Derek Jarman Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Limpet "A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. ... I am an adherent of ... the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution. ... [T]he hero doesn't look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, a potato."-Ursula K. LeGuin J.M.W. Turner, "War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet" I remember the first academic conference I ever attended as a Romanticist. It was on Romantic Historicism, hosted in Aberystwyth, Wales, in summer 2004, and began its plenary welcome with a rich consideration of the J.M.W Turner painting, "War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet" (1842). The figure of Napoleon that we considered that day was a revenant: diminished, outmaneuvered by the sheer number of reactionary forces and the tide of events, and haunted by a historical reason that itself-on peril of dissertation and job for anyone starting out in their career-was not to be understood as selfpossessed. The hero (as, for example, Napoleon stood always in essayist William Hazlitt's eyes) had passed through the anti-hero stage (as in Lord Byron's contempt for defeated Napoleon, "abject-yet alive!") onto the phase where names as tropes are harder to find.

- by
- •
- Romanticism, Ecocriticism, Derek Jarman, J. M. W. Turner

An analysis of Derek Jarman's War Requiem film, this paper focuses on Jarman's aesthetic and artistic relationship with Britten's musical setting of the same name, as this aspect of the film is often overlooked in most of its scholarly... more

- by Dianne Gebauer
- •
- History, Musicology, Film Analysis, HIV/AIDS

The purpose of this article is to study the films based on the life of Italian artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610). The various biographical sources used on the films preparation and their multiple interpretations given... more

- by Felix Monguilot
- •
- Visual Studies, Art, Film Studies, European Cinema
- by Luca Arnaudo
- •
- Gardens, Derek Jarman, Letteratura Inglese

Made by British avant-garde filmmaker Derek Jarman about the life of the celebrated 17th-century Italian Baroque painter, Caravaggio (1986) makes use of tableaux vivants in order to create both a biopic and a thinly veiled semi-autobiographical movie. Jarman appropriates the events of the life of Caravaggio and presents them in a way that straddles the line between historical accuracy and artistic leeway. This prompts the question of why did Jarman choose to depict the tableaux in the way that he did? More importantly, how does intermediality affect the transformation of the paintings into tableaux vivants? The aim of this paper is to argue that Jarman’s choices were driven by his idiosyncratic ideas and to explore the web of connections between the tableaux vivants and the paintings.

- by Ana M Moctezuma Cruz
- •
- Art History, Avant-Garde Cinema, Film Studies, Film Theory
- by Kristina Lutscher
- •
- Film and Video Art, Derek Jarman, Super 8

In the history of visual culture, several figures had different meanings, which had changed for centuries through their association with the social or artistic contents of their period. Some studies were made in the 19 th century on the proximity of photograph with moving image, and both technical and contextual relationships between photography and cinema were addressed. Two significant homosexual artists from the near history, namely Derek Jarman and Robert Mapplethorpe not only showed the LGBT existence in their works, but also reflected various problems experienced by the homosexual individual in the historical and social contexts. Jarman's movie Sebastiane dated 1976 and Mapplethorpe's polaroid photograph series Bondage dated 1974 are the works created through the image of St. Sebastian; the concepts of suffering, eroticism, pain and resistance have a direct visuality.

- by Seckin Tercan
- •
- Photography, Queer Theory, Photography Theory, Cinema
- by Bradley Tuck
- •
- Ideology, Alain Badiou, Cinema, Derek Jarman

Les Vies de Caravage publiées par Giovanni Baglione, Gian Pietro Bellori, Guilio Mancini et Francesco Susinno ont une influence considérable dans la réception du corpus de l’artiste. Souvent considérées en tant que sources primaires, ces œuvres littéraires opèrent toutefois une médiation dans le discours de la discipline en émettant des jugements critiques et stylistiques sur les œuvres et par la mise en scène de faits historiques par la fiction. Ce mémoire situe le mythe du Caravage dans le contexte de la production littéraire italienne et de son héritage antique et contemporain. Les illustrations de ces ouvrages sont également étudiées en regard de la tradition de portraiture. Les stéréotypes définissant le peintre sont perçus dans leurs mutations et confrontés à la perception de la violence et de l’érotisme par l’historiographie moderne, de même que leur récupération par la culture populaire notamment dans le film Caravaggio de Derek Jarman (1986).

