Derek (2008)
78 mins, Colour Digital Video, Sound
Derek will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival 2008.From Sebastiane (1976) to Blue (1992), Derek Jarman’s films constantly interrogated time and art, and epitomised his own era. He was a painter, part of that moment that made sixties London a capital of the art world. He was a film-maker, perhaps the single most crucial figure of British independent cinema through the seventies, eighties and nineties. He lived as a gay man surfing the joys of Gay Liberation and the sorrows of Aids. He lived as a participant observer, noting with pen or camera all that passed before him - from punk to Thatcher, from Hampstead Heath to film premiere.
Now those images will serve to place his art in his time, to produce a fascinating history that we can put to use. As well as the feature films and Super 8 films, which span three decades, there are the extensive video clips he recorded from the early seventies, for artists from the Smiths to the Pet Shop Boys, and from television to film festivals in Japan, Berlin and Cologne. There are also images of Derek, as he erupted into the viewfinder of the news media. This unique perspective will provide a counterpoint, as his own images are juxtaposed with the images of the history that generated them.
At the centre of the film, the thread from which it is all woven, is the time capsule that Derek left. Before his death, and in the midst of that great creative period that would produce Edward II, Caravaggio and Blue, he recorded a day long interview in 1990 with Colin MacCabe. It is his message in a bottle, a survey of his life from the point of view of his death, a talisman for the future.
The present is represented by a letter written to Derek by Tilda Swinton and read by her as a voiceover which provides a beguiling narrative thread throughout the film, bringing his life closer to a new generation, a new audience.
Using the skills he has accumulated in a career which ranges from narrative feature to video art, from museum installation to television documentary, Isaac Julien’s new film will combine document with fiction, experiment with narrative to produce an enthralling work of art.
www.derekthemovie.com
Link to Guardian news article: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/news/story/0,,2182556,00.html
Derek is currently available on DVD in the UK from the BFI, North America from Kino and Australia from Madman Entertainment.
To order from the BFI film store, click here.
www.madman.com.au
www.kino.com