Multimodal Derek Jarman

Even as an article in The New Yorker speculates on “What’s Happening to Reading?” in the age of AI, I have been reading as much as, if not more than, ever. Call it a reaction formation to the way AI is being forced on us through every device, tool, and institution. Picking up a book and reading is respite from, and maybe even throws a wrench in the works of, AI’s homogenizing effects on our capacity to think and create. But not to worry, this post isn’t about AI! I started writing my Reading Notes blog when I left Twitter as a way of continuing a practice of using social media as a space for annotating as I read. I am now doing that on Blue Sky even as I continue to explore the practice of reading notes in this blog.

So, in the spirit of reading more not less, expansively not reductively, and to kick off my redesigned website during Pride month, I thought I would offer my latest Reading Notes post on Derek Jarman’s work. My title “Multimodal Derek Jarman” foregrounds Jarman’s diverse, multimodal practices of art and politics, which I have immersed myself in over the past month. It also intentionally echoes the phrase “Queer Derek Jarman” used on a banner announcing an exhibition of his work at the Manchester City Art Gallery (now Manchester City Gallery) in 1992 (Figure 1). On a trip to the UK several weeks ago, I picked up Jarman’s last journals, Smiling in Slow Motion, covering a period from May 1991 to a last brief entry on his birthday on January 31 just weeks before his death of AIDS on February 19, 1994. I bought the book at an independent bookstore in Rye, East Sussex, not far from Prospect Cottage, Jarman’s seaside retreat and garden in Dungeness. My reading notes are also meant to be multimodal and transversal, demonstrating how reading Jarman’s journals leads to his other work—films, paintings, gardening, and politics, which, I argue, together articulate a formally complex illness aesthetics and politics.

I want to begin with that show in Manchester in 1992. In his journals, Jarman writes about the show, which he first proposed might be called Shipwrecked, as a metaphor for the experience of living with HIV. Jarman is initially rather contemptuous of the gallery, which he calls a “cesspit at the heart of Manchester” (79). When I read this comment, I felt a little offended on behalf of the gallery, which has long been one of my favorite places in Manchester, since I first visited the city in 1994 when I was doing an MA in Gender Studies at Lancaster University. I realize only now that this was just two years after Jarman’s Queer show there. It’s heartening to read how Jarman’s views on the gallery changes, and he ends up completely charmed by the exuberant welcome he receives from the people of Manchester. He writes, “The Victorian palazzo which is the City Art Gallery bore a huge banner which proclaimed: Queer – Derek Jarman. This is surely a world first for civic gay pride. The gallery looked splendid—all the large pictures we have painted during the last months are up, as well as the little landscapes and black paintings that were in Glasgow” (127). He describes how “gallery goers flooded in” to the show’s opening reception, filling the gallery space within 15 minutes of the doors opening. After the reception, he and a group of old and new friends go dancing “at the sweetest queer nightspot,” and he enthusiastically recommends Manchester’s “great red light district” (127). His journal entry documenting the opening of “Queer Derek Jarman” at Manchester City Art Gallery concludes with genuine affection, “Everywhere I go people come up and say ‘Hello Derek’—it really is friendlier here. By the end of the evening I was exhausted but very happy” (127).

Figure 1: Manchester City Art Gallery, Queer Derek Jarman banners, 1992; black and white photo by Howard Sooley