- by Marie Carrier-Corbeil
- •
- Queer Studies, Art History, Violence, Literature

Questo lavoro mette a confronto il pensiero e la personalità del filosofo Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) con il ritratto che ne fa il regista Derek Jarman (1942-1994) nel film Wittgenstein. Le immagini della pellicola illustrano non solo la vita, ma anche alcuni
elementi della filosofia di Wittgenstein, con una suggestiva commistione di linguaggio filmico e filosofico, non priva di aspetti problematici. Su questi si cercherà di far luce ricorrendo alla descrizione e alla interpretazione di alcuni passaggi decisivi delle opere del filosofo, in particolare il Tractatus logico-philosophicus e le Ricerche filosofiche. La regia, la sceneggiatura e la scenografia richiamano infatti, in parte, la struttura dell’atomismo logico del primo, in parte i concetti-chiave delle seconde, come i giochi linguistici, le forme di vita, le somiglianze di famiglia e le regole. Sullo sfondo di questa trattazione rimangono i fattori linguistici, semiotici e teorici del rapporto fra cinema e filosofia, e la riflessione su un modo in cui il linguaggio per immagini permetta una comprensione più diretta e coinvolgente dell’opera filosofica rispetto al linguaggio verbale.

- by Matteo Bressan
- •
- Wittgenstein, Derek Jarman
- by Monika Keska
- •
- Derek Walcott, Derek Jarman, Arte contemporáneo, Historia del Cine
- by Monika Keska
- •
- Cinema, British cinema, Derek Jarman, Historia del Cine

A philosophical exploration of engagement in art, elaborating on the work of Susanne K. Langer. Five interconnected essays address the role of art and the artist in society, conceptual and performance art, beauty and the gaze, aestheticism, and the cultural politics of the art-world. It contains extensive discussions of the work of, among others, Andy Warhol, Derek Jarman, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Wolfgang Tillmans, Anthony Goicolea, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and draws upon the work of Arthur Danto, Roland Barthes, and Elaine Scarry.

- by Christophe Van Eecke
- •
- Roland Barthes, Arthur Danto, Derek Jarman, Pier Paolo Pasolini
- by Simon O'Sullivan
- •
- Magic, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson

Conceived jointly by Basel-based curator Elise Lammer and La Becque | Artists Residency, on the shores of Lake Geneva, in Switzerland, Modern Nature: an homage to Derek Jarman, is a 3-year project that comprises the development of a garden and artistic program inspired by the life and work of British filmmaker, artist, activist Derek Jarman (31 January 1942–19 February 1994). The garden located on the lakeside grounds of La Becque is a tribute to the garden that Jarman developed at his Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, on the southern coast of Kent between 1986 and 1994. Far from a perfect copy, La Becque’s Jarman-inspired garden is in fact a reinterpretation of the principles that guided Jarman throughout his gardening. Namely, working with local and native species, using found elements to create a scenography, thinking of biodynamic arrangements for the best efficiency, and avoiding walls or fences. In late summer 2019, a first selection of living artists were put in dialogue with what was still a sparse garden and a rather minimal research archive. Ranging from people who had worked closely together with Derek Jarman to younger artists whose practice strongly resonated with themes dear to him, the cohort’s connections to Jarman were somewhat intuitive and endorsed the capacity of his legacy to transcend generations and geographies. The first series of works newly conceived or adapted “for” this Swiss version of Prospect Cottage emerged under the overarching theme of “camp”. For the second chapter, a selection of artists and guests were invited to respond to the notion of “queering landscape”, unveiling newly-produced sculptures displayed in the garden, as well as readings, film screenings, and various artistic and music performances.

- by Anne-Laure Franchette
- •
- Queer Studies, Derek Jarman, Ecological Studies

Working beyond mainstream practice, Derek Jarman creates films that are unusually musical. Caravaggio, a biography of the artist, is a case in point. Jarman’s collaboration with composer Simon Fischer Turner from the start of the filmmaking process enables music to assume a structural role, a procedure that turns common music-image interaction
on its head in two ways. First, rather than strive for the audio-visual fusion common to many mainstream films, music and image are here uxtaposed. Second, as music becomes audible, the film’s illusion of realism is destroyed. This article explores how Jarman’s challenge to conventional filmmaking procedure can expose the fragility of reception history by comparing visual, literary, and musical versions of Caravaggio’s
biography.

