Jubilee

[This piece was accidentally posted in incomplete form earlier. Sorry about that.]

Derek Jarman ought to be around to film the end of the world. In Edward II, in War Requiem, in Caravaggio, Jarman filmed very queer apocalypses, sensual destructions that rent the world as we understand it asunder. For Jarman, everything was a process of constant transformation and rebirth.

Edward II turns 30 this year. Take a break from discussions of the 30th anniversary of The Silence of the Lambs and watch what is, in my opinion, Jarman’s masterpiece. As a film, it practically explodes into your consciousness.  Ever since seeing the film for the first time on the big screen at a queer film festival, it’s been embedded in my mind, my mindset. It’s not a didactic film, not an argumentative film, but it changed how I think. It’s 30th year is, to borrow another of Jarman’s titles, a jubilee worth observing.

If any filmmaker should exist today, should be able to film the coronavirus pandemic or the climate crisis or whatever great calamity arises in the future, it should be Derek Jarman. But Jarman lived an apocalypse already, and it took his life: the filmmaker died of complications from AIDS in 1994. Like nearly an entire generation of gay men, most of whose names we collectively do not and will not ever know, Derek Jarman is lost to time.

Derek Jarman’s Blue, one of the director’s final films, is also one of the most bracing. Set entirely against a blue screen (a signifier of Jarman’s loss of sight) and a diverse sonic landscape, voices narrate poetically of, among other things, AIDS, illness, and encroaching blindness. It’s a rare film with a truly singular visual reference, one utterly detached from the progression of time.

The experience of watching Blue at home, on video, is perhaps a step removed from its most potent form. After all, at home, in a brightly lit office, I sit and watch, but my eyes dart around the crowded visual landscape of my bookshelves; I pause to write this article; I stop the film and go to sleep because I’m tired. The direct confrontation that is Blue, between a cinema and its discontents, is lost to home video. We can only appreciate the film as a history lesson or abstract thought experiment. It’s too easy to look away.

But the power of Blue nonetheless lingers. Jarman died in February 1994, about a month before Tom Hanks won an Academy Award for playing Andrew Beckett, the HIV-positive protagonist who dies at the end of Philadelphia. If you look up the phrase “too little, too late” in the dictionary, you might find the movie poster for Philadelphia, an utterly terrible film that’s so up its own ass with elitist Hollywood smugness over a willingness to tackle AIDS in 1994 that it collapses into itself like a black hole of self-righteousness. You won’t find Blue on the Oscar list that year, because Jarman is not interested in making heterosexuals feel better about themselves.

Instead, Blue, like contemporaries such as The Living End or Poison, knows an apocalypse when it sees one, indeed when it lives one. A forerunner of, and then participant in, the New Queer Cinema, Jarman’s work is an unapologetic attack on the hypocritical pillars of mainstream society. For Derek Jarman, nothing is sacrosanct: tradition, convention, time, space; past, present and future.

I think a lot about AIDS and COVID-19. I think about what AIDS might have been like if it hadn’t tended to mostly impact people on society’s margins. But then I think about the disparities that do exist with COVID, who it impacts more viciously, and all the people who don’t care about COVID, who never really cared, and I realize history is repeating itself. I know it’s selfish to wish an artist to be alive solely to create more art, but I can’t help but imagine Jarman’s filmography in 2020 onward would recognize this and more.

“Charity has allowed the uncaring to appear to care”, speaks a voice in Blue, “and is terrible for those dependent on it. Charity is big business; well, we go along with this, so the rich and powerful who fucked us over once fuck us over again and get it both ways.”

Jarman’s films seem to take place out of space. Blue is an obvious example, but even more representational films take place in nondescript spaces that evoke emotion more than a sense of locale. Caravaggio might as well be a remake of Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc in its detachment from the laws of spatial arrangement (not to mention its sense of religious torment). Space is just another form of dogma; the body and the spaces it inhabits are elements to be broken down.

The paintings in Caravaggio are telling examples of discontinuity in Jarman’s oeuvre, as live figures pose for paintings, in one sense germinating their creation for Caravaggio and in another sense recreating the paintings for Jarman. Like the chronological distortions of Jarman’s films — taking place as they do outside of any solidified history — the paintings mix both past and future.

“All art is against lived experience”, says Caravaggio in his eponymous film, meaning, perhaps, that art is both set upon the backdrop of life but also set against life itself. That art is both with and without life is a typical Jarman juxtaposition. Art must speak from lived experience but is also incapable of truly capturing that same experience. Watching Jarman’s films, particularly Blue, one gets the sense that art both is and isn’t a vital life force, a contradiction that electrifies the director’s work, pulling an audience in multiple directions in a delicate balancing act that threatens the stability of the psyche.