Particular, Peculiar: Derek Jarman on Blu-Ray

Derek Jarman’s oeuvre can be a hard sell, but it shouldn't be. It’s slippery, inconsistent, frustrating, sometimes hopelessly dated, opaque, silly and occasionally outright tedious. It is also beautiful, funny, tender, intelligent, ahead of its time and absolutely fascinating. Sometime it’s all of these things at once, taken both microcosmically and as a whole. Lavishly presented by the BFI, Jarman Volume 1: 1976-1986 covers his earliest filmed work through to Caravaggio, along with a plethora of supplementary material including short films and exclusive interviews with many of his collaborators, all presented on Blu-ray for the first time.

The famously queer filmmaker’s early life was marked by an absolute denial of his sexual self - following a humiliating and brutal Catholic education, he buried it under art and education until the age of twenty-two. Rupture eventually came, and proudly so – what would follow was redolent of Cocteau: “In France this vice does not lead me to prison because of the way Cambacérès lived and the longevity of the Code Napoléon. But I will not agree to be tolerated. This damages my love of love and of liberty.” Loudly realised with his first feature film, 1976’s Sebastiane (co-credited, much to Jarman’s chagrin, with Paul Humfress) was the first explicitly homoerotic film to be screened in the UK. This affords it a certain importance, undeniably, but it is often quite a boring watch (on the surface, at least, to a heterosexual male viewer like this writer, who can’t get too much out of the frequent and extremely long shots of toned, tanned men bathing in the nude – this is not a criticism per se, the film was made with a homoerotic intention and, so, a heterosexual male is not the primary audience).

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Sebastiane. Image courtesy of the BFI.

The film becomes more interesting when one considers Jarman’s hostility to the film’s subject, the Third Century martyr, Saint Sebastian, who he once described as “the doolaly Christian who refused a good fuck, gets the arrow he deserved”, asking “Can one feel sorry for this Latin closet case?” It marks the film as a tentative setting out of his stall – unashamedly gay and furious at the abuse, violence and repression he had been subject to as a result of his sexuality. St Sebastian is his former self, a person he could never be again.

Rage courses through these films, a rage that Jarman would say was unleashed by the punk movement – this is most obviously realized by 1978’s Jubilee, as fervently anti-establishment as it is critical of the punk movement itself. Taking place in a dystopian near-future, the punk’s have won but not much seems to have changed but for a further degeneration of societal integration. Oh, and Queen Elizabeth I has travelled through time with the alchemist John Dee and the angel Ariel, to see what it’s all about. Jenny Runacre plays both QEI and one of the punks, Bod, and this dual role, along with QEI’s placid, thoroughly regal, benignly anachronistic presence is as good an emblem as any to the conflict(s) within the film: a love of an old, genteel idea of England set against an admiration for the would-be anarchy of punk and anger at an oppressive/regressive establishment. The punks in the film, led by punk icon Jordan’s superlative turn as Amyl Nitrate and including Adam Ant as Kid and Toyah Wilcox as Mad, generally doss about causing trouble – they test the audience’s patience but we’re on their side, at least eventually, especially following particularly brutal behaviour on the part of the police (you could easily cheer when two policemen are killed, such is their characterisation, presaging the wholly deserved portrayal of the police as Thatcher’s personal army before she’d even made it to No 10).

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Jubilee. Image courtesy of the BFI.

This sympathy withers at the film's close. Head of the world’s media, Cardinal Borgia Ginz (played with outrageously camp relish by Jack Birkett AKA Orlando), courts the punks throughout the film and eventually wins them over into the ultimate sin – selling out. Ginz is an emblem of the pernicious rise of commercialisation that Jarman hated, and the punks are victims just like anyone else, albeit ones we are very disappointed with (would you like some butter with your car insurance?); that he is a cardinal (‘cardinal’) surely no coincidence either. But as Ariel says, “Consider the world’s diversity and worship it. By denying its multiplicity you deny your own true nature. Equality prevails not for the gods’ sake, but for man’s. Men are weak and cannot endure their manifold nature.”

