War Requiem

Year of Release:  1989
Director:  Derek Jarman
Screenplay:  Derek Jarman, based on the musical piece War Requiem by Benjamin Britten
Starring:  Laurence Olivier, Nathaniel Parker, Tilda Swinton, Sean Bean, Nigel Terry, Patricia Hayes, Owen Teale, Jodie Graber, Spencer Leigh
Running Time:  92 minutes
Genre:  Experimental, war

Tended by a nurse (Swinton), an elderly soldier (Olivier) is lost in dreams and memories.  This is an entirely dialogue-free film, the only speech we hear is Olivier reciting the poem "Strange Meeting" by Wilfred Owen in voice-over in the film's prologue.  The film features dramatised segments with Nathaniel Parker as Wilfred Owen, visions of home and family in grainy Super 8, and vintage newsreel footage of mostly World War I, and other more recent conflicts including World War II, Vietnam and Afghanistan, and I would warn you that the film does feature some graphic and disturbing documentary footage of wartime violence.  All we hear is a 1963 performance of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, which inspired the film.  While this is a difficult film, and full of distinctive esoteric images, particularly strong on religious and homoerotic imagery, this does have a strong theme about war, and works almost as a silent film.  It is also surprisingly emotional, and you don't have to share Jarman's unique vision to appreciate it.  This was Laurence Olivier's final acting role.

Sean Bean in War Requiem

The Last of England

Year of Release:  1987
Director:  Derek Jarman
Screenplay:  Derek Jarman
Starring:  Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry, Spencer Leigh, Jonathan Philips, 'Spring' Mark Adley
Running Time:  87 minutes
Genre:  Experimental

This plotless, experimental film is a kind of collage of sound and images exploring Jarman's feelings about the decay of Britain during the 1980s, which he believed was increasingly homophobic and repressive.  The film mixes Jarman's old home movies, new footage shot in shaky hand held, and more documentary style footage.  The sound track mixes classical music, punk, folk and features performers such as Simon Turner, Marianne Faithful and Diamanda Galás.  This is a difficult film to really enjoy.  It's inaccessible, and strangely dated.  This is a "state of the nation" film, and it is about the 1980s for a 1980s audience, and really if you are unfamiliar with the political and social scene in '80s Britain then it will be even less accessible.  Jarman creates some starling and provocative imagery and some sequences are really dynamic, however a lot of the film is baffling.  There are repeated grainy images of urban wastelands, and derelict housing and industrial estates, Tilda Swinton tears a wedding dress she is wearing on a beach with fires burning, two soldiers make love on a Union Jack, civilians are gunned down by masked gunmen, there is a bizarre sequence that plays like a rock video, and Nigel terry sonorous voice over reads from T. S. Elliot's "The Hollow Men" and Allen Ginsberg's "Howl".   It is certainly a work of art, which I don't think was ever intended to be "enjoyable".  I found it infuriating, provocative, occasionally brilliant and often dull.

 Tilda Swinton in The Last of England

Caravaggio

Year:  1986
Director:  Derek Jarman
Screenplay:  Derek Jarman and Suso Cecchi d'Amico, from a story by Nicholas Ward-Jackson
Starring:  Nigel Terry, Sean Bean, Tilda Swinton, Spencer Leigh, Michael Gough
Running Time:  93 minutes
Genre:  Biography, drama

Towards the end of his life, celebrated Seventeenth Century painter Michelangelo da Caravaggio (Terry) reflects on his eventful life, from his youth as a violent hustler and street artist to his rise to fame under the patronage of Cardinal Del Monte (Gough).  Caravaggio becomes known for his skill as an artist and notorious for his habit of using people from the street as models for his mostly religious paintings, as well as his habit of sleeping with many of his models, both men and women.  His reflections focus on his relationships with thuggish street fighter Ranuccio (Bean) and Ranuccio's girlfriend Lena (Swinton), who both become his models and his muse. 

Acclaimed British director Derek Jarman worked for seven years to make a film of the life of the legendary painter Caravaggio, and the original idea was something much closer to the conventional movie biopic to be shot on location in Italy with a fairly large budget.  However, the budget fell through at the last minute and Jarman was forced to scale back his plans quite considerably.  The film ended up being shot entirely in a studio in London.  Possibly as a result of this, the film never aims at an authentic recreation of 17th Century Italy.  Instead it kind of exists in a surreal twilight zone somewhere between the world of Caravaggio and the world of 1980s London.  There are numorous deliberate anachronisms in the film: characters wear items of modern dress, merchants do their accounts on pocket calculators, an art critic writes venomous reviews on a portable typewriter and Ranuccio works on a motorbike among others.  However the film is visually startling.  The look of the film attempts to replicate the look and feel of Caravggio's paintings with striking success.  It creates it's own world that is both dreamlike and strongly vibrant and physical.  The performances are very good, if occasionally overly theatrical.  This film marks the movie debut of Tilda Swinton, who went on to do several more films with Jarman, as did Sean Bean.  Derek Jarman was a painter himself and the film presents a striking account of the art world.  Rarely do biopics of an artist focus so strongly on the actual painting of the works themselves.  This film is probably Derak Jarman's finest film and certainly his most accessible.  It's well worth checking out.

Nigel Terry and Sean Bean fight it out in Caravaggio