The genius of Derek Jarman

Film director, artist, gay activist and gardener: Derek Jarman was a London renaissance man. As a new documentary plus an exhibition of his paintings and sculptures opens at the Serpentine, Time Out considers his legacy while Tilda Swinton leads friends and collaborators in celebrating the life of a legend

Tilda Swinton | Paul Burston | Colin McCabe | Don Boyd | Isaac Juilen | Neil Tennant | Cerith Wyn Evans Jon Savage

Take another look at the image at the top of this feature: it’s the actress Tilda Swinton holding up a photo of her friend and mentor Derek Jarman. Jarman was the gay artist and fearless filmmaker the 1980s Thatcherite tabloids loved to loathe. He was the provocateur who announced his HIV status and challenged anyone to say anything about it. He was the radical who directed a young Swinton in seven films, from the bold ‘Caravaggio’ in 1986 to the startling ‘Edward II’ in 1991 and, finally, the magnificent ‘Blue’ in 1993.

The memory still lingers of ‘Blue’ on Channel 4 in 1993: we were treated to 75 minutes of silent blue screen with BBC Radio 3 broadcasting the voices of Swinton, Jarman and others from his entourage speaking his final, moving testament. It felt like the smartest lunatics had taken over the asylum. Jarman is long gone and Channel 4’s current proudest achievement is ‘Big Brother’, but Swinton, at 46, is one of our most interesting actresses. One month she’ll be playing the White Witch in ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’, the next she’ll be dubbed into Hungarian for Béla Tarr’s latest arthouse challenge. Her career has continued to be a continuation of her time on ‘Planet Jarmania’, as she once baptised Jarman’s collaborative, inspiring and bonkers approach to film and life.

Tilda Swinton in 'Edward II' (1991)

In February 2008, Londoners will have an opportunity to return to that planet. There’s a new film from Isaac Julien, simply titled ‘Derek,’ which includes an interview recorded at Jarman’s home shortly before his death in 1994. ‘Derek’ will screen on More4 (but not Channel 4 – how times have changed) and also as part of an exhibition of Jarman’s artwork at the Serpentine. Integral to the new film is a lucid and frank open letter from Swinton to Jarman, presented as a voiceover.

In this deeply personal missive, Swinton wonders what Jarman would make of today’s world and whether his work has been all but forgotten. Swinton was a muse to Jarman, one of the mainstays of the shifting, leftfield troupe of friends and collaborators he gathered around himself in London, first in the late ’60s as an artist and set designer and then, from the late ’70s, as a filmmaker. Jarman was adored by loyal fans and derided by an establishment that bristled at his loud, shameless disregard for commerce and conservatism.

For Swinton, a young actress not long out of Cambridge in 1985, Jarman was an introduction to a cinema that could be at once serious and ridiculous, political and frivolous, radical and traditional. By the time the pair met, Jarman was well established as the polar opposite to the self-satisfied British cinema of ‘Chariots of Fire’. His work was weird, spiky, unconcerned with story, a mixture of the improvised and the considered, packed with ideas, often very funny and, crucially, unashamedly gay. Jarman had already enjoyed his first, surprising success in 1976 with the classical gay romp, ‘Sebastiane’, and then, three years later, his chaotic punk collage ‘Jubilee’ confirmed him as a radical on the city’s scene, a character fearless about embracing classical stories yet unafraid to stick two fingers up at tradition. His humour was puckish and clever. If it became trendy to like Jarman’s films, trendy was never a label to which he aspired.