Ariel appears, of course, in Jarman’s next film, The Tempest, an oneiric cut up of Shakespeare’s text that convincingly conveys the sensation of being locked away while a storm or blizzard rages outside. Heathcote Williams’ Prospero quietly menaces, Toyah Wilcox’s Miranda drifts dreamily and Jack Birkett just about steals the show as the frequently fulminating Caliban, eating raw eggs and spitting out lines in his typically campy manner (Christopher Biggins turns up at one point too…). While the original play is arguably dismembered somewhat in its service, the film is among the more successful Shakespeare adaptations you could hope to see, heavy on (Cocteau-esque) atmosphere and fore-fronting the poetry of the text.

Indeed, perhaps Shakespeare needed Jarman as an editor – Prospero’s famous speech from Act 4, Scene 1 of the original now appears as a wholly fitting, climactic knockout:

“…We are such stuff
As dreams are made of; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”

The whole film builds toward this moment, a successful reclaiming of Shakespeare from a British establishment that Jarman would come to vociferously despise over the following decade or so, an antipathy that progressed in parallel with Thatcher’s efforts to hollow out the country.

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The Angelic Conversation. Image courtesy of the BFI.

Shakespeare is central too to Jarman’s The Angelic Conversation (1985) but it is in some ways as unsuccessful as The Tempest is successful, though this impression may simply be a matter of format - it is simply too ponderous to be properly enjoyed in a home cinema context, and is ill-served by some particularly period video techniques. Two men move through gloomy landscapes in a serious of slow-motion Christian/AIDS allegories while Judi Dench periodically intones Shakespeare’s sonnets. There is no doubt that the film was very personal for Jarman and some of the imagery is very striking, but the testudineous pacing makes its seventy-seven minutes an endurance test, at least in your sitting room - a gallery installation feels like a more appropriate setting (the same could be said of Disc One’s In the Shadow of the Sun), or indeed the cinema.

Not so Caravaggio. Opening with the titular figure dying of a fever, the film skips back and forward through the artist’s life, reality twisted by the way that memory afflicts itself. Anachronisms abound (a gold calculator, a linen suit, dinner jackets) in a particularly dank and grimy Rome. There are visual nods to many paintings, not just Caravaggio’s, Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat, for one – Jarman the art historian, perhaps. The attention to Caravaggio’s work is not slavish in its reproduction of his paintings (impressive though many of them are), nor are the settings from which he paints quite what we’d expect – Jarman the artist shows us the alchemical leaps that are made from reality to the canvas, the artist as conduit. Nigel Terry’s turn as the brooding artist is impressive and subtler than it might’ve been, given the biography involved and Jarman certainly affords Caravaggio a narrative that both acknowledges and transcends the mad-artist-turned-madder-murderer story to which we are accustomed. It may be Jarman’s most accessible film, but it also seems a perfect fit for Jarman as we know him: an outsider and an insider, a transgressive and a conservative (self-described, presumably with a minuscule ‘c’).

This box set provides an intricate and intriguing detailing of an artist’s development from punky independent to established transgressor. It is not always easy to watch these films, but they are always, intelligent, and more complex than facile viewing sometimes indicates.

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Caravaggio. Image courtesy of the BFI.

Gina Birch of The Raincoats wrote the following of Jarman’s work:

“We now think of film and TV as the way of capturing reality. We are programmed to think of it as ‘real’. But is it more real than the time before we discovered perspective, when there was an honest selectivity about what was considered most important/ Derek’s films introduce us to a different kind of reality, a world of the interior mind – feelings, thoughts and dreams – that impinges on our view of the exterior world.”

One could go further – perhaps his work suggests also that the exterior world impinges on the interior; the subjectivity of our existences blurs the boundary between both states - the interior world may be more important than the exterior, but not solipsistically so. Our own feeling, thoughts and dreams can only ever really be our own, but they blur the boundaries between reality and each one of our inner selves. Derek Jarman’s very particular, peculiar cinema bears that out in a very particular, peculiar and captivating way.