Thirty years later in 2021, Manchester Art Gallery hosted a retrospective of Jarman’s work called Derek Jarman Protest! In a piece on the significance of the two shows at the same place across time, appropriately called “Queer (1992) and Protest! (2021),” Fiona Corridan, Curator of Art and Design at the Manchester Art Gallery, explains that the later show “aimed to present Jarman’s many ways of working as a continuous flow; to consider how one practice informed another, how he fused his knowledge of tradition, myth and magic with new forms of expression and storytelling” (70). I want to draw out the links here—between the political themes of the two shows in Manchester (queer and protest!) and what Corridan describes as the continuous flow across forms and modalities and between the past and present and into the future (now and beyond). We see this continuous flow again exemplified in the creation of the Derek Jarman Pocket Park in front of Manchester Art Gallery in 2022. On the Pocket Park website, the collaborative project is described this way: “Manchester Art Gallery, volunteers from the Pride In Ageing programme at LGBT Foundation and artist Juliet Davis Drufayard worked together with landscape architects Exterior Architecture to create this public garden. The space is inspired by artist, gay rights activist and gardener Derek Jarman’s celebrated garden in Dungeness, Kent, as well as the life experiences of our over 50s LGBTQ+ communities in Greater Manchester.” My partner and I visited the Pocket Park in August 2022, on what was my first trip to the UK in three years due to the pandemic. In a post on IG (Figure 2), I noted the serendipity of discovering the Pocket Park project at the same time as V happened to be reading Modern Nature, a gift from me. She literally had the book in her bag when we decided to check out what was on at the gallery. In the Manchester Art Gallery gift shop that day, I bought At Your Own Risk (1992), described by Jarman as “a series of introductions to matters and agendas unfinished” (4), and Chroma (1994), his meditation on color written as he was going blind from cytomegalovirus, an opportunistic infection and complication of AIDS. He discusses working on both these formally innovative essays in Smiling in Slow Motion. For me, they are like literary gardens—a cultivated and wild mix of prose and poetry, history and theory, social analysis and memory work.

I began reading Smiling in Slow Motion on our flight home from the UK at the beginning of June (Figure 3). The flight was nearly empty, as Trump’s short-sighted and cruel immigration policies have understandably deterred Brits from visiting the US. In his moving introduction to Jarman’s journals, writer and theatre director Neil Bartlett notes that, at the time the journals begin in 1991, Jarman had been living with HIV/AIDS publicly for 5 years, having been diagnosed in 1986. Bartlett writes, “The significance and bravery of that decision is hard to recapture” (viii). I agree with Barlett that it is crucial that we return to this earlier time to recall and recapture the bravery of Jarman and others. This has become even more urgent considering Trump’s aggressively regressive policies that have cut funding for programs working to prevent, treat, and destigmatize HIV/AIDS in the US and abroad, and have rolled back rights for LGBTQ+ people, including the right to gender-affirming care for trans and nonbinary folks. Jarman’s journals document in real time the huge toll of HIV/AIDS on the LGBTQ+ community, and Bartlett points to what he calls Jarman's “verbal reliquaries,” vignettes about Jarman’s numerous friends and acquaintances who have died of AIDS. Bartlett describes how these vignettes stand out in the journals as a concerted practice of witnessing to the devastating toll of AIDS: “he slows down or even brings to a halt entirely the day-to-day welter of events in order to record the details of how he met this person, who they were, what they gave to his life and what life subsequently did to them” (xiv). Bartlett’s phrase “verbal reliquaries” recalls, or perhaps we might say, anticipates, another recent AIDS memoir, Robert Glück’s About Ed (2023), which pays tribute to his once lover and longtime friend artist Ed Aulerich-Sugai, who like Jarman died of AIDS in February 1994. As I wrote in an earlier Reading Notes post, Glück wrote and assembled the many fragments that make up About Ed over the course of several decades, and he is explicit that the book is a kind of tomb: “I started this book two decades ago, so now it has turned into a ritual to prepare for death, and an obsession to put between death and myself. I want a tomb to keep up appearances in the face of death. Will I occupy the tomb I have been building for Ed?” (182)

Multimodality is about experimentation and collaboration, and these practices are at the heart of all Jarman’s work. In Smiling in Slow Motion, Jarman documents a constant to-ing and fro-ing between his apartment and studio in London and Prospect Cottage, his house and garden at Dungeness, which he buys in 1987 shortly after testing positive for HIV in December 1986. In an essay on Jarman as both gardener and artist, Marco Martella writes of this “pivotal” time and place for Jarman, “During the eight years he had left to live—this ‘borrowed time,’ as he called it, this ‘reprieve’ that life granted him—Prospect Cottage became the pivotal point of his existence. The more virulent his illness became, the more, it would seem, his artistic activity intensified: films, painting, writing, set design, video clips” (118). Thus, illness aesthetics and politics are intimately linked in Jarman’s work as it cuts across different forms and modalities in the “borrowed time” between his diagnosis of and death from AIDS.

Jarman’s work has a centrifugal force for me. As much as it captures his life and work, it also moves outward. I chase down references. I study his paintings. I look up the people and cultural and political events he mentions. I even experiment with drawing Derek Jarman. I have a terrible line and most of my drawings are out of proportion, but I like how I manage to capture his dark and heavily browed eyes in one drawing (Figure 4).

