Serpentine Gallery Film Programme: It’s A Sin: The Films and Inspirations of Derek Jarman
27 February 2008 21:52 Filed in: Screenings
Serpentine
Gallery Film Programme: It’s A Sin:
The films and inspirations of Derek Jarman
On the occasion of the Serpentine Gallery exhibition Derek Jarman: Brutal Beauty curated by Isaac Julien, It’s a Sin, is a season of feature-length films by Derek Jarman as well as films that influenced his practice. In addition an exciting short film programme has been selected by installation artist and film-maker Tina Keane featuring works by Jarman’s contemporaries and younger film-makers. Screened at The Gate Picturehouse, Notting Hill, Greenwich Picturehouse and The Ritzy Cinema, Brixton, the series celebrates the work and legacy of this pioneering film-maker.
Tickets available from: www.picturehouses.co.uk and 0871 704 2068
On the occasion of the Serpentine Gallery exhibition Derek Jarman: Brutal Beauty curated by Isaac Julien, It’s a Sin, is a season of feature-length films by Derek Jarman as well as films that influenced his practice. In addition an exciting short film programme has been selected by installation artist and film-maker Tina Keane featuring works by Jarman’s contemporaries and younger film-makers. Screened at The Gate Picturehouse, Notting Hill, Greenwich Picturehouse and The Ritzy Cinema, Brixton, the series celebrates the work and legacy of this pioneering film-maker.
Tickets available from: www.picturehouses.co.uk and 0871 704 2068
For more information on
the exhibition Derek Jarman: Brutal
Beauty curated by Isaac Julien, 23
February – 12 April 2008, please see www.serpentinegallery.org
10am-6pm daily, admission free
Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens
London, W2 3XA
T: 020 7402 6075
Gate Picturehouse Programme:
12 pm Sunday 24 February: The Last of England (18)
Representing Derek Jarman’s response to Thatcherite Britain, The Last of England presents a Blakean vision of London, where terrorists execute prisoners, soldiers indulge in brutal sex and desperate figures emerge from the shadows.
One of Jarman's most experimental works, The Last of England is an intensely personal vision, which manages to be at once apocalyptic and lyrical with a climactic sequence featuring Jarman's frequent collaborator, Tilda Swinton.
Director: Derek Jarman, UK, 1987, 87 mins, 35 mm
12 pm Sunday 2 March: Ecology (advisory certificate 15)
With an introduction by the director, Sarah Turner
The London preview of Sarah Turner's look at the unsettling side of family takes the themes of destruction and renewal as metaphors in her visually compelling new feature Ecology. Located somewhere between meditation and dream, Ecology is a film in three parts that are uniquely designed to be screened in any order, fusing an exploration of narrative with Turner's dedication to formal experimentation.
Director: Sarah Turner, UK, 2007, 97mins, DIGI BETA
8 pm Monday 3 March
SPECIAL SCREENING: Jubilee (18)
Often credited as being Britain’s first ever punk movie, Derek Jarman’s Jubilee is an unequivocally powerful, arresting and irreverent film that transports Queen Elizabeth I through time to witness the future disintegration of her kingdom, as marauding female punks roam a violent landscape. A thrilling synergy of sight and sound, featuring a score by Brian Eno and performances by luminaries such as Adam Ant and Richard O’Brien, it remains amongst Jarman’s most committed and fiery works.
Director: Derek Jarman, UK, 1978, 104 mins, 35 mm
12 pm Sunday 9 March: War Requiem (PG)
A cinematic visualisation of Benjamin Britten's celebrated oratorio featuring live-action and documentary war footage from the 20th century. Jarman employs his trademark painterly and non-narrative style to explore visually the requiem based on the poetry of Wilfred Owen, who was killed at the very end of World War I. Attacking the screen with a rhythmic onslaught of images, which matches the emotional pitch of the music, the film culminates in the director's trademark bombed-out post-apocalyptic landscapes.
Director: Derek Jarman, UK, 1989, 92 mins, 35 mm
12 pm Sunday 16 March: The Mirror (U)
The Mirror unfolds with flashbacks, historical footage and original poetry to illustrate the reminiscences of a dying man about his childhood during World War II, his adolescence and a painful divorce in his family. The story interweaves reflections about Russian history and society.
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky, Russia, 1975, 108 mins, 35 mm
12 pm Sunday 23 March: The Wizard of Oz (U)
As one of the most powerful dream worlds created on celluloid, The Wizard of Oz was a particular favourite of Derek Jarman, influencing his ideas about the possibility of cinema. The vibrant layers of music, set and colour, along with the powerful performance of a young Judy Garland, was a pivotal experience for the film-maker.
Director: Victor Flemming, USA, 1939, 101 mins, 35 mm
12 pm Sunday 30 March: Le Testament d’Orphée (15)
The last film made by Cocteau is a visual summing up of the poet's own life. Gazing one after the other into the multiple mirrors of his loves and his works, the film re-creates his personal myth.