Interview in 1990 used in new documentary 'Derek'

Many of Jarman’s films may sound traditional – reinventions of Shakespeare’s plays (‘The Tempest’) and sonnets (‘The Angelic Conversation’), philosophy (‘Wittgenstein’), sixteenth-century Italian painting (‘Caravaggio’), an interpretation of a Marlowe play (‘Edward II’). But in truth they are anything but stuffy. Just watch the films now: they are inspired as much by art and literature as by film and they scream with a free approach to narrative, image, sound and sexuality. Just think of the noisy Outrage! march that invades the drama of ‘Wittgenstein’; the sheer beauty and lyricism of ‘The Last of England’; the painterly compositions; the ultra-modern mix of film and video. Jarman brought classicism to pop. Why else did The Smiths, the Pet Shop Boys and Suede each in their turn rush to adopt him as a director who would introduce style, intelligence and bravado to their videos and tours? I remember seeing Jarman introduce a Suede gig in 1993. He spoke in a faltering voice to a silent crowd at the Clapham Grand in support of two young men who were taking the issue of the age of consent for gay men to the European court; films made by his associates then played during the band’s set. If I remember rightly, a chicken was ripped apart in one film. Politics, pop, promos, poultry – and all in one too-brief evening.

Jarman came to film more by accident than design. After a comfortable childhood in the London suburb of Northwood, he studied painting at the Slade and worked as a designer of costumes and sets, collaborating with Ken Russell on ‘The Devils’ in 1971. During this time, Jarman would shoot Super-8 films and screen them in his Bankside flat. The late ’60s and ’70s were one huge party as Jarman embraced the homosexuality that he had kept quiet and nurtured a bohemian set around him in London. His Super-8 films offer a glimpse of a decadent warehouse life on Bankside, all creativity and dressing up. Cinema proper – if you could call it that – only began when he took a bunch of young gay men to Sardinia in the summer of 1976 to shoot ‘Sebastiane’, a raunchy, madcap take on the life of Saint Sebastian (in Latin!) that threw gay sex up on the screen and had punters queuing round the block at the Gate Cinema in Notting Hill when it opened in 1976.

This year marks 14 years since Jarman died at the age of 52. He had publicly embraced his HIV status, first diagnosed in 1986, at a time when to do so provoked anger and homophobic catcalling in the tabloids and made him a hero, whether he liked it or not. ‘I didn’t have to adopt a cause… I became one,’ he said.

As the ’80s became the ’90s, Jarman’s fame – and notoriety – grew as he worked more determinedly than ever as a director, painter, writer and activist for gay rights and HIV awareness. He was a force. His diaries catalogue a frenzy of activity as he flitted between his flat in Phoenix House on Charing Cross Road and Prospect Cottage, his tiny fisherman’s home at Dungeness in Kent, where he fruitfully indulged a latter-day passion resurrected from childhood – gardening. He was surprising to the end.


Tilda Swinton | Paul Burston | Colin McCabe | Don Boyd | Isaac Juilen | Neil Tennant | Cerith Wyn Evans | Jon Savage

Courtesy James Macka

Celebrating the legacy of London legend Derek Jarman

Tilda Swinton
How did you and Derek Jarman first meet?
‘In a quite orthodox way. He was casting “Caravaggio” and friends we had in common encouraged us to meet. I went to see him at Phoenix House: he opened the door with a video camera on me. He never turned it off throughout our meeting. It set the tone of our relationship somewhat. Never-ending footage. No frills. A kind of self-conscious über-candour. And something almost gladiatorial – daring – in the level of scrutiny inflicted and invited, like a game of dare between siblings.’

Looking back, how would you describe your friendship?
‘Derek was the first artist I had ever met with whom I shared a similar upbringing. We were both the children of service families: his father a pilot, mine a soldier; both public-school educated; both resistant, or what my father calls “contrary”; and both aware that the world of art might hold us in a way that other worlds had not. We just had a family feeling from the get go: I think we felt we could trust each other in a sort of kinship-based way. There were things I never needed to explain to him: for example, why it was unthinkable for me to follow the interpretative classical theatrical or professional actor’s path many people were encouraging me to go down; or why making silent Super-8 films with him was much more serious an endeavour for me. Derek completely understood that making new shapes was as important for me, as a performer, as it was for him as a filmmaker. He respected that impulse in all of us. I think he was rather amazed to have acquired this pet performer, actually, and one lazy enough to want to make home movies and travel the world with him rather than make money or have a career as a professional.’