- by Holly Rogers
- •
- Avant-Garde Cinema, Film Studies, Soundtrack Studies, Film Music And Sound

This essay has been accepted for inclusion in Tess Somervell and Susannah Edney, 'Georgic Literature and the Environment: Working Land, Reworking Genre', Routledge, forthcoming 'Paradise haunts gardens, and it haunts mine', wrote Derek... more

- by Greg Garrard
- •
- Queer Theory, Ecocriticism, Derek Jarman, Gardening

Le film-essai Blue (1993), sans images, se compose de seulement de deux éléments: le bleu et le son. Il est constitué d'une seule scène-clé, inspirée par les peintures de Yves Klein (1928-1962). Nous analyserons cette scène en utilisant la méthode de Panofsky. Auparavant, pour comprendre la poétique du réalisateur et son choix de "soustraction", il faudra aussi parler de l'un de ses travaux antérieurs, Caravaggio (1986). Les deux films représentent le point le plus élevé de la subordination du film au pictural, parce que Jarman utilise l'écran de cinéma comme la toile d'un tableau en essayant de porter à l'écran l'expressivité de la peinture avec toutes ses significations symboliques. Nous entendons ici présenter la relation entre le film Caravaggio et Blue à travers les théories de Panofsky et comment Derek Jarman obtient, déjà en 1986, une soustraction de la langue du film, libérant les images de la "méthode de composition" pour ne donner que la "signification iconographique."

- by Stefano Notaro
- •
- Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Iconography, Art History

This paper reassesses Derek Jarman’s film The Tempest (1979) against recent developments in film adaptation theory in order to reach conclusions about its controversial handling of the Shakespearean source material. After locating the film’s lack of general critical acclaim in the practice of fidelity criticism, an overview of film adaptation theory is given, and recent ideas are applied to the film’s content and structure, placing it in the context of British counterculture in the 1970s. Jarman’s Tempest is analysed by discussing the film’s protagonists in terms of gender, considering its director’s choices of characterisation and plot against the backdrop of queer politics. First Miranda’s relationship with Prospero and Ferdinand is placed within a gendered context of geopolitical conflict; next, the characterisation of Caliban as non-racialised, non-threatening and essentially human is seen as the result of Jarman’s queer agenda; finally, Ariel and Caliban are contrasted as conflicting sexual tendencies within Prospero, interiorising the film’s action in his mind as an allegory of the release of homoerotic desire. As a result, Jarman’s rewriting of the original is seen as a subversive deconstruction in service of his gay politics, to be appreciated as an independent piece of art.

- by Cornelis Martin Renes
- •
- Queer Studies, Film Studies, Countercultural Studies, Derek Jarman

A monografia versa sobre as intersemioses entre imagem fixa (pintura) e imagens móveis (cinema), em dimensão estética própria da contemporaneidade – estabelecendo agudo percurso para os estudos visuais, ao determinar simetrias expressivas entre a história das imagens, seus processos de citação e apropriação. Metodologicamente, sustenta-se nas análises formais e simbólicas – extraindo semioses meta-criativas. (prof. Dr. Marcos Rizolli)

- by Laura Carone Cardieri
- •
- Derek Jarman, Caravaggio, Semiotica, Cenografia

The Good Gardener? Nature, Humanity, and the Garden illuminates both the foundations and after-effects of humanity's deep-rooted impulse to manipulate the natural environment and create garden spaces of diverse kinds. Gardens range from subsistence plots to sites of philosophical speculation, refuge, and self-expression. Gardens may serve as projections of personal or national identity. They may result from individual or collective enterprises. They may shape the fabric of the dwelling house or city. They may be real or imagined, literary constructs or visions of paradise rendered in paint. Some result from a delicate negotiation between creator and medium. Others, in turn, readily reveal the underlying paradox of every garden's creation: the garden, so often viewed as a kinder, gentler, 'second nature,' results from violence done to what was once wilderness. Designed as a companion volume to Earth Perfect? Nature, Utopia, and the Garden, this richly illustrated collection of provocative essays is edited by Annette Giesecke, Professor of Classics at the University of Delaware, and Naomi Jacobs, Professor of English at the University of Maine. Contributors to this wide-ranging volume include photographer Margaret Morton, landscape ethicist Rick Darke, philosopher David Cooper, environmental journalist Emma Marris, and food historian William Rubel.

