Separation

Year of Release:  1968 (produced 1967)

Director:  Jack Bond

Screenplay:  Jane Arden

Starring:  Jane Arden, David de Keyser, Ann Lynn, Iain Quarrier, Terence De Marney

Running Time:  93 minutes

Genre:  Experimental drama

London:  Jane (Arden) is married, but carrying on an affair with a younger man (Quarrier).  As her marriage collapses, scenes from her past, present and potential future are revealed along with her dreams and fantasies.

Written by and starring Welsh poet, actress, scriptwriter and director Jane Arden, and directed by her then partner Jack Bond, this experimental film portrays the inner life of a woman in a series of fragmented scenes.  Largely shot in crisp monochrome, interspersed with brief surreal dream sequences in vivid colour, this demands a lot from the viewer.  The dialogue is often enigmatic, with phrases frequently being repeated throughout the film in various permutations.  This is is in many ways a product of the Swinging Sixties, with the Procol Harum soundtrack, trips along Portobello Road and meals at a cool restaurant where the clientele includes Michael York, and James Bond composer John Barry and Jane Birkin are sent packing by the police before they can even get out of their car.  However the blandly pretty suburban streets, brutalist high rises, sterile offices and swimming baths have not aged, neither has it's bleak presentation of marital and mental breakdown.  The film is visually striking with inventive camera work, and memorable imagery, but it's Jane Arden who is the most compelling thing about the film.  It is something of a feminist film depicting a woman's mental landscape.  This is a challenging and often disturbing film, but there are frequent flashes of surreal humour.  Arden and Bond would collaborate on two subsequent films The Other Side of the Underneath (1972) and Anti-Clock (1979).

Iain Quarrier, Jane Arden and David de Keyser in Separation

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

The Blood of a Poet

Year: 1930
Director: Jean Cocteau
Screenplay: Jean Cocteau
Starring: Elizabeth 'Lee' Miller, Pauline Carton, Odette Talazacuez, Feral Benga, Enrique Rivero, Jean Desbordes
Running Time: 55 minutes
Genre: Surreal, experimental, fantasy

Summary: An artist (Rivero) paints a picture of a face and is startled when the painting's mouth starts moving, and frantically erases it. He is shocked when the mouth appears on the palm of his hand and begins moving. On the advice of a talking statue (Miller), the artist enters a mirror and finds himself in the "Hotel of Dramatic Lunacies" where he is forced to crawl along a gravity-defying, dreamlike corridor and peer through the keyholes of the doors that he passes at various bizarre tableaux.

Opinions: This was the debut film from French poet, artist, writer and film-maker Jean Cocteau and forms the first part of a trilogy loosely based on the Greek legend of Orpheus which continued with Orphee (1950) and Testament of Orpheus (1960). This is very much an experimental film and has very little in the way of a plot, instead it's a succession of various strange and surreal images and scenes which are sometimes striking, but how you feel about it will definitely depend on whether or not you can get onto Cocteau's wavelength. Although if you are interested in surrealist art and cinema, then you will probably want to check this out. It is not an enjoyable movie, but it is a powerful one and quite fascinating. It's pretty much as close as cinema could ever get to filming a dream. Due to rumours about an anti-Christian message in the film, and the furore over the Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali film L'Age d'Or the movie was hugely controversial in France and it's release was delayed for over a year.
This is strange, powerful, sometimes boring and frequently intriguing.



A typically strange image from The Blood of a Poet