Wittgenstein

Blue

Derek Jarman took film seriously as an art form. That may sound like the epitaph of a filmmaker you should respect but whose work you don’t actually want to sit through, but it shouldn’t scare anyone away from his films. Certainly, his work isn’t “easy.” Some of it (The Angelic Conversation, Blue, The Last of England) eschews narrative entirely, and even his most “conventional” films (Edward II, Caravaggio) include deliberate anachronisms and fight against realism. They are also, by the way, ravishingly beautiful and intellectually provocative.

Jarman used film not just to tell stories but to tackle ideas, and he did so with sometimes astonishing beauty. This week, the Gene Siskel Film Center is showing three of his works (Caravaggio, Wittgenstein and Blue), and though a full-blown retrospective would have been nice, the chosen films make sense as a group, and this is a great chance to see them projected. The Siskel is also showing Derek, a loving documentary tribute to Jarman by Tilda Swinton (a Jarman regular) and noted filmmaker Isaac Julien (Looking for Langston, Young Soul Rebels).

Born in England in 1942, Jarman came to film by way of art. His undergraduate degree at King’s College in London was in history, English literature and art, suggesting his wide-ranging interests. That intellectual curiosity is reflected in his film work, which often features historical subjects.

Caravaggio

Jarman’s work is also unabashedly sensual and gay. It’s no accident that his three biopics tackle Saint Sebastian (an icon in gay art), Caravaggio (well known for his affairs with men) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (a more complicated case but usually described as gay, if monkish). Jarman’s films about them might be understood in part as acts of recovering gay history.

Adding one more layer, Jarman was politically outspoken, aggressively criticizing the Thatcher government throughout the 1980s on film and in writing. His films Jubilee and The Last of England are both unabashed attacks on everything he saw wrong with modern England. Though this side of Jarman isn’t well represented in the films showing at the Siskel, it’s important to remember this side of Jarman to put his less political films in the larger context of his whole body of work.

Jarman’s style is painterly, and his films often feature striking tableaux. Of course, in the case of Caravaggio this makes sense, with the painter’s life made analogous to his paintings. But this is no Girl with a Pearl Earring. Jarman defies realism, with 17th-century Italians costumed from a wide array of periods and one of the painter’s critics pounding out a review on a typewriter. The results wouldn’t feel out of place on the stage, and rewatching this film drives home that Julie Taymor and Mary Zimmerman come out of a long tradition that isn’t exclusively theatrical.

That connection is even more apparent in Wittgenstein, a biopic about one of the 20th century’s most important and impenetrable philosophers. Perhaps following the lead of Wittgenstein’s weird epigrammatic style, Jarman turns the philosopher’s life into a series of bizarre conversations shot entirely against black backgrounds with limited props and sets (a table and two chairs, a bed). Limiting the clutter and visual distraction, Jarman forces us to focus on the actors and the ideas they are kicking around. Surprisingly, the film is very funny, even as it works as an effective primer on Wittgenstein’s ideas about the limits of language.

In his final feature film, Blue (1993), Jarman gives up on imagery for the simple reason that when he was making it, he was blind. AIDS-related infections meant he could only see the world as a haze of blue, and he was dead within a year of completing this film. Jarman asks his viewer to experience his world; for 76 minutes, we can see only a cobalt-blue screen with a sound collage of music, Jarman’s writings and ambient noise. It’s a haunting experiment from a man for whom images meant so much.

Caravaggio, Wittgenstein, Blue and Derek are showing at the Gene Siskel Film Center.