Jarman Volume 1: 1976-1986 is out now on limited edition Blu-ray on BFI. A second volume will be released later in 2018.

Andrew R. Hill

Baxter Dury, Halo Maud – Stereo, Glasgow, 20 February 2018

In May this year, Baxter Dury will play at the Casino de Paris, an iconic venue with a capacity of 2000, and venue for an iconic live album by Serge Gainsbourg; Stereo in Glasgow is among the best venues in Scotland, but it’s just a smidge smaller (capacity: 300) - the audience tonight may not know, in a way, just how privileged it is.

Parisians Halo Maud open, perhaps a little bit bashful at first if très charmants, their sound is certainly aligned with what one tends to think of in terms of contemporary French pop music (or at least that which we are exposed to in the UK): somewhat ethereal vocals, minimalist guitar, slightly proggy keyboard washes, melodic and propulsive bass, driving (but never heavy) drums. There’s a lightly psychedelic touch to them, little hints of Broadcast, Melody’s Echo Chamber, Aquaserge – at one point, vocalist and guitarist Maud Nadal (also of Moodoïd) even sings a searching melody that brings Björk to mind. Rightly well-received, their set is dynamic and memorable.

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Baxter Dury’s onstage persona is certainly geezerish but with a knowing glint in the eye present at all times. It’s wholly appropriate for the music, especially numbers from his superlative 2017 album Prince of Tears, a catalogue of sad characters victimised by their own masculinity, too in love their own bravado and braggadocio to notice they’re pathetic, broken.

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Across a set composed primarily (but not solely) of songs from his last three albums, Dury is a charismatic stage presence and the music shines. Played live, these songs take on an extra vivacity, muscularity – the band has a great time, and so do the audience. It’s pretty rare for a 16-song set (including encore) to be anything other than irritating/waring/boring by the time of its conclusion, but not tonight. It’s pretty much perfect - sometimes cheeky, sometimes downtrodden, always captivating. Dury should be a household name in the UK but as it stands he’s just another example in a long list of ways our Continental brethren can show us the way. Bof.

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Photos: Erika Sella. Words: Andrew R. Hill

Magician & Surgeon: The Mystery of Picasso

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso (Le mystère Picasso, 1956) is, at least in part, a failure but it is an interesting one. Presented here in a lovingly restored form by the ever-admirable Arrow Academy, it is essential viewing for anyone with an interest in 20th Century art, never mind the singular force of nature it seeks to document.

Clouzot’s stall is set out early in the film, a voice intones:

One would die to know what was on Rimbaud’s mind when he wrote ’The Drunken Boat’, or on Mozart’s when he composed his symphony ‘Jupiter’. We’d love to know what secret process guiding the creator through his perilous adventures.

Clouzot doesn’t even get close. Or maybe it’s a red herring? The ‘French Hitchcock’ (a needless Anglophone-centric reduction if ever there was one) has some success in approaching Picasso’s work as an opportunity to build suspense, as was his stock-and-trade. Much of the film consists of specially-prepare canvases reverse-shot, filling the screen while Picasso ‘paints’ using marker pens and special inks on the other side. The ink bleeds through, giving us an unusual sort of animation. This was the first film of Clouzot’s to feature colour, an approach that certainly underlines the jouissance present on/in each canvas. The suspense emerges from the line of questioning most viewers cannot help but ask: where will that line go? What will this form become? What will the background be? When will the next nude or bull or matador or Pierrot turn up?

Shot in nice over three months in 1953, many of the pictures created in the course of the film are recognizable variations of works form the previous few years, typical of Picasso’s ‘late style’ (the body of work created between 1953 and his death in 1973). Of course, there was no one style per se over these twenty years, but it is not too harsh to state that his hitherto constant thrust toward innovation had ebbed by this time. As Cy Twombly once asked in defense of his friend Robert Rauschenberg, “ Do you have any idea how difficult it is to hold the tension over several decades?”