- by Annette Giesecke
- •
- Architecture, John Muir, Urban History, Early Modern Europe
- by Daniel Humphrey
- •
- Trauma Studies, Derek Jarman, Trauma Theory

Introduction to the exhibition Derek Jarman: Black Paintings at Trondheim Kunstmuseum in 2014.

- by Pontus Kyander
- •
- Film Studies, Contemporary Art, Gay And Lesbian Studies, Painting

Delphinium: A Childhood Portrait of Derek Jarman (2009) portrays filmmaker Matthew Mishory's interpretation of the childhood of Derek Jarman described in interviews and autobiographical writing such as At Your Own Risk. The portrait of Jarman honours his memory with a Super 8 inscription that repeats the queer sensibility of Jarman's cinematic and painterly work. Mishory's film positions Jarman as his filmmaking predecessor; even more so, it positions Jarman as a sort of queer ancestor. Delphinium's sense of ancestry demands a reappraisal of Jarman's work that foregrounds its creation of queer lineage. This article does just that, looking at Jarman's Caravaggio (1986) and Edward II (1991) as both searches for queer origins and formations of queer futures. Through their explorations of queer continuity, Jarman's films inscribe the process by which one learns to become queer and navigate a world that is so often hostile to queer existence. Their preservation of individual figures of the past provides a queer family history and a tool for education, a means for queers to understand their origins, as well as how to make sense of their own place in the world.

- by Laura Stamm
- •
- New Queer Cinema, Queer temporality, Queer Cinema, Derek Jarman
- by Andreas Vrahimis
- •
- Kant, Film Studies, Film Theory, Marxism

What if the artist you would like to interview is dead? That is the problem for an art historian like Véronique Plesch, who reflects on the challenges of studying “dead artists,” dreaming of time travel, but who ultimately accepts the blessings of asking them questions. We come full circle with what we read in Kestenbaum’s opening essay, who similarly affirms the importance of asking questions as opposed to having ready-made answers. We must keep asking. You can find the article online here; https://maineartsjournal.com/veronique-plesch-of-dead-artists-and-time-travel/

- by Véronique Plesch
- •
- Art History, Time Travel, Albrecht Dürer, Derek Jarman
- by Monika Keska
- •
- British Cinema (Film Studies), British cinema, Derek Jarman, Historia del Arte
- by Alexandra Parsons
- •
- Activism, Derek Jarman, Edward II, Queer Childhood
- by Felix Monguilot
- •
- European Cinema, Biography, Biopic, Derek Jarman
- by Anna Viola Sborgi
- •
- Film Studies, Cultural Heritage, Derek Jarman, Redevelopment

« Après tout, si un peintre a la peur de la toile blanche et un écrivain, la peur de la page blanche, pourquoi un cinéaste n'aurait-il pas la peur d'un écran blanc ? », se demande Gérard Courant dans un numéro de Cinéma dans un bref commentaire du film le plus radical de Marguerite Duras, L'Homme atlantique (1981). Les quarante minutes de noir de ce film où on n'y voit rien (dans un autre sens – bien plus concret – que celui rendu célèbre par Daniel Arasse), font plonger dans un gouffre sémiotique qui refuse à la matière filmique ses conventions les mieux établies : des figures qui se détachent sur un fond lumineux. En Blanche-Neige (2000), le cinéaste portugais João César Monteiro reprend presque le même pari : faire rester un spectateur devant l'écran noir de son film, en l'engageant dans le vide visuel intensifié par de nouveaux rapports image/son. On a pris l'habitude de penser le vide en le peignant en noir ou blanc, mais dans un sens large (ouvert, parmi d'autres, par Malevich ou Yves Klein), toute monochromie suffira pour y plonger. C'est aussi la leçon de Derek Jarman dans Bleu (1993), qui soumet nos regards aux 77 minutes de bleu fermé, sursaturé, aveuglant – un autre signifiant vide à donner des vertiges. En attirant l'attention essentiellement sur ces trois films, j'analyserai la nature et les fonctions de l'écran monochrome – dépourvu de toute figure et de toute différence – en tant que signifiant vide dans le système de signes cinématiques. En empruntant les mots du même Gérard Courant, « Son au-délà, c'est l'absence de l'au-délà. Son cinéma, c'est l'absence de cinéma. » Il n'y a rien à voir, sauf ces représentations (en noir, blanc, bleu) volontairement amputées, visiblement invisibles, qui « font du vide une matière pleine » : trois exemples de cinéma outrageusement théorique, certes, mais très concret, désincarné, mais évocateur, troublant, mais cathartique – comme autant d'apophases visuelles.

