(Edited Press Release) - The new exhibition in the Kunsthalle Zürich
“Derek Jarman. Brutal Beauty” is dedicated to the British artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942 - 1994). The exhibition is curated by Isaac Julien who worked with Jarman for many years.
While “
Derek Jarman. Brutal Beauty” aims to present a representative overview of Jarman’s creative output, it is not conceived as a classical retrospective. Instead, Julien is more concerned with making it possible to experience Jarman’s interdisciplinary approach and with refocusing critical attention on the work itself.
Derek Jarman was one of the outstanding representatives of British Independent Cinema of the period 1970 – 1990. However, although he was known to a large audience mainly as a filmmaker, he saw himself as an artist, in whose interdisciplinary and highly autobiographical oeuvre film, painting, stage design and writing assumed equal prominence. In his tireless struggle for gay rights and AIDS education and awareness, Jarman’s main priority was “to unite Art with Life and vice versa” (Isaac Julien).
The exhibition opens with a selection of paintings from the 1980s and 1990s. The double projection, which was developed for the Kunsthalle Zürich and provides the basic material for Isaac Julien’s documentary film
Derek (2008), offers an introduction to the work and life of Derek Jarman. It is based on an interview with Jarman recorded by writer and producer Colin McCabe in 1990. The voiceover is narrated by the actor Tilda Swinton, who appeared in many of Jarman’s films including
Caravaggio (1986),
The Last of England (1988) and
Edward II (1991). Tilda Swinton reads excerpts from a letter she wrote to Jarman after his death. In Derek, the interview, narrative and excerpts from Jarman’s feature films and super 8 films are interwoven with relevant contemporary news footage and media material focusing on the political events of the time to form a coherent and impressive work; in this way the film conveys an overview of Jarman’s biography from the perspective of his imminent death. At the same time, insight is gained into the England of the period 1960 - 1990 through the documentation of socially volatile topics such as the punk movement, the protests by intellectuals against the government of Margaret Thatcher, the struggle for gay rights and the AIDS crisis.
The installation is juxtaposed with a still life image by Isaac Julien which were taken inside Jarman’s house in Dungeness.
The exhibition ends with Jarman’s film
Blue (1993), a moving and harrowing work by an artist who was about to go blind. In this his last film, the screen remains blue for the entire duration of the work - an homage to the French painter Yves Klein, whose Blue symbolised serenity and contemplation for Jarman. The soundtrack of the film is a text written and spoken by Jarman, in which he artistically explores and reproduces life and his experience with AIDS.
Between these two central works, Isaac Julien presents a selection of rarely shown films from the super 8 archive of Jarman’s artistic estate, e.g.
Imagining October (1984) and
In the Shadow of the Sun (1980). Having studied painting and stage design at the Slade School of Art in London, Jarman started working with super 8 as far back as the early 1970s and experimented with this medium up to the early 1980s. Jarman, who saw himself primarily as a painter throughout his life, achieves a painterly feel in the way in which he deals with light, colour, composition, abstraction, alienation and staging.
The work
It Happened by Chance Redux (2008) is a ten-screen projection composed of footage which Jarman found on the floor of his editing suite. The installation is a re-working of
It Happened by Chance (around 1976). The former was curated jointly by Isaac Julien and James Mackay, the owner of the archive, and incorporates Jarman’s most important super 8 films. The sculptural arrangement of the screens in the space is intended to evoke formally the Petersburg hanging of the Black Paintings, which were exhibited in the Richard Salmon Gallery in London in the late 1980s.
A trailer of Terence Davies' new film, Of Time and the City is available here. Davies' homage to his native city of Liverpool is redolent of the city film genre epitomised by Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) and, to a certain degree, Dziga Vertov's The Man With a Movie Camera (1929). The blurb describes the film as a "meditation on time, memory and mortality" (heard that one before?) and it opens in the UK on Friday, 31 October 2008.
There's no better way to become a filmmaker than making a short film. That's how most directors get started and, with low-cost digital technology, it's never been easier from a tecnnical point of view to make a film on a shoestring budget.
One of Kamera Books' latest releases is an insightful book about gay cinema called Out At The Movies: A History of Gay Cinema, penned by Steven Paul Davies, who kindly agreed to do a Q&A with us. And guess what? YouTube has a great little number that includes excerpts from many of the films mentioned in the book. Enjoy it ...
Film lovers in London have noticed that the number of shops that specialise in their favourite subject matter have been dwindling over time. So it's fantastic news to hear that our mates at Wallflower Press have opened a shop to fill in the gap. Cinéphilia starts trading today and we wish them the best of luck. Located at 97 Sclater St, just off the centre of the universe, that is, Brick Lane, it sounds very promising indeed. Pop around and get your film culture fix.
Film artists Anthea Kennedy and Ian Wiblin have written a piece for Kamera with an account of their collaboration to the Twenty Puccini omnibus film project fostered by the Lucca Film Festival in Italy due to start next Thursday.
All you need to know about the American New Wave, which includes those much-loved, quirky films by Richard Linklater, Spike Jones, Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, David O. Russell, Sophia Coppola ... is in Kamera Books' new title on the movement, Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers - An Excursion Into the American New Wave. Author Derek Hill chatted to us about it. Unmissable...
It's 1994 and he is still a virgin, to his defensive embarrassment; he's into alternative hip-hop and dresses like a skater. His parents fight a lot, he won't upgrade to CDs, and makes really good mix tapes with all his cassettes. He's going off to college, and everything is going to change.