Director: Jean Cocteau, France, 1960, 83 mins, 35 mm
This film is accompanied by the short film Un Chien Andalou (15)
With its notorious opening sequence and succession of outlandish and arresting images, Un Chien Andalou has always shocked and bemused. Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel claimed that their first collaboration on film was merely a succession of jokes dictated purely by dream logic, which was resistant to rational analysis. But its satirical anti-clericalism has always been obvious, and later audiences have been consistent in interpreting the film as a tragi-comic dream of desire and its inevitable frustration.
Director: Luis Buñuel, France, 1928, 25 mins,
12 pm Sunday 6 April
Shorts Programme 1— a selection of short films by Derek Jarman’s contemporaries
Advisory Certificate For Programme (15)
Absurd
Absurd is a collage of Maybury’s earlier work with new footage, expressing and reflecting his experience of the past decade. Like his earlier films, it weaves a rich tapestry of decadent, erotic and personal imagery.
Director: John Mayury, UK, 1986, 5 mins, video, (transferred to BETA SP)
Kiss 25 Good Bye
Demonstration footage from 1991, featuring Derek Jarman.
Director: Steve Farrar, UK, 1991, 6 mins, 35 mm, (transferred to BETA SP)
Behind Closed Doors
Fragments of dreams, nightmares and memory are drawn together through landscape and natural sounds. The film references The Deposition, by Renaissance painter Raphael, and features Derek Jarman, Richard Heslop and Steve Farrer.
Director: Anna Thew, UK, 1988, 15 mins, 16mm and BETA SP
Degrees of Blindness
Focusing on the relationship of representation to position, the film’s assertion is that what we perceive is crucially dependent on what we are. This critical meditation on the modern city displays a technological landscape where everything appears free-floating in a shifting and disturbing territory.
Director: Cerith Wyn Evans, UK, 1988, 19 mins, video, (transferred to BETA SP)
Domestic Sanitation; Latex Glamour Rodeo
Documentation of part one of a live performance by Helen Chadwick, held in Brighton during the summer of 1976 when women were making and putting on prosthetic skin and fantasy costumes in an attempt to mock the glamour industry.
Director: Helen Chadwick, UK, 1976, 15 mins, Super-8, (transferred to BETA SP)
Christine Binnie and Jennifer Binnie
Documentary of a Super-8 performance from 1979-84, including Cerith Wyn Evans and Grayson Perry.
Director: Christine Binne and Jennifer Binnie, UK, DATE, 27 mins, DVD
12 pm Sunday 13 April
Shorts Programme 2: Derek Jarman’s Film Poetry of the Small Medium Lives On
Advisory Certificate for Programme (15)
Black Palms
A reference to cinema and its relationship with enchantments and magic. Milani’s film fuses illusions with hallucinations, using the absence and presence of a magician in front of the sea as an allegory of intimate sensations and the melancholy of past moments.
Director: Jacopo Miliani, Italy, 2007, 2 mins, DVD
The Storm
A car makes its way through the storm, lost in a recollection of memories.
Director: Tina Keane, UK, 2007, 1 min, DVD
Summerhouse
Filmed by a lake in Finland, the Summerhouse is a semi performative piece featuring squares of perspex and their reflection of the natural environment, both framing and dramatically contrasting its setting.
Director: Laura Buckle, Finland, 2007, 2 mins and 2 seconds, DVD
Swiss Plot
A visual diary of the passing moments of daily life using the languages of the artist's Gallic childhood and Anglo adulthood, as she travels back and forth to Switzerland to visit her sick mother. Avoiding any straightforward narrative intention, causation or chronological structure, the plot takes the form of a film fragment.
Director: Julia Brazel, UK, 2006, 4 mins and 38 seconds Super-8 (transferred onto DVD)
Empathy with Trees
A personal reflection on Anderson’s experience of school, which forms part of a series of script-led self-portraits.
Director: Seraphina Anderson, UK, 2006, 3 mins, BETA SP
Get Me a Mirror
A linear description of unfolding mental events through images of decaying femininity.
Directed by: Bonnie Camplin, UK, 2005, 5 mins 55 secs, BETA SP
This is not an AIDS advertisement
Artist and film-maker Isaac Julien’s short film looks at the survival of sexual desire during the height of society’s fears around AIDS. The pulsating soundtrack and hot-pink visual tinting places men as objects of desire in this unashamedly erotic and stylish video.
Director: Isaac Julien, UK, 1987, 11 mins, BETA SP
Loverfilm
Excerpts from the director’s journals and statute books of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Director: Michael Brynntrup, Germany, 1996, 22 mins, video, (transferred onto BETA SP)
Swan
A seductive look at a white swan preparing for flight, flexing and caressing, extending and folding its wings as if in preparation for a lengthy journey. At once both graceful and strong, the viewer becomes aware of the uncomfortable closeness to this creature and its underlying power.