- by Alexandra Irimia
- •
- Semiotics, Film Studies, Marguerite Duras, Derek Jarman
- by Monika Keska
- •
- British Cinema (Film Studies), Derek Jarman, Gesamtkunstwerk

Derek Jarman was a multifaceted artist whose intermedial versatility reinforces a strong authorial discourse. He constructs an immersive allegorical world of hybrid art where different layers of cinematic, theatrical and painterly materials come together to convey a lyrical form and express a powerful ideological message. In Caravaggio (1986) and Edward II (1991), concomitant perspectives. In Caravaggio, through the use of tableaux of abstract meaning and by focusing on the detailing of the models' poses, Jarman re-enacts the allegorical spirit of Caravaggio's paintings through entirely cinematic resources. Edward II was a king, and as a statesman he the theatrical basis of Christopher Marlowe's Elizabethan play bringing it up to date in a successfully abstract approach to the musical stage. In this of existential phenomenology as advocated by Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks, in order to address the relationship between the corporeality of a means to convey intradiegetically the sense-ability at play in the cinematic touching the spectator in a supplementary fashion. The two corporealities favour an inter-artistic immersion achieved through coenaesthesia.

- by Fátima Chinita
- •
- Media Studies, Performing Arts, Film Studies, Intermediality

"Visualising Music explores alternative models of music-image relationship in film and video art, investigating how the boundaries of cinema can be challenged, both practically and theoretically, by a redefined audio-visual interaction. The first half of the book considers the significance of music in several types of non-Hollywood film, including the work of Werner Herzog and Derek Jarman. Building from here, the second half explores the expanded spaces of video installation art, with close reference to the immersive musical sites of Bill Viola.
Show More
Show Less
"

- by Holly Rogers
- •
- Avant-Garde Cinema, Video Art, Derek Jarman, Audiovisual Art

‘Insofar as they are sheltered domestic creations, gardens are by nature precarious’ (Robert Pogue Harrison). As both gardener’s diary and artist’s journal, Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature (1991) attends to the myriad rhythms of plants, landscape and the weather, weaving environmental observations around quotidian scenes from domestic life and reflections on queer culture. Situating Modern Nature in the context of past and present crises around Aids and ecocide, I identify Jarman’s ‘queer ecology’ of the everyday and suggest it offers ripe opportunities for exploring the temporal oscillations of precarity at scales both personal, political and terrestrial. As both environmental ledger and site for direct expression, Jarman’s journals provide a curatorial space where social and natural history coexist and co-create resistant identities through the voice of an openly queer artist. Like his garden, the journal encompasses both shelter and exposure. By tracing Jarman’s polychromatic, richly rendered sketches of ‘nature’, society and aesthetic practice, I suggest the journal form is ideally poised to offer embodied and reflexive ‘arts of noticing’ (Anna Tsing), which encourage new ecological intimacies, affects and sensory encounters — often resisting the narrative teleologies of extinction and paralysis associated with environmental crisis and Aids. Referencing Gilbert White’s A Naturalist’s Journal and drawing on Stacy Alaimo’s notion of ‘transcorporality’, I consider how the journal – a ‘long’ form that negotiates both data-recording and personal reflection – may develop queer ecological sensibilities, situating subjective enmeshments of desire, time and mortality, while also expressing fresh potentials for pleasure, elegy, work and care within a precarious world.

- by Maria Sledmere
- •
- HIV/AIDS, Ecocriticism, Nature Writing, Derek Jarman

This essay discusses Derek Jarman’s use of Shakespeare’s sonnets in The Angelic Conversation (1985). With particular focus upon the images that accompany the recitation of sonnets 55 and 104, the latter of which concludes the film, Jarman’s engagement of a tradition which asserts the immortality of art in the face of transient life is identified, by way of references to Ovid, Shakespeare and Proust. The essay concludes with consideration of the apparent revision of Jarman’s aesthetic programme in the light of his own imminent death, evident in the conclusion to Blue (1993), in which the close of The Angelic Conversation is echoed and refigured.

- by John Blakeley
- •
- Shakespeare, Derek Jarman