WHO is he?
British filmmaker, scenarist, stage director, author and painter who directed over ten feature films and close to forty short films from the early seventies onwards until his death in 1994 due to AIDS-related complications. Jarman’s filmography consists of a mixture of narrative cinema, avant-garde work and counterculture films, with all of them retaining a highly experimental edge.
WHY is he of interest?
Along with Terence Davies, Jarman is widely regarded as the most prominent British figure in the New Queer Cinema movement that took shape in the early 1990s. However, Jarman also finds his place in the pantheon of experimental filmmakers and his works of high formalism defy and move beyond the simple categorization that the idea of Queer Cinema offers.
WHAT are his films about?
Style
The immediately striking aspect of Jarman’s period films, especially his biographies of Caravaggio. Edward II and Wittgenstein, is the disregard for traditional biopic conventions such as period detail and historical contextualization. The narrative space of these films is not bound in time. Objects and ideas from modern era infiltrate them, in effect opening up them to contemporary audience. Besides such anachronism, some of the most characteristic features of Jarman’s cinema are the use of voiceovers, high-contrast imagery, lack of background spaces, disjointed narratives, use of classical music and characters addressing the audience directly.
Themes
Jarman’s most well known films are biographies in the broadest sense of the word and come across as reinterpretations of the lives of the persons in question. More specifically, they are ‘queer interpretations’, in which conventional accounts of the sexuality of these figures are challenged and their lives re-rendered in a different light altogether. Unapologetic homosexual love and the tyrannical nature of institutions (that often have contemporary resonance and critical edge) are two of the most salient themes in Jarman’s films.
WHERE to discover him?
In Caravaggio (1986), Jarman re-imagines the private life of the Italian master painter. Taking us through Caravaggio’s scandalous affairs, his proclivity for melees, his complex sexuality and his undeclared war against the court and the church, the film postulates how the painter’s work was rooted, consciously or subconsciously, his own experience. Jarman’s film, if not anything else, is stunning to look at as it recreates and pays homage to Caravaggio’s extremely corporeal, tactile, baroque, emotionally intense movement-laden, chiaroscuro-based style in its own images.
