Michael Charlesworth - Derek Jarman

Derek Jarman wrote a series of highly readable and fascinating books. They took the form of memoirs, journals and commentaries on the making of films. All gave him the opportunity to use an autobiographical approach, but each work allowed the authors voice to be developed into differing forms, more or less experimental, sometimes modulating between prose and poetry. Although he employed the first person singular, it would be a mistake to regard these works as simple and unproblematical reports from the daily continuing life of Derek Jarman, who was born in 1942 and died in 1994. Like the poets Alexander Pope, W. B. Yeats and many others before him, Jarman engaged in a mythopoeia a personal mythmaking which kept its eye on a different sense of time (on posterity) and which allowed different emphases about the life and work to emerge in different volumes. Jarmans partner and editor Keith Collins gives a clue to this in his preface to Kicking the Pricks (1987):

Derek extensively re-edited and re-ordered the text, scrubbing out the past, inverting meanings, ruthlessly cutting so that pages were returned bleeding from their red Pentel duels a process of revision and re-invention that was characteristic in his painting, writing, film editing, and personal history.

Jarmans books are works of literary art rather than straightforward notes. In them he represents to us where his imagination wasdwelling at various stages in his life, and obviously the imagination can occupy a somewhat different place from the physical body. Since the imagination is the spring of all creative activity, Jarman offers a wonderful insight to an artist and poet at work. A reader of his books will soon notice that the same incidents are often told in rather different ways. It would be invidious and short-sighted of us to demand that the versions of the story should be identical. The new occasions demanded new emphases. Each context was different. Rather than seeing this as a series of masks hiding the real face of Jarman, we could see them as signs of the manifold nature of personality in modern circumstances. As Jarman himself put it (or rather, as the resonant narrative voice put it) on the soundtrack to his most autobiographical film, The Garden (1990): I went in search of myself. There were many paths, and many destinations.

Jarman is famous for his film-making and his place in the history of film-making is assured. Throughout his life he produced paintings and made other works of visual art, including installations and three-dimensional works. This part of his productivity has been much less frequently discussed than his films, despite having given rise to a series of one-man shows between 1961 and 1994, in Europe, the USA and Japan. He designed sets for other peoples productions in ballet, opera, film and theatre, and from 1979 made pop promotional films (music videos). Having developed a lifetime of expertise in gardening, Jarman also made an extraordinary garden in a most unlikely place, and lived to see it become nationally famous. This book will aim to tread some of the many paths represented by these activities. Does more than one path lead to the same destination? Do any paths cross each other, or run beside each other for a while? In other words, can the varied activities be conceptually or aesthetically linked?

One path that weaves in and out of Jarmans landscape is that of political activity, which is closely related to his sexuality. The view taken in this book is that he was able to develop political positionsout of questions of sexuality and articulate them in ways that became relevant and urgent to a far wider audience than the up to 15 per cent or so of the population who are of a queer orientation. In speaking and writing of gay rights at a time of great controversy about them, Jarman reached an audience far larger than that consisting only of his peers. He did this by relating questions of sexuality to class conflict and governmental questions, and in so doing became a highly successful activist for greater acceptance of homosexuality, because of, rather than despite, his preparedness to engage in controversies during the last eight years of his life. His utterances about class, government, capital and patterns of cultural production, stemming from his own experience more than from an ideological or theoretical position, are also relevant and important to heterosexuals, as are his writings on sexuality, its attempted suppression and its free exercise. This was recognized by a large number of people during his lifetime. The ability to reach a wider audience also depended on fame beyond the confines of the film world only, and once the excellence of his garden had been understood by the large, diverse but generally not revolutionary nation of garden-lovers, he was accepted by them for its sake with no regard to whether his sexuality corresponded to theirs or not.