first time in three years.

i bet it's the same weekend i'm out of the country!

yes, tennessee williams was there and, oh, so was ken russell and he asked him to design The Devils... based on what exactly? 2 super-8 films he'd made of his loft?

He could talk a good film, I suspect.

I remember reading Dancing Ledge in the late 80s and thinking some of his films sounded a lot more interesting than they turned out to be when I saw them. He wasn't above the kind of "I've read John Dee - so I may have some alchemical secrets' type of mystique-making at times.

Is it time for a Tilda Swinton c/d?

I liked watching his super eight films behind Throbbing Gristle playing live at the Tate last year. Plus I got a free bottle of champagne as I was the guest of an investment bank.

His visual art is a huge dud.

I'd like to see The Last of England again as in my head it consists entirely of a squaddie and a balaclavaed terrorist rolling around in an embrace on a union jack for 90 mins. O for the days when you could see this stuff on Channel Four.

The only Greenaway I could watch these days is Belly of an Architect, which is his most normal I guess. Martin Freeman is in his new 'un inee?

Tilda Swinton bits were great. Y'know Tilda, I think the figures show that people do want to see focussed group demographic targeting movies more than british arthouse experimental homoerotic cinema. A lot more people.

focus groupped.

oh forget the whole thing actually

I rewatched Jubilee a couple years ago. Did not hold up well. All "program" and little art.

But dude, Adam Ant!

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/artexhibition-20640243-details/Derek+Jarman/artexhibitionReview.do?reviewId=23445372

^^ heavy-hitter. best thing i've read on jarman out of the current bunch of reviews, partly coz sewell knows the scenes jarman was in, partly because he, uh, knows a little about modern british art. i was pretty shocked by the observer's lack of context or perspective. as per usual, most of the commentary has been about what a stand-up guy jarman was, rather than on the enduring qualities of his work.

i saw 'the garden' and 'the last of england' recently. 'the last of england' has some powerful stuff in it, and it's the best of his films i've yet seen. it's quite conservative -- hatred of suburbs, suburban people, and so on. 'the garden' is straight-up terrible though. pissed i'm going to miss the britten film.

Interesting article, typical Sewell stuff. Could have bought one of the tar paintings at the time, wish I'd gone for it now. I seem to end up watching "Jubilee" every four or five years or so by accident, and get more out of it every time. Hated it first time though.

I'm sure there's a great book to be written about the decadent glam art scene in mid-70's London.

was probably mean about greenaway upthread. he is an insufferable 'intellectual', and comes across as an elitist dick -- saw him up close a few years ago and was unimpressed. jarman, though somewhat unselfconscious about his advantages, is a more engaging figure. but this shouldn't be the point w.r.t their work. i kind of suspect i'd like greenaway's 70s stuff over his post-cook/thief/wife/lover work so will seek out.

will come back to woolf thing.

xpost

I'm sure there's a great book to be written about the decadent glam art scene in mid-70's London.

-- Soukesian, Sunday, March 2, 2008 3:39 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

this. the 'Thems'.

haha or a good todd haynes movie.

rly though, 'i'm not there', only with byron ferrari.

absolutely superb review from Sewell. all the better for being fair and reasonable (not something i would expect from him but i've never read his stuff before)- i particularly liked this:

"the films that made him an icon in the uncritical world of the fervent homosexual"

& this:

"The almost innumerable other films are mere scraps... but in a sense they were the glue that held Jarman's court together and convinced his performing minions that they mattered. To an outsider contemptuously suspicious of film and video as art forms, they are as technically inept as film of a village wedding shot with a clockwork camera in the trembling grip of an octogenarian."

close minded? yes but genuinely funny. it's when the review starts to talk about Isaac Julien that it really takes off. He hits the nail on the head by talking about Jarman's main problem: his acolytes and the extravagant claims they made for him, not the work itself.

i don't read sewell often -- or many art critics, i guess -- but even if it was unfair, it was a bracing thing to read, you felt he engaged with the work. i just read a mindless review of 'derek' in the independent on sunday, and i really have no faith the writer had seen a single jarman film, or could explain what good there was in them. i'm open to there being something in them just because art* and shakespeare are blind spots for me. gonna read bracewell's 'england is mine' soon to get into this.

*i.e. caravaggio

That piece was absolutely coruscating; one artist missing from Sewell's summary was Cerith Wyn-Evans but C does not go out of his way to emphasise his links to/role as J's one-time assistant. I've never been keen on Jarman's paintings because they're a bit bad gay Kiefer. The films are odd because they're so obtuse yet every so often there's an unbelievably heady image that just makes everything STOP.