What did he give you as an actor that you still carry with you today?
‘I’m pretty sure that had I not met Derek, I might well not have worked as a performer in film in England at all. The filmmaking landscape in the 1980s was somewhat alienating for anyone with pre-industrial leanings: Merchant Ivory, Alan Parker and Richard Attenborough had it about sewn up. Neither Ken Loach nor Mike Leigh was making films for cinema at that time. The cinema I aspired to was all elsewhere, either geographically or long gone. Jim Jarmusch’s “Stranger than Paradise” introduced a new possibility in an American film from the alien’s perspective but, apart from that, all other new waves felt spent for the time being.’

Did you miss Derek’s way of working after he died?
‘I think that the fact that the first nine years of my filmmaking life were almost exclusively spent working with Derek set my habits indelibly: the miracle is that, honestly, I’ve not been aware of having had to stray too far out of the zone since. The filmmakers who have approached me seem to know the territory of my interests and contribution and be up for it. Of course, a kitchen-table collaboration between actor and director is hardly fostered tenderly within the studio system, but I understand that I have had the great good fortune to only work in that universe hand in hand with particularly free and open people: Spike Jonze, Francis Lawrence, Andrew Adamson, David Fincher. In fact, the big studio adventures I have had so far have been pretty exclusively built out of an experimental vibe uncannily similar to Derekworld. The big CGI films – in my experience – are crucially founded on a pioneering spirit, largely created by computer genius nerds under 26 who are forever sliding on to the set to show the newest and most out-there program for taking 20 years off people or throwing glass shards through the air around your head. It’s like pop videos with The Smiths all over again.’

Some of Derek’s later diary entries hint at his unease with the attention he received in the last years of his life, especially the call on him to be a role model. Did you feel that from him?
‘Honestly, I think Derek was very attached to getting attention, and genuinely more easy with it than perhaps anyone I’ve ever met. It’s important for those who weren’t around at the time to know that he was not just some arty type who only a few people were ever aware of and want remembered now. He was a proper tabloid figure in the ’80s, involved in constant argy bargy with moral arbiters like Mary Whitehouse and Ian McKellen. He was truly gleeful about his role as public provocateur. What he was perhaps uncomfortable with latterly was the concept of his occupying any kind of centrist position; the buzz was to be an outsider antagonist, not a member of any established order. His was essentially an adolescent fantasy, a constantly morphing spirit of anarchy dignified and enlightened by the freedom accorded by the luxurious position of holding the moral high ground. Towards the end of his life, the respect with which he was treated became something to adjust to.’

Your open letter to Derek runs through Isaac Julien’s new film about his life. How do you imagine he might reply?
‘I feel him laughing a lot. I suppose he would update us on things from where he’s sitting since he left the building. Probably making us feel utterly envious and left out of a far more fabulous party than we are a part of up here. I reckon he likes the film. It’s called “Derek”, so he retains the spotlight. People often ask what I imagine Derek would be doing now, were he alive. Honestly, whatever would surprise the life out of everyone else, I suspect. He would probably have worked out a reason why making Super Bowl commercials for the plutonium industry is the only rad and powerful statement for an artist to be making. Either that, or some kind of cable channel live-art feed in Ancient Greek. Whatever, he would be making it up as he went along and having a rocking good time doing it.’

Paul Burston
Time Out’s gay editor on Jarman the activist
I’d met Jarman once, at a club called Bang in 1985. But it was six years later that we became allies, or as Derek would have it, foot soldiers in the war against ‘heterosoc’. I was working for the Gay Police Monitoring Group (Galop), taking calls from men who’d been caught with their pants down or beaten up for being gay. We were in desperate need of funds and Derek was determined to help however he could. He talked about staging a gay musical, with Erasure’s Andy Bell in the lead role. The musical would tell the story of gay activism in Britain and take several swipes at the gay lobbying group Stonewall. It would be called ‘Pansy: The Musical’.

