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).
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.
This NME story points to the trailer for Passions Just Like Mine, a documentary about Morrissey fans directed by Kerri Koch. According to the movie’s website, the film focuses on one fan in particular, a working-class Mexican immigrant named Jose who “credits Morrissey with saving his life.”
This makes Passions the second documentary about the Los Angeles-based subculture of Latino Morrissey fans that I’ve heard of in as many years. The first was Is it Really So Strange?, directed by William T. Jones, which I saw at Anthology Film Archives in 2006, at a hipster-packed screening where I sat behind celebrity Smiths fan Chloe Sevigny. What made that film interesting was the ingenious ways in which Jones turned his lack of access into an asset. A photographer-turned filmmaker, Jones structured the film as fan’s photo album of fandom. His only meeting with Morrissey was almost accidental, but Jones’ diary-esque telling of that encounter was compelling in an almost confessional way.
It’ll be interesting to see if Koch’s approach sufficiently differentiates her film from Jones‘, which screened at several festivals and is available on DVD via Frameline. I’ll tell you one thing: I never thought I’d have to worry about Latino Morrissey fan doc fatigue.
UPDATE: In the comments, Matt Dentler and Tom Hall point to Viva Morrissey, another doc about Morrissey’s Latino fans (this one’s a short), which screened at SXSW in 2006. I haven’t seen it, but of the three films, it certainly has the most sophisticated trailer.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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