Director: Alia Syed, UK, 1986, black and white, 4 mins, video, (transferred to BETA SP)
Assasin
An exploration of the archetypal character of the assassin in crime cinema. Taking as it starting point the plotting of a murder by a couple in love, the film creates a new text in which the binding effects of narrative have been dissolved. Part picture puzzle, part fragmented image-sequence the film operates as a form of inner speech, often disconnected and incomplete.
Director: Michael Maziere, UK, 2006, 10mins, video (transferred to BETA SP)
The Space Between
A shattering of time and space into shards of light. Featuring footage shot in India and reworked in the optical printer into a rigorous, flickering duality.
Director: Brad Butler & Karen Mirza, UK, 2005, 12 mins, 16mm and video
Paris – FRANPRIX
The unsolicited social and economic networks that surround a supermarket in the crumbling 20th arrondissement in Paris, become a site for looking at memory, respect, hope and despair as the product is followed from its 8 am bulk delivery to its 8 pm disposal and eventual consumption.
Director: Mark Aerial Waller, UK, 2003, 11 mins, video, (transferred to BETA SP)
Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton Programme
12 pm Sunday 30 March: Shorts Programme 1
12 pm Sunday 6 April: Caravaggio (18)
A powerful meditation on sexuality, criminality and art, Caravaggio brings together Derek Jarman's twin worlds of film and painting. A brilliant account of the controversial Italian painter caught between the demands of Church patronage and his own sexual desires, who eventually murders his lover and dies in exile.
Director: Derek Jarman, UK, 1986, 93 mins, 35 mm
12 pm Sunday 13 April: Last of England (18)
Director: Derek Jarman, UK 1987, 87 mins, 35 mm
Greenwich Picturehouse, Greenwich Programme
12 pm Sunday 23 March: Shorts Programme 2
12 pm Sunday 30 March: Caravaggio (18)
Director: Derek Jarman, UK, 1986, 93 mins, 35 mm
12 pm 6 April: Le Testament D’Orphée with the short film Un Chien Andalou
10am-6pm daily, admission free
Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens
London, W2 3XA
T: 020 7402 6075
Gate Picturehouse Programme:
12 pm Sunday 24 February: The Last of England (18)
Representing Derek Jarman’s response to Thatcherite Britain, The Last of England presents a Blakean vision of London, where terrorists execute prisoners, soldiers indulge in brutal sex and desperate figures emerge from the shadows.
One of Jarman's most experimental works, The Last of England is an intensely personal vision, which manages to be at once apocalyptic and lyrical with a climactic sequence featuring Jarman's frequent collaborator, Tilda Swinton.
Director: Derek Jarman, UK, 1987, 87 mins, 35 mm
12 pm Sunday 2 March: Ecology (advisory certificate 15)
With an introduction by the director, Sarah Turner
The London preview of Sarah Turner's look at the unsettling side of family takes the themes of destruction and renewal as metaphors in her visually compelling new feature Ecology. Located somewhere between meditation and dream, Ecology is a film in three parts that are uniquely designed to be screened in any order, fusing an exploration of narrative with Turner's dedication to formal experimentation.
Director: Sarah Turner, UK, 2007, 97mins, DIGI BETA
8 pm Monday 3 March
SPECIAL SCREENING: Jubilee (18)
Often credited as being Britain’s first ever punk movie, Derek Jarman’s Jubilee is an unequivocally powerful, arresting and irreverent film that transports Queen Elizabeth I through time to witness the future disintegration of her kingdom, as marauding female punks roam a violent landscape. A thrilling synergy of sight and sound, featuring a score by Brian Eno and performances by luminaries such as Adam Ant and Richard O’Brien, it remains amongst Jarman’s most committed and fiery works.
Director: Derek Jarman, UK, 1978, 104 mins, 35 mm
12 pm Sunday 9 March: War Requiem (PG)
A cinematic visualisation of Benjamin Britten's celebrated oratorio featuring live-action and documentary war footage from the 20th century. Jarman employs his trademark painterly and non-narrative style to explore visually the requiem based on the poetry of Wilfred Owen, who was killed at the very end of World War I. Attacking the screen with a rhythmic onslaught of images, which matches the emotional pitch of the music, the film culminates in the director's trademark bombed-out post-apocalyptic landscapes.
Director: Derek Jarman, UK, 1989, 92 mins, 35 mm
12 pm Sunday 16 March: The Mirror (U)
The Mirror unfolds with flashbacks, historical footage and original poetry to illustrate the reminiscences of a dying man about his childhood during World War II, his adolescence and a painful divorce in his family. The story interweaves reflections about Russian history and society.
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky, Russia, 1975, 108 mins, 35 mm
12 pm Sunday 23 March: The Wizard of Oz (U)
As one of the most powerful dream worlds created on celluloid, The Wizard of Oz was a particular favourite of Derek Jarman, influencing his ideas about the possibility of cinