Derek Jarman at the Serpentine
I remember the first time I saw a Derek Jarman film. I’d been brought up on Disney and westerns – here was something brave, rough, colourful and violent, and it opened my eyes to modern film-making.
So I was naturally interested in the Serpentine Gallery’s Derek Jarman exhibition, which includes a new film about Derek by Isaac Julien as well as rare Super-8 footage from Jarman’s private archive. There are also lightboxes showing views of Jarman’s seaside cottage at Dungeness – out of a a remote shack on a shingle beach, Jarman created an eclectic and weird kingdom of his own, in the shadow of a huge power plant.
The garden has iconic status these days now that architectural plants and mediterranean plants have become so popular you can even buy them at B&Q – but what’s truly Jarmanesque about the Dungeness garden is that longing to go further and further away from the social whirl, from the respectable city. Jarman was in Docklands in the 1970s – before the first developer moved in – and by the time the yuppies started to buy Docklands flats, he’d already moved out here.
Jarman is perhaps best known as a great gay film-maker – but that was not the only risk he took. How many directors would produce a great film about homosexual love (Sebastiane) and script it entirely in Latin? He used elements of both punk and period drama in ‘Jubilee’, introducing Elizabeth I to an anarchist future London. In ‘Blue’ – which forms part of this exhibition – he fills the screen with saturated blue; all we have to focus on is the soundtrack. Anyone interested in avant garde film and just what you can achieve with the medium should see this exhibition.
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