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Derek Jarman
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Writer, painter, designer, avant-garde filmmaker, and sometimes gardener, Derek Jarman was a whirlwind of creative activity before his AIDS-related death in 1994. British director Ken Russell, who employed Jarman as a designer on films like The Devils and Savage Messiah, considered him "the last true bohemian." In this objective look at a man who "could not have been dull if he tried," Jarman's friend and literary agent portrays an often-contradictory figure. For instance, Jarman embraced his sexuality (artist Robert Mapplethorpe was among his many lovers) but tempered the hedonism with an innate shyness and asceticism, and in spite of late-night parties and other excesses, he took pride in maintaining an "orderly ship." Peake recounts Jarman's bleak childhood, early creative endeavors, and constant struggle to finance his controversial films, which some critics dismissed as homoerotic "home movies." After his AIDS diagnosis, Jarman turned activist, speaking out against the disease's stigma while facing a prolonged death with humor and grace.
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Derek Jarman was the most important independent filmmaker in England during the 1980s. Using emblems and symbols in associative contexts, rather than conventional, cause-and-effect narrative, he created films noteworthy for their lyricism and poetic feeling and for their exploration of the gay experience. His style of filmmaking ... links Jarman with other prominent directors of lyric film, including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Genet.
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Writing in 1991, the great British film-maker, artist, writer, tireless gay rights campaigner and iconoclast Derek Jarman must have had a fair inkling that the millennium would be seen without him. He died from AIDS related complications in St. Bartholomew's hospital at 11 o'clock on February 19, 1994 after just over seven years of bravely battling the infection.
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From All Movie Guide: An accomplished painter, Derek Jarman entered films in the early '70s, designing sets for Ken Russell's The Devils (1971) and Savage Messiah (1972). After making numerous experimental shorts, mostly in Super-8, he began helming features in 1979 with Sebastiane, a controversial gay-themed account of Saint Sebastian, in which all the dialogue was spoken in Latin. Over the next 20 years Jarman frequently interwove historical evocation and unexpected anachronisms, particularly in his biopics Caravaggio (1986) and Wittgenstein (1993). His landmark non-narrative features of the '80s, The Angelic Conversation (1985) and The Last of England (1987), offer a painter's sense of texture, with Jarman transferring Super-8 footage onto video for his editing, and then transferring the video onto 35-mm film. Radical gay politics, a constant theme in his films, emerged most forcefully in the '90s with The Garden (1990), which re-enacts incidents from the life of Christ with two gay lovers in place of Jesus; Edward II (1992), his fiery adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's 16th-century tragedy; and his last film Blue (1993), in which the sole visual element is an unchanging field of blue, while the soundtrack describes Jarman's thoughts and emotions in the face of his imminent death from AIDS. ~ All Movie Guide
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A year before director Derek Jarman succumbed fully to AIDS, he made his last film. In Blue, the color blue is all there is to see as Jarman tries to bring the audience into his vision-impaired world. Jarman offers his insights on life, love, disease, the meaning of art, and the symbology of the color blue over a blue screen. Actors, including Tilda Swinton and John Quentin... read from Jarman's journals and poetry. ~ John Voorhees, All Movie Guide
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Derek Jarman was born in Northwood, Middlesex on January 31, 1942. He was educated at King's College in London from 1960-1963, and at Slade School of Fine Art from 1963-1967. His first exhibition was at the Lisson Gallery in London in 1967. He did set design for the Royal Ballet, the Ballet Rambert and the English National Opera in 1968 and worked as a film designer for Ken Russell's films THE DEVILS and SAVAGE MESSIAH. Jarman began working in Super-8 film in 1971 and directed his first 16mm feature, SEBASTIANE, in 1975. Trained as a painter, he drew heavily on painting and poetry, and consistently experimented with the cut‹up collage approach.
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Derek Jarman