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Derek Jarman: Super 8
Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you Anton Stuebner’s consideration of Derek Jarman: Super 8, a recent monograph from Thames & Hudson. Steubner notes, “[The book] shows an artist fully coming into his own at a social and historical moment when his distinct creative voice would become more needed than ever.” This article was originally published on April 9, 2015.
Derek Jarman. My Very Beautiful Movie, 1972 (contact sheet of film stills); Super 8mm; 17:13. Courtesy of Thames & Hudson and LUMA Foundation.
In his lifetime, Derek Jarman (1942–1994) was arguably Great Britain’s most prolific queer artist, a punk poet rallying against the homophobia and AIDS paranoia of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party government. Although originally trained as a painter at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, he created work that gleefully transgressed conventional boundaries of discipline and medium. In Jarman’s oeuvre, paintings function doubly as text pieces (incitements for political action with slogans like “FUCK ME BLIND” and “SPREAD THE PLAGUE”), while his journals, conversely, incorporate pictorial images: film stills, mixed-media collages, oil studies in miniature. By the time of his death, Jarman had amassed a staggering body of work that included countless canvases both large and small; multiple set designs for the Royal Opera House; over ten books of autobiography, poetry, and scripts; and even a house, a cottage near the Dungeness nuclear power station in Kent that Jarman designed and built from the ground up.
Jarman’s eleven feature-length films—from the highly sensual Sebastiane (1976), a homoerotic account of St. Sebastian’s martyrdom, to the autobiographical masterpiece Blue (1993), a monochromatic tone poem about Jarman’s physical and psychological experiences of living with HIV/AIDS—are undoubtedly his most lasting and powerful works. Twenty years after his death from AIDS-related complications, it’s still painful to imagine the films that Derek Jarman could have made had he survived. At once both painterly and highly cinematic, profoundly political while also deeply meditative, his features represent the fullest expression of his creative energies even if they aren’t the entirety of his cinematic output. Jarman’s initial forays in filmmaking were on Super 8, a medium he continued to experiment with and incorporate in his feature films throughout the early part of his career. Many of Jarman’s feature films were funded (in part) by the British Film Institute, the largest government-supported nonprofit for film production and preservation in Great Britain. This funding enabled these films to circulate through larger distribution networks, reaching a wider audience that the Super 8 films, as considerably smaller and more fragile works, could never reach. As a result, Jarman’s feature-length films continue to dominate critical assessments of his work.