My favourite aspect of Jarman doesn't get mentioned enough - there are three memoirs and Chroma, all incredible books that make me super-jealous of him for getting an education in the Classics. Jarman's take on suburbia is interesting because it is the flipside of Metroland (also in the sense that he grew up there in NW London). It's all over the memoirs; when viewing certain films it's worth using this info as a filter.

against the odds, i liked 'wittgenstein' (scr. terry eagleton hiss hiss) a lot.

am reading 'kicking the pricks/last of england'. kind of messed up in a lot of ways -- never trust a man with a classical education -- but also yeesh hell of a weird dad. his dad was a fkn air commodore; he casually mentions the editor of the daily mail popping round for dinner at his parents.

then he says stuff like "safe sex can be awfully drab if you've experienced sodomy" because it's "suburban" and "chintzy".

Terry Eagleton's work is more intelligent, interesting, funny and illuminating than anything Jarman ever did.

Except perhaps Jarman's Smiths videos; 'The Queen Is Dead', at least, I thought terrific.

Otherwise I think Jarman was an overrated bore. But at least he mostly made pictures out of his own pocket, for relatively very low costs, and didn't waste taxpayers' money on them.

no, they were funded by channel 4 and the bfi, or german tv mostly.

Terry Eagleton's work is more intelligent, interesting, funny and illuminating than anything Jarman ever did.

i dislike both of them, but at least jarman was consistent. eagleton is simply a trend-surfer. both of them were closet catholics tho.

TE is very consistent. He says the exact same thing, in the exact same words, in books published three decades apart.

haha, i don't think jarman ever paid for a film, other than early super 8s, from his own pocket, he was incredibly well funded considering his meagre talents. the smiths videos are good although not quite as good as i remembered, they're incredibly clumsy but they are compelling.

Burchill on similar issues to some of the stuff raised on this thread:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/biography/0,,343407,00.html

(I thought she wrote this about two years ago! How time flies etc.)

Two incredible links on this thread. Brian Sewell and Julie Burchill: two of the most ludicrous and pointless sots of UK hackdom, surely? And yet both their articles on Jarman are largely terrific - wise, sane, and quite brave in their criticism of this Queen Mother figure. Who would ever have thought that Julie Burchill, of all people, could write something so true as this??

--

Here, if we needed it, is proof of Jarman's complete lack of sensibility: would any true artist, be they writer, painter or filmmaker, see in a rush-hour railway carriage this seething mass of loathsomeness rather than a group of individuals with their thwarted dreams and desires? Most of us are over this kind of cheap misanthropy by the time we're halfway through our teens.

"Why do visual artists believe they can write? I would not dream of downing typewriter, running off to make a daubing, and then touting it in a public place. Neither would I prance around wielding a camcorder and expect the BFI to fund me."

replace the bfi with CH4 and she has actually done this on several occasions since.

the Sewell piece is one of the best things i've read recently. possibly he is much greater than his public persona suggests he is, i should investigate further.

more like wittgenstein, less like caravaggio, what should i watch next?

War Requiem is very good.

NYC retro. Have been underwhelmed by him in recent years, prob most interested among what I don't know in The Angelic Conversation.

http://www.bam.org/film/2014/derek-jarman

yeah his work hasn't really been any good since he died.

in a way, true

(i speak of how i have changed as a viewer, more than likely)

funny enough, when i saw some of his video work in college i thought it was impossibly pretentious but the last time i saw it (ca. 2005?) i liked it much more. still not a huge fan, really, but i guess i'd say i admire the guy.

Enjoyed reading this:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/27/olivia-laing-derek-jarman-modern-nature

(Don't really know much about Jarman ... but that made me want to read "Modern Nature.")

"Modern Nature". Incredible. What next?

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/sep/02/keith-collins-obituary

Has anyone seen the "Derek Jarman: My garden’s boundaries are the horizon" exhibition?

(And, more prosaically, is the catalogue worth buying?)

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jul/21/derek-jarman-prospect-cottage-dungeness-kent-garden-museum-london

I realise that article may be the reason you asked rather than a reply to your query!

Thanks Jed_ - it partly was.

I have to confess I had one of those Coronavirus moments when I thought "Nah, not traveling into London for that" but in a way that made me feel a bit wearied and sad.

yes, I feel the same way about it.

Looks good, try and go to this.

derek jarman's garden is a bit less impressive if you actually go to visit it as every garden there looks exactly like it. Those are the plants that grow out of the rocks which are all over the place on that stretch of dungeness. him turning to sea kale is like me deciding to turn to dandelions in my garden -- they are there whatever I do.

I do like his yellow windows though.

Excellent piece on this Jarman film:

https://abolitionistfutures.com/latest-news/cops-in-culture-2-edward-ii

Watched Sebastiane tonight and it was pretty great I thought, kind of sadomasochistic but also beautifully strange and homoerotic, and all of the dialog was in Latin

Any recommendations on his books? Loved "Modern Nature" and, ever so slightly less, "Smiling In Slow Motion".

x-post to the comments about the garden. I love his garden but I've never seen a garden supposedly inspired by it that hasn't made me cringe slightly.

There's a very good interview with Keith Collins on YouTube where he's surprisingly scathing about Jarman's choice of poppies!