Director Derek Jarman (1942-1994) was a true punk and iconoclast who at heart was a fantasist. His influences include Michael Powell, Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger and B-status science fiction films. His cinematic career would begin when Ken Russell personally invited him to design the lavish and highly imaginative sets for The Devils and Savage Messiah.
Jarman's is a cinema of pure unadulterated magic and spectacle and the true wonder is his gift for receiving such seductive outcomes on such anemic budgets, Thematically, his films are threaded by a preoccupation with ensembles of characters isolated by the bleakest possible setting - the desert-like Sardinian landscape in 1976's Sebastiane and the devastated urban sprawl of Jubilee (1978) and the island-bound decaying mansion in The Tempest (1979). The emphasis is thus placed upon the interaction of characters, especially upon power relationships, both political and sexual.
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| London's burning in Jarman's subversive masterpiece The Last of England (1987) |
Sebastiane, based on the erotically charged Renaissance painting of the famous martyr is remarkable for the fashion in which Jarman's panning camera dwells upon the au natural male form and renders even the landscape as sensual. Co-directed by Paul Humfress, the film is possibly unique in having its dialogue in the Latin language.
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Jubilee would be the most extravagant and bizarre of Jarman's releases, its the least endearing of his works. It is a vision of the decadence and decay of modern society situated in a dystopian London where a group of punk terrorist prey remorselessly on a culture they deem as unreasonable.