The show never happened but Derek’s animosity towards Stonewall came out in a letter to The Guardian, in which he criticised Ian McKellen for accepting a knighthood from a Tory government that promoted family values. The letter prompted a dozen of Stonewall’s finest thespians to write to The Guardian in defence of McKellen, and the battle lines were drawn. McKellen claimed afterwards that there was no real disagreement between himself and Derek. I’m not so sure. Derek was strongly opposed to Stonewall’s softly-softly approach, especially since they’d named themselves after the riot that sparked the gay rights movement.

He raged hard in those last few years. There were the films, in particular ‘Edward II’, which married Marlowe’s homosexual king with a celebration of modern queer activism. There was his book, ‘Queer Edward II’, with its goading slogans ‘stop the straight war against queer love’ and ‘save queer children from straight parents’, and another book, ‘At Your Own Risk’. And then there were the paintings: angry canvases using words like ‘Queer’ and ‘Aids’.

For much of this time, he worked from an office on Wardour Street papered with the most offensive tabloid headlines he could find, a reminder of the battles still to be won. I truly believe that it was the anger that kept him alive so long in the days before combination therapy. The last time I saw him was at an early screening of ‘Blue’. He was practically blind, and when the lights came on his face was wet with tears. Still he insisted that I stress the ‘extra fun’ element in ‘Blue’. ‘All I see in Aids films is sentimentality,’ he told me once. ‘That’s not how I feel about it at all.’

When he died, a few days before the age of consent vote of 1994, there was a sense of loss on the gay scene. The night of the vote, there was a vigil outside the House of Commons. When it was announced that Parliament had voted against an equal age of consent at 16, grief turned to anger and people stormed the building. It was the only dignified response, and one that carried something of the true spirit of Stonewall. The following day’s papers spoke of ‘gays on the rampage’. Derek would have loved that.

Colin MacCabe
Executive producer of Jarman’s ‘Caravaggio’ and producer of Isaac Julien’s new documentary, ‘Derek’
There were always those who would foam at the mouth at the very thought of Derek’s films. Certainly the UK Film Council [government-backed film promotion body] was set up at the end of the ’90s specifically to avoid films like Derek’s. I have some understanding of where his critics were coming from: Derek’s films have great virtues but he wasn’t interested in narrative and he wasn’t good at it. ‘Edward II’ and ‘Wittgenstein’ are, I think, his two best films because he was using Marlowe’s play and Eagleton’s script. Until he got Aids, Derek was busy having a good time; then, the fact that he knew he was dying meant that the focus became much, much stronger. I think the last three films are his masterpieces.

We filmed the interview that runs through ‘Derek’ in 1990. It was March of that year and I was rung up by The Independent. They said, ‘Will you write Derek Jarman’s obituary? He’s dying.’ I knew that he’d been ill and this was coming but it was still tremendously upsetting. While writing I realised that, while I knew Derek quite well, there was lots I didn’t know about him. Then he recovered, in a way that at that stage with Aids you could; he went from being at death’s door to being his full physical self. So I said to him, ‘Why don’t we record you on film telling the story of your life?’ It was interesting and fun, but also very moving.

Don Boyd
Producer of ‘The Tempest’, ‘The Last of England’ and ‘War Requiem’
One of the most preposterous assessments of Derek Jarman’s legacy came to me from a British director who chose to abandon a career in advertising to make American movies. He claimed – without any irony – that Jarman had studied his hugely over-rated television commercials, stolen their photographic style and design imagery, and integrated them into his films without acknowledgement. I asked this sad popinjay in which of Derek’s films this plagiarism was most apparent and he couldn’t name any of the Jarman oeuvre. What made me laugh most was that Derek did not own a television. He was however acutely aware of the corrupting power of the advertising industry. He railed against the political and lobbying influence wielded by men like the Saatchis during the Thatcher era.

I think he would have been surprised by his artistic legacy. He was amused by the sudden increase in his fame after he revealed that he was suffering from HIV; he considered this adulation a weird form of necrophilia. His attitude to wealth was epitomised by his story about having dinner at the mansion of a man whose beautiful wife loved great paintings and going to ballet and opera with Derek. After pudding he was ushered into the library and, while Derek scrutinised the exquisite first editions, the slightly embarrassed philanthropist wrote him a cheque covering his debts before they returned to cigars and brandy. He knew that Derek’s artistic legacy would be acknowledged one day like the Monets in his dining room.