Perhaps the frustrations of this approach could be said to be with Picasso rather than Clouzot. While there is no doubt an appeal to the resultant works Picasso creates, the imposed suspense is rarely satisfied. That said, the suspense is imposed; and maybe that misses the point anyway – in a thriller, the suspense (not the resolution) is the point. Interestingly, this dovetails neatly with Picasso’s own attitude to his art:

For me each painting is a study. I say to myself, I am going one day to finish it, make a finished thing out of it. But as soon as I start to finish it, it becomes another painting and I think again I am going to redo it. Well, it is always something else in the end. If I retouch it, I make a new painting.

The trouble is that often this suspense feels not just imposed but really quite forced, and one cannot help but feel that Clouzot could do with letting the works ‘breathe’ more. The worst element in all this (and in fact the worst thing about the whole film) is Georges Auric’s overwrought, grating score – rather than leading one to be tense through a sense of suspense, one ends up tense through aural aggravation.

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Image courtesy of Arrow Films.

To see a Picasso emerge before you is a privilege, no doubt, but the most interesting parts of the film may be where we see the Picasso interacting with Clouzot If it weren’t apparent enough already from the canvases he has created before, Picasso’s enormous sense of playfulness then comes out in contrast to the mostly austere Clouzot  - though they do share the odd chuckle. It’s fascinating to see Clouzot excel in his usual stark monochrome yet with a more Brechtian, and less straightforwardly documentary approach. One of these all-too-short sequences leads to more suspenseful drama, Clouzot telling Picasso how long he has left to paint before the film runs out. Interestingly, these segments are score-less and manage to be more suspenseful than those where we directly watch and await the emergence of a ‘complete’ canvas.

If one feels a slight dissatisfaction at the end of the film, it is perhaps the blame of those expectations set up by the opening narration, that somehow we will have a greater insight into Picasso’s work, practice, thoughts, ethos; ultimately, we do not. In some ways this underlines a point made in Walter Benjamin’s essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’:

Magician and surgeon behave like painter and cameraman. The painter, while working, observes a natural distance from the subject; the cameraman, on the other hand, penetrates deep into the subject’s tissue. The images they both come up with are enormously different.

This disconnect may be the source of the sense that something has not quite come off with The Mystery of Picasso. But this is an experiment, and watching both artists working really is a privilege in itself. At the end of The Mystery of Picasso, Picasso and his work remain just that, a mystery – would you really want it any other way?

The Mystery of Picasso is out now on Arrow Academy on blu ray and DVD formats; each features Paul Haesaerts’ 1949 documentary ‘A Visit to Picasso’, ‘La Garoupe’, a 1937 ‘home movie’ by Man Ray, and a short ‘before and after’ feature on the restoration of the film.

Andrew R. Hill

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directed by Georges Clouzot

Bibliography

Bazin, André. Bazin at Work: Major Essays & Reviews from the Forties & Fifties. Edited by Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, Routledge, 1997.

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by James Amery. Underwood, Penguin Books, 2008.

Berger, John. The Success and Failure of Picasso. Penguin Books, 1966.

Lewison, Jeremy. “In the Antechamber of Death: Picasso's Later Paintings.” Late Style and Its Discontents Essays in Art, Literature, and Music, edited by Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles, Oxford University Press, 2016.

Lloyd, Christopher. Henri-Georges Clouzot. Manchester University Press, 2007.

Under your skin: Hesteofringen - Henning Christiansen

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Image courtesy of Holidays Records.

This oddity from boutique Milanese label Holidays Records makes for a disquieting and arresting listen across its 8 minutes and 55 seconds. A single-sided 10” in beautifully minimal respectively white/green and red/white outer and inner sleeves, it transcends its origins as the soundtrack to a singularly bizarre and brutal piece of Danish conceptual/performance art.

