Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations
A comprehensive look at the work of Britain’s most controversial director
312 Pages, 6 x 9 in
- Paperback
- 9780816653133
- Published: November 9, 2009
Details
Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations
ISBN: 9780816653133
Publication date: November 9th, 2009
312 Pages
8 x 5
Best known as an iconoclastic, wildly inventive filmmaker, Derek Jarman was also an accomplished author, painter, and landscape artist. In Derek Jarman's Angelic Conversations, Jim Ellis considers Jarman's wide-ranging oeuvre to present a broad perspective on the career and life of one of the most provocative, engaged, and important artists of the twentieth century.
Derek Jarman's Angelic Conversations analyzes Jarman's work-including his famous films Caravaggio, Jubilee, Edward II, Blue, and Sebastiane-in relation to his critiques of the government and his activism in the gay community, from the liberationist movement to the AIDS epidemic. While others have frequently focused on Jarman's biography, Ellis looks at how his politics and aesthetics are intertwined to comprehend his most radical aspects, particularly in films such as War Requiem and The Last of England.
Here Jarman is revealed as an artist who keenly understood the role of history and mythology in creating a personal and national identity: as an activist, he sought to challenge old histories while producing new ones to carve out a space for alternative communities in Britain late in the twentieth century.
Introduction: Getting History Wrong
1. Artistic and Sexual RevolutionsSituationism and Other Avant-gardes—The Gay Liberation Front2. Liberation, Space, and the Early FilmsReconfiguring "Home" in the Super-8s—Gay Liberation Theology in Sebastiane3. The Elizabethan FutureJubilee and the Punk Nation—Punk Heritage in The Tempest4. The Caravaggio YearsImagining Change: Imagining October—Homoerotic Countermythologies in The Angelic Conversation—Caravaggio: Gay History and the Scripts—Caravaggio and the Art of the Past5. Thatcherism, AIDS, and WarThe Last of England and the Landscape of Loss—War Requiem and the Army of Lovers6. Time and the GardenThe Garden at Prospect Cottage—Gardening History in Modern Nature—Histories of the Fall in The Garden7. Blindness and InsightEdward II: Queer Gothic—Wittgenstein and the Queer Life—Queer Vision in BlueCoda: The Raft of the Medusa
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Select Filmography of Derek Jarman
Index