Derek Jarman
Startling and subversive works from an inspirational figure in British cinema.
For those that hunger for something distinctive and different, the eclectic work of Derek Jarman is inspirational in its fearlessness yet remains touchingly personal.Emerging from the Slade School of Art to become a renowned set designer in the early 1970s, he directed a series of radical features throughout the 80s and 90s that would define a new oppositional and iconoclastic British cinema.Jarman was a rooted post-modernist: attached to history yet willing to subvert it. He manipulated time into startling new loops and sequences – colliding past and present, tradition with transgression, challenging accepted orthodoxy. His films were like magic spells, rooted in landscape, visually charged and offering a view of history as aplace which could still inform the present, playing with notions of time.We present a selection of his works including his renowned features Sebastiane (1976) and Caravaggio (1986) – both classics of gay British cinema – though to his vehement late critiques of Thatcher's Britain, The Last of England (1987) and The Garden (1990).