Broadcast to a large portion of the Danish population in January 1970, Hesteofringen (‘Horse Sacrifice’) was the ostensible ritual slaughtering and dismemberment of a horse in protest of the ongoing war in Vietnam (the horse was actually very old and put down humanely by a vet). Initiated by Bjørn Nørgaard, this ‘happening’ is captured on silent super 8 footage - a medium that is lent an additional strange horror by the fact that it was so often used to record home videos in the past. The record sleeve’s colour scheme is no coincidence – on a snowy plain in northern Denmark, we see (multimedia and performance artist) Lene Adler Pedersen incanting as a ‘priestess’ while wearing a red, black and white robe, a reflection of sorts of the horse’s dark body bleeding out onto white ground as it is hacked up - while Fluxus-associated Beuys collaborator Henning Christiansen accompanies the act on a green violin (this scene is documented in a vibrant colour photograph on the inner sleeve). The only sound in the film is the music documented on the record, which is partly repeated later in the film (17 and a half minutes long).

The music (a piece that is actually entitled ‘Min døde hest’ – ‘My dead horse’) consists of Pedersen, childlike, singing a poem by Nørgaard; Nørgaard plays plangent, cyclical piano chords while Christiansen draws out atonal, creaky, moans from his violin. The voice is the part that dominates, the part that captivates most – nothing so unusual about that – mourning, distracted, absent. But the (Danish) lyrics repeat the piece’s title again and again, with interjections about crawling inside the dead horse, “Oh, your soft intestines”, and “dead horse on bread”. We do not need to comprehend the lyrics literally (a kind Discogs user, Google translate and the sleevenotes are to thank for these transcriptions/translations) to understand that this voice speaks of a profound loneliness.

The music is perhaps very slightly reminiscent of John Cage’s songs for piano and voice (as found on ECM’s 2012 release As It Is), or Erik Satie, or Patty Waters, but one tends to think more of Jandek, or Grouper (particularly Ruins) in the sense that - irrespective of the actual circumstances of the playing of the music - this sounds like a room containing one person, singing inwardly, lamenting, not taking much care to the execution of the playing, more trying to work through something harrowing, and perhaps finding they are inadequately emotionally or linguistically facilitated to do so. Holidays Records describe the piece as a ‘sad lullaby’ and it’s hard to argue with this description. Lullabies are often used to sing children to sleep, especially if they are unsettled or temporarily troubled; this sounds like someone singing herself to sleep, slipping back into something infant, seeking comfort, warmth, protection.

Lene Adler Pedersen and Henning Christiansen perform Hesteofringen (film still found on inner sleeve).

In Christiansen’s ‘THOUGHTS ABOUT A DEAD HORSE (and an attempt to move on)’ (February 1970), presented as sleevenotes to Hesteofringen, he underlines the existential isolation that echoes through the record: “Our most immediate problem is contact among people. For the last five years, the code word has been communication, but this was on an external level. At stake now is the internal level.” The hippy-ish context of that most late-60s/early-70s artwork, ‘the happening’, and the references to mysticism throughout Christiansen’s statement tend to make one suspicious of this assertion, but it is not so distant from Lacanian thought around language’s alienating effects – most basically (so one is given to understand), that there is a fundamental, irresolvable disconnect within each one of us that leads to an innate dissatisfaction, and language (as an external system) bears much of the responsibility. While the then-fashionable quasi-spiritual mumbo jumbo contained in Christiansen’s 48-year old statement is to some degree validated by tracts of poststructuralist theory, it is really a tautology, irrelevant. As interesting as the sleevenotes are, and as fascinating as the original artwork/performance is, the song resonates all the louder by itself.

Hesteofringen lends some voice to that alienation, without resolving it. That language here has to some degree broken down - become repetitive, twisted, obsessive - is surely no coincidence; not understanding the literal meaning of the words (though the repetition is obvious) actually enhances this sensation of alienation. That the voice, piano and violin all sound slightly misaligned, disjointed, heightens the sensation further still; but the voice alone transmits this alienation well enough, and the loneliness conveyed makes one a voyeur. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, spying on private trauma.

“Oh, just the whole world was a dead horse.”

Crawling inside your “dear, dead horse” won’t bring it back to life; it may protect you from the elements for a while, but the world remains outside.

This may make the record sound horrific, unbearable, unlistenable, but it is far too beautiful to honestly deem it so. Hesteofringen is undeniably stark, strange, discomfiting; but its hypnotic melancholy cannot help but get under your skin.

