At the Guardian, Andrew Pulver laments the fall Derek Jarman (and the personal, high-art cinema he made and represented) from cinephile fashion. He blames this in part on the revival of the commercial British film industry:

One problem is the seismic shift of the cinematic landscape since Jarman’s death in 1994, the same year that saw the release of Four Weddings and a Funeral. One of Jarman’s main weapons had been that, in the Thatcher era, there was no one else putting out Britain-centred product so enthusiastically. His small-scale, personalised vision undoubtedly helped him survive the 1980s and, to some extent, prosper. But with the revival of the commercial end of the British film industry, the very people who most resented Jarman’s productivity regained the initiative. After his death, his cinematic influence virtually vanished.

The idea of Jarman as a “Britain-centred” filmmaker reminded me of one of the things I found most frustrating about Derek, Isaac Julien and Tilda Swinton’s collaborative, impressionist doc on their late friend, which I saw at Sundance last month (Pulver mentions both Julien and Swinton but not the film, although I have to imagine this post was in part motivated by Derek’s premiere this week in Berlin).

Julien’s film portrays Jarman (who largely tells his own story, via an interview filmed before his death) as someone whose work was initially driven by two passions/concerns: national politics and sexual politics. These twin concerns come together spectacularly in Jubilee, but they seemed to separate out as Jarman became more active as a gay rights activist and an outspoken person living with AIDS. Jarman’s own priorities and preoccupations are perhaps illustrated most plainly in the way he discusses the music videos he made in the 80s. They were all work-for-hire projects, ostensibly primarily motivated by a paycheck, but they’ve also aged spectacularly well, particularly The Queen is Dead, a short film to three songs by The Smiths.

In Derek, when the subject of his work for The Smiths comes up, Jarman writes it off as a pure paycheck, and almost seems embarrassed to have done it. But later in the film, in a much longer section devoted to the filming of “It’s A Sin” for Pet Shop Boys, Jarman has no such qualms––in fact, he says he thinks “Sin” is maybe the best thing he’s ever done. Decide for yourself: “Sin” is above, Queen can be watched here.

In general, I found the film lacking in analysis of Jarman’s work––as someone whose familiarity begins and ends with The Smiths videos and Jubilee, I wanted to learn more and was left wanting––but I was particularly frustrated that seemingly contradictory claims like these went uninterrogated. I ended up relying on subtext: Jarman was a gay, British man. His work was critical of Thatcher Britain, but certainly not ashamed of its Britishness, and this would seem to put it squarely in line with Morissey’s Queen is Dead era nationalism (which has since morphed into a questionable conservatism, but that’s a subject for another time). But Jarman rejects any spiritual/thematic alliance with The Smiths, and instead professes a kinship with the Pet Shop Boys. The Pet Shop Boys, like Jarman and Morrissey, were also British and gay (although only Jarman was out at the time), but in his work for them, Jarman was allowed to downplay concerns of national identity and forefront sexuality as the only politics of relevance. Ultimately, Jarman’s sexual identity was more of a defining characteristic of his life and work than his nationality.

Now that’s interesting, right? Too bad it’s an idea that exists on such a subtextual level in Derek that I’m not even sure it’s a correct reading of the film.