Pasta with Derek

Just saw the absolutely fantastic documentary / biographical film on the life of cult film-maker Derek Jarman - Derek made by Derek Jarman’s friend and collaborator Tilda Swinton and film maker video artist Isaac Julien. In England thankfully there is a major reappraisal of Derek's work afoot with a major retrospective at the Serpentine . I'm really sad I won't get a chance to visit this.

Thankfully, I was lucky enough to meet and interview legendary film maker Derek Jarman some years ago (before Blue / after Caravaggio). The interview took place on one of my then favorite streets in London, Old Compton St, where we had pasta for lunch after which we retired to Derek's apartment just across the road above Charing Cross Rd. His place was, unsurprisingly, as striking as the man himself - black paintings embedded with mirrors, a wooden throne, all kinds of wonderful books. I remember we talked about 15th Century English mystic John Dee, his fantastic sets for the ballet "In The Mouth of The Night," his work with the equally legendary Ken Russell and his now very famous, but then still new garden.



I'm not gay, and have no interest in homosexuality, but Derek's work even in it's most homosexual of moments transcends the narrow framework of being classified as strictly "gay." Much has been made of his sexual orientation since his passing of AIDS related illness and many have championed him as a "gay" artist and whilst I do not want to deny the essence of the man the fact is he was much much more - Derek was a fascinating mixture of characters and was obsessed with a wide array of themes.

I think it is fairer to call him an artist interested and exploring "outsider" territory and as such he's much more accessible and meaningful to a broader range of people. Derek's work reflected the depth of his thinking and it's very English in many ways. On one hand he handles the classics - Caravaggio's biography, Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, Britten's War Requiem, Wittgenstein's biography and Shakespeare's The Tempest. On the other hand he's very much a part of Punk - Jubilee and Post-Punk - videos for Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV and The Smiths and the dissection of Thatcher's UK that is The Last of England. Then of course he's purely poetic - The Angelic Conversation, In The Shadow of The Sun and many other super 8 films.

Fact is simply put Derek Jarman was one of the most innovative, original and down right unique film-makers England, or any other country for that matter, has seen. If you haven't seen his work I suggest you track down Caravaggio as a good starting point - it's one of his more formal works but outstanding. After find the two volumes of Super 8 films - much more experimental but a fantastic view at the real "inside' of his work. Then I'd try something like "The Last of England."



Derek and his films were very important to me, alongside Mike Leigh's "Naked" I felt something like "The Last of England" truly reflected the world I was living in and Caravaggio was one of the reasons I went to acting school. I always wanted to be in one of his films. Here's what his cohort film-maker Cerith Wyn Evans (who was Jarman's assistant in the early 80s on films like "The Last of England") said about him recently - "It would be wonderful to have Derek still with us but I wonder what he would have made of the YBAs or BritArt. I think you can see aspects of Derek’s work in the Britishness of it but, at the same time, I’m sure he would have been critical of all the marketing. Because, after all, he was very much part of the pop art generation and he distanced himself from that. It would have been very interesting to see what his counter arguments would have been. Certainly, I imagine Charles Saatchi would have been a real demon for Derek. But also I think there would have been aspects that he could and would have exploited to the full."

And here is British Punk scholar and Derek's friend Jon Savage - "He was a fantastic catalyst. I remember at the funeral saying to a couple of people, ‘This will be the last time these diverse people will be in the same room.’ You used to go up to Derek’s tiny flat and there would be some German punk kid who’d come to talk to him, together with Norman Rosenthal from the Royal Academy, John Maybury and Derek’s latest rent boy discovery. Not that Derek was having sex with them necessarily, but he liked those marginal lads. Derek was always unbiddable, that’s what I liked about him: ‘I’m going to do what the hell I want. I’m going to do the opposite to everybody else, and sod you. He was a great battler.

There were very many sides to him. And I really like Derek’s Super-8 films. I loved ‘In the Shadow of the Sun’. I thought that was fantastic. It just all worked. Derek was very lyrical about the countryside. I spent a lot of time with him in 1983/1984, just driving around London. He took me all around the Docklands. It was that pyscho-geographical thing of finding forgotten bits of the city; this fantastic landscape that I hadn’t realised existed. I like the idea that filmmaking is an extension of everyday life. For Derek, it wasn’t something that was blocked off by production schedules. And I do see some of Derek’s films as a visual diary, really. In that way he was very inspiring."