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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 174 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 174, April 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Kevin Ovenden, in his obituary of Derek Jarman (March SR), is right that the overwhelmingly gay content of Jarman’s work meant that it ‘remained largely ghettoised’. Kevin is also right in saying that as a result of this ghettoisation Jarman ‘could offer no coherent alternative society’. However, despite this, his critiques of capitalist society, both past and contemporary, were often astounding.
Jarman was a visual artist as well as a film maker. His montage piece, Imperial Dreams – Material Nightmares, which has a picture of Queen Victoria beneath broken glass and symbolic moths, not only borrows language and concepts from Marxism, but also cuts against the traditional ‘Englishness’ to which Jarman himself aspired.
Kevin states that Jarman’s films ‘often became quite impenetrable’. However, even at his most obscure in content (The Garden) and in form (Blue), he always managed to be powerfully meaningful – for example in the absolutely horrifying scene in The Garden in which cops tar and feather two gay lovers.
Jarman was not, of course, a revolutionary socialist, but neither was he a narrow gay separatist. Indeed, only his Aids condition prevented him from speaking at the Socialist Workers Party’s Marxism 92 event.
As Kevin Ovenden says, Derek Jarman despised the Tories. It was, therefore, quite stomach turning to read David Mellor’s ‘salute’ to Jarman in the Guardian. Mellor boasted of spending an ‘absorbing half hour’ by his sick bed. All this proves is that Jarman’s chief fault was a tendency to be too polite. In his last film, Blue, he makes perfectly clear what he thinks of Mellor and his kind: ‘Charity has always allowed the uncaring to appear to care ... so the rich and powerful who fucked us over once fuck us over again and get it both ways.’
Derek Jarman was as artistically progressive as he was politically. Now that he has gone we must defend his work from the accusation that it was too obscure to become truly successful. His work was sidelined by a homophobic society which knew no other way of dealing with his commitment to gay liberation. After all, anyone capable of master works as accessible as The Tempest and Caravaggio can’t be accused of persistent obscurity.
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Mark Brown |
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