Rowland Wymer: Derek Jarman

• Eckart Voigts-Virchow

Rowland Wymer has written an intriguing and knowledgeable account of the work of one of the most original and fascinating British filmmakers of the past 30 years. Wymer is clearly at pains to dissociate Derek Jarman from his subcultural credentials and to secure a place for him as “a major figure in European and World cinema”. This, however, does not make Wymer’s portrayal a panegyric. He is quite aware of the irritating contradictions in Jarman’s life and art – his traditionalist iconoclasm, his elitist rejection of authority, his lyrical anger, his irreverent erudition, his mix of ‘camp’ humour and sexual aggression, his love of colour and home-movie filmmaking as well as his Platonic distrust of images. Wymer admirably succeeds in demonstrating the extent to which Jarman, who died of AIDS-related infections in 1994, was idiosyncratically shaped not just by the queer (rather than gay, as Wymer persuasively argues) movement and punk iconoclasm, but also by the Western canon, Renaissance art and alchemy as well as an ingrained Englishness. However, Wymer’s attempts in the first chapter to find echoes of Jarman in contemporary cultural products from numerous adaptations of Renaissance drama to R.E.M. videos and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ have an air of contrived overemphasis. Wymer’s book is indebted to Jarman’s own approach to cinema in that he clearly separates art cinema from film as commerce (in spite of Jarman’s forays into pop videos for the Smiths, the Pet Shop Boys or Marianne Faithfull, 30).

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