Hesteofringen is out now on Holidays Records, in a limited edition of 350 copies. Thanks to Low Company Records for bringing it to our attention.

Andrew R. Hill

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Bibliography

Ghosh, Mallika. “Lacan and Post-Structuralism.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Anthropology (IJSSA), Dec. 2016, pp. 85–89., http://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0e8b/d896781fe72f4533098794afbc64b4586949.pdf.

Harwood, Mark. “Nature and Culture.” Surround, Apr. 2014, surround.noquam.com/nature-and-culture/.

Hvidt, Annette Rosenvold. “About the Work: The Horse Sacrifice.” Statens Museum for Kunst, 22 Mar. 2017, www.smk.dk/en/visit-the-museum/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/2010/bjoern-noergaard/about-the-work-the-horse-sacrifice/.

Lechte, John. “Jacques Lacan.” Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: from Structuralism to Postmodernity, Routledge, 1994, pp. 77–81.

Glasgow Film Festival 2016: Miguel Gomes’ ‘Arabian Nights’ Trilogy

Adapting One Thousand and One Nights for the cinema is no small undertaking, especially when to do so automatically places you in the estimable company of the likes of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Georges Méliès. While the framework of Scheherazade’s need to tell her fantastical tales in order to save her life (and those of others) is still present, it is just that – little else of the source text remains, at least in terms of plot. Over these three films, a disparate and heady miasma of strange trials, talking animals, recondite hobbies, suicide, priapism and economic hardship unfold, primarily in Portugal of 2013 and 2014.

The trilogy begins with a prologue of sorts that establishes quite avowedly that this is not to be a literal adaptation of the famous book(s). Via documentary footage and interviews, we learn that a shipyard in a town in contemporary Portugal is to be closed; the town is also beset by a swarm of Asian Hornets threatening the indigenous bee population and, as such, the local honey production. The film’s director, Miguel Gomes, narrates (temporarily) and appears on screen, utterly despondent. He is trying to link the two problems afflicting the town, but isn’t sure what he means by it; then things take an unexpected and comic turn. It is the first of many, many formally playful moments over the trilogy’s intimidating six hours and twenty-one minutes duration. We do see Scheherazade (and she does turn up as other characters through her stories) in her Baghdad ‘in the Antiquity of Time’, especially in the third part, an undisguised modern-day Marseilles (Scheherazade uses a speed boat and at one point she and her father converse on a Ferris wheel). This is no sword-and-sandal epic and puts the (almost) here-and-now, post-economic crisis Portugal through a frequently entrancing magical realist filter.

Crista Alfaiate and Américo Silva ride a Ferris wheel in Arabian Nights Volume 3: The Enchanted One. Image courtesy of the Glasgow Film Festival.

Those only familiar with Gomes’ 2012 feature Tabu may be initially surprised by the tone and form of Volume 1: The Restless One but gradually a more meditative feeling takes over – the first film flits between several stories and settings; the second slows into more detailed, longer tales; and the third slows further still, to such an extreme that the trilogy ends with a grinding inertia (which stands in stark contrast to the first film in particular). The testudineous pace of Volume 3: The Enchanted One does bear facile resemblance to Tabu’s meditative oneirism, but lacks its compelling emotional weight. Unfortunately, the over-extended primary story of Volume 3 slips readily into self-indulgence and stretches initially interesting subject matter to a frustratingly ponderous length (there was an unusually high amount of groaning and sighing around the audience); arguably the saviour of this part and thus the trilogy is the particularly effective climactic use of The Langley School Music Project’s take on ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’, but the problems with this volume do threat to bend the viewer’s impression of the whole trilogy significantly out of shape.

Its running length and its experimental form makes Arabian Nights no small undertaking for a viewer either, but for all its manifest flaws, it is a worthwhile one; charming, beautiful, bawdy, hilarious, tragic and furious, it makes for a long, strange trip and one all curious or serious filmgoers should consider taking.

Andrew R. Hill