During the time I was reading Smiling in Slow Motion, I also watched three of Jarman’s films, which he discusses in the journal—The Garden (1990), Wittgenstein (1993), and, finally, his last film, Blue (1993). Although it was released the year before the journals begin, Jarman describes a visit in July 1991 to a film festival in Moscow with his partner HB at which The Garden was screened (this is of course just six months before the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991). At the film festival, Jarman is “presented with a citation from the Moscow Film Club for their favourite film of the festival” (38). Jarman explains how momentous this is: “It’s still illegal to be gay in the Soviet Union—for most of the audience this was the first time they had seen a film that had touched the subject” (38). His hosts tell him, matter-of-factly, “if [he] had been born here [he] would probably have spent most of [his] life in lunatic asylums like [Soviet film director and screenwriter Sergei] Parajanov until, like him, [he] died young” (38). The Garden features Jarman’s garden at Dungeness, with the nearby nuclear reactor as eerie backdrop to mythical scenes of cruelty and violence against a young queer couple (a reference to the rise of gay bashing in the 1980s and 1990s as a sort of contemporary crucifixion), as well as scenes of intimacy and care even in the face of fascistic violence. As with many of Jarman’s films, The Garden is painterly in style, driven by images more than narrative, and the composition and color palette create an abstract, otherworldly quality to many scenes (Figure 5).

Jarman’s last two films—Wittgenstein and Blue—are formally different from each other, but they both explore multimodality, in Wittgenstein between the cinema and philosophy, and in Blue between sight and sound. In her moving introduction to Chroma, queer Scottish writer Ali Smith calls Wittgenstein and Blue Jarman’s “two most notably original films,” and she argues that they both explore “a philosophy of the image and a possible imagery for philosophy” (ix). The story behind the making of Wittgenstein is amusing, as is the film itself. I didn’t realize that literary theorist and cultural critic Terry Eagleton had written the original script for Wittgenstein, which was produced by Tariq Ali for Channel Four. As Jarman explains in his journals, he changed Eagleton’s script quite a bit, with the intention of making the film more humorous as a way into Wittgenstein’s philosophical concepts and methods. According to Jarman, Eagleton was incensed by the changes, insisting that Jarman’s film was “full of errors.” In his journals, Jarman skewers Eagleton, noting bitchily, “In my life I have never met such uncouth and surly bad manners” (246). He calls Eagleton a “literary dinosaur” and contrasts his own collaborative ethos of filmmaking to the ego-driven work of academics like Eagleton who are “locked in combat.” For Jarman, collaboration is connected to queerness: “We make the films sparkle by working together—everyone throwing ideas and thoughts into the crucible, perhaps being queer taught us to bury ego” (246). Here, collaboration, multimodality, and queerness are, to quote Wittgenstein in Wittgenstein, “practical ways of doing things” that lead beyond the ego into different forms of living.

Smiling in Slow Motion documents the interconnectedness between the making of his final films, Wittgenstein and Blue, the research for and writing of his final book, Chroma, and the increasing debilitation from AIDS that saps his energy and steals his sight. Smith calls Blue a “leap in film form” and Chroma a “leap in book form” (xii), and I contend that the experience of illness creates the conditions of possibility for Jarman to make these formal leaps. Blue is sui generis. The viewer watches a long, continuous take of a blue screen (Figure 6), with Jarman’s voice, music, and other recorded sounds documenting the “blue funk” of illness and the darkness of blindness closing in from the periphery. Jarman repeats twice the instructions given at an eye examination, like an incantation:

Look left

Look down

Look up

Look right

Yet, even as these words instruct us in where and how to look, the film offers another way of seeing that is neither straightforward nor clinical, but multimodal, collaborative, and queer.

Jarman states unsentimentally, “I shall not win the battle against the virus—in spite of the slogans like ‘Living with AIDS,’” and he refuses the solace of the AIDS quilt, because even if “awareness is heightened by this…something else is lost. A sense of reality drowned in theatre.” This section ends with the couplet, “Thinking blind, becoming blind,” which Blue envisions, paradoxically, as a voice from the blue without the compensatory comfort of heightened awareness or theatrical performance. A small gesture, like these reading notes:

“I place a delphinium, Blue, upon your grave.”