Derek Jarman's angelic conversations

A comprehensive look at the work of Britain's independent and controversial director. Best known as an iconoclastic, wildly inventive filmmaker, Derek Jarman was also an author, painter, and landscape designer. Author Ellis considers Jarman's works to present a study of the life and career of one of the most provocative, engaged, and important artists of the twentieth century. He analyzes Jarman's films, including Caravaggio, Jubilee, Edward II, Blue, and Sebastiane, in relation to Jarman's 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. 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--From publisher description.

Introduction: getting history wrong -- Artistic and sexual revolutions. Situationism and other avant-gardes ; The gay liberation front -- Liberation, space, and the early films. Reconfiguring "home" in the super-8s ; Gay liberation theology in Sebastiane -- The Elizabethan future. Jubilee and the punk nation ; Punk heritage in The tempest -- The Caravaggio years. Imagining change : Imagining October ; Homoerotic countermythologies in The angelic conversation ; Caravaggio : gay history and the scripts ; Caravaggio and the art of the past -- Thatcherism, AIDS, and war. The last of England and the landscape of loss ; War requiem and the army of lovers -- Time and the garden. The garden at Prospect Cottage ; Gardening history in Modern nature ; Histories of the fall in The garden -- Blindness and insight. Edward II : queer Gothic ; Wittgenstein and the queer life ; Queer vision in Blue -- Coda : the raft of the Medusa.