Isaac Julien
Director of ‘Derek’, artist and curator of the new Serpentine exhibition
This reappraisal of Derek is really very important. There’s an ambivalence towards his legacy both in the film and the art world. If you mention Derek, people will say, ‘Interesting filmmaker but not a very interesting painter.’ That whole compartmentalised way of thinking about someone prefigures everything we understand about young British artists now. Think of Damien Hirst and the variety of his work; no one worries that he might make a film, or a painting, or a sculpture. Derek embraced that whole punk ethic of ‘don’t dream it, be it’, that whole DIY attitude. It was extraordinary that he was able to do all those things. In the new Serpentine show, there will be some of Derek’s paintings, but also some of his works that have never really been seen before by the public. His bed sculpture (a bed frame with a tarred-and-feathered mattress acting as the canvas) for example, was shown in Glasgow in 1990 but never in London.

Neil Tennant
Pet Shop Boys star who worked with Jarman on several videos, including ‘It’s A Sin’
At the end of 1989 Derek told me that the 1990s were going to be all about gardening. Of course he was very prescient; that was before ‘Ground Force’ and all the fucking rest of it. And he made that garden at Dungeness, which was and still is amazing. In many ways, the things I think he is remembered for, really, are the diaries and the garden, which you can still go and see: it’s not open to the public, just open, and people still go there. It’s such a striking garden, too, with the shingle and the plants he brought in. His book with [photographer] Howard Sooley [about the garden] pretty much became a bestseller after he died.

One of Derek’s great things was creating – like any artist, I suppose – something out of nothing: found objects, driftwood and shingle. That was a very strong part of his aesthetic; living in these rotting warehouses with fascinating spaces that you could create something in. And it was a very influential aesthetic. We have Derek to blame for pebbles, really. If you go to a hotel and there are pebbles in a fucking jar, it’s basically Derek.

Cerith Wyn Evans
Artist; Jarman’s assistant in the early 1980s
It would be wonderful to have Derek still with us but I wonder what he would have made of the YBAs or BritArt. I think you can see aspects of Derek’s work in the Britishness of it but, at the same time, I’m sure he would have been critical of all the marketing. Because, after all, he was very much part of the pop art generation and he distanced himself from that. It would have been very interesting to see what his counter arguments would have been. Certainly, I imagine Charles Saatchi would have been a real demon for Derek. But also I think there would have been aspects that he could and would have exploited to the full.

Jon Savage
Punk scholar and friend
He was a fantastic catalyst. I remember at the funeral saying to a couple of people, ‘This will be the last time these diverse people will be in the same room.’ You used to go up to Derek’s tiny flat and there would be some German punk kid who’d come to talk to him, together with Norman Rosenthal from the Royal Academy, John Maybury and Derek’s latest rent boy discovery. Not that Derek was having sex with them necessarily, but he liked those marginal lads. Derek was always unbiddable, that’s what I liked about him: ‘I’m going to do what the hell I want. I’m going to do the opposite to everybody else, and sod you.’

He was a great battler. There were very many sides to him. And I really like Derek’s Super-8 films. I loved ‘In the Shadow of the Sun’. I thought that was fantastic. It just all worked. Derek was very lyrical about the countryside. I spent a lot of time with him in 1983/1984, just driving around London. He took me all around the Docklands. It was that pyscho-geographical thing of finding forgotten bits of the city; this fantastic landscape that I hadn’t realised existed. I like the idea that filmmaking is an extension of everyday life. For Derek, it wasn’t something that was blocked off by production schedules. And I do see some of Derek’s films as a visual diary, really. In that way he was very inspiring.

Tilda Swinton | Paul Burston | Colin McCabe | Don Boyd | Isaac Juilen | Neil Tennant | Cerith Wyn Evans | Jon Savage

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