Derek Jarman Protest!

As the exhibition has been rescheduled from April 2020 to December 2021 we want to share some of the material that we planned to include in the gallery and additional content that we have found during lockdown. Our friends at LUMA Foundation, Basilisk Communications and BBC Arts have given us access to film and audio content from their collections and archives so that we can present an on-line programme that covers different aspects of Jarman’s work, from painting, film and literature to gardening and activism.

We have asked various contributors to talk about aspects of Jarman’s life and work that we can pair with Jarman related film and audio.

Jon Savage: Jarman and Punk

Although of an older generation, Jarman was fascinated by Punk: he shot the first ever footage of the Sex Pistols and directed one of the major film features from within that moment, Jubilee. This began with a Super 8 he filmed of punk pioneer Jordan dancing, but developed into a wider look at the state of England in 1977. The film brought him into prominence as a caustic chronicler of the national mood, seen in such paintings as Margaret Thatcher’s Lunch, as well as reinventing him for a younger generation of artists and filmmakers. This facet of Derek’s work can be seen at its height in the 1987 feature The Last of England: a fast cut polemic – to the pace of pop videos – against the degradation of English life under the heavy hand of Mrs. Thatcher.

Read the full transcript of an interview with Jarman for Jon Savage’s book England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock.

Arena: Derek Jarman – A Portrait (1991)

Filmmaker Mark Kidel talks about making the documentary

I first met Derek in the late 1980s, while I was directing a 20-minute film insert on AIDS in film and TV for Channel 4’s Media Show. I was intrigued by the fact that Derek owned just about every book by maverick archetypal psychologist James Hillman, who was something of a mentor to me. Entire lines from James’s book had made it into the dialogue of Caravaggio. The Arena doc was made in a rush to coincide with the release of The Garden. I was blessed with help from my friend the film-maker John Furse, and the possibility of interviewing all the immensely articulate (and not uncritical) contributors, over three concentrated days at Lime Grove Studios, against a black background, which both made it more efficient and resonated with the black paintings Derek was doing at the time, one of which we see him make – in a hurry – in the documentary. I realise now that the adrenalin-fuelled speed with which we made the film mirrored the ‘fizz” as Tilda Swinton calls it in her interview, that characterised Derek’s creative process. Most of all I was blessed with a brilliant film editor, Andrew Findlay, and the freedom granted by Derek to intercut different films as much as we liked, and to use the soundtrack of one over the images of another. Derek was like that: he believed totally in spontaneity, freedom and experimentation