With 49 days to go until the opening night of the Sundance Film Festival, expect to see some space here devoted to previews of some of the films I’m particularly interested in. The first thing that really caught my eye upon skimming the schedule was Derek, a film about Derek Jarman directed by Isaac Julien. Executive produced by actress/Jarman muse Tilda Swinton and produced by film historian Colin MacCabe, the World Documentary Competition entry purports to “combine document with fiction, and experiment with narrative” to fashion “a timely reappraisal and celebration of the work of one of Britain’s most important artist filmmakers.” There’s a bit of an expanded synopsis on Julien’s web site. After Sundance, the film will be part of an exhibit devoted to Jarman curated by Julien, at the Serpentine Gallery in London.
I’m generally fan of what I know of Jarman’s work, but I’m mostly interested in this because lately I’ve been kind of a sucker for non-fiction films that take huge liberties with documentary form. In a recent interview with BOMB magazine, Julien actually spoke of Derek not as a documentary, but as “a strange kind of biopic about [Jarman's] life.” All in all, it’s classification in the doc competition seems a little strange, but it maybe another sign of Sundance 2008’s swing towards a more adventurous programming attitude. Strange Culture, another non-fiction film involving Swinton that incorporated narrative elements, premiered at Sundance last year in the marginalized Frontier sidebar, which I thought was unfortunate–it was hands down the best documentary I saw at the festival last year, but got little attention out of competition.
Jarman, who died of AIDS in 1994, is fairly well represented today on YouTube. More after the jump.
He’s probably best known for Jubilee (1977, excerpted above), a punk-rock masterpiece in which Queen Elizabeth I travels forward in time to a late-twentieth century alternate Britain awash in nihilist decadence. It co-starred two Malcolm McLaren protegees, Adam Ant and Jordan, and featured cameos from Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Slits.
Jarman was one of few openly gay artists working in Britain in the late 70s and early 80s, and with public funds for the arts hard to come by in the Thatcher era, he had trouble financing his experimental/activist projects. In the 80s, he shot music videos and adverts to make a living. Probably most notable is The Queen is Dead, a promo film set to three songs by The Smiths, which was later edited down into a single music video for the song “Panic.” There’s a slightly higher quality version of the full film here, but I can’t figure out how to embed it; above, you’ll find just the “Panic” segment.
But most excitingly, it seems that Jarman has become a favorite source of material for YouTube mashup artists. My favorite example of this is embedded above. I guess you could classify this kind of thing as analogous to the slash fan video phenomenon Henry Jenkins speaks of here, except that the homoerotic content of Jarman’s work is hardly subtextual. Editing Jarman’s images into a cheesy, cheesecakey music video doesn’t draw out hidden meanings as much as it makes the primary meanings more palatable for YouTube-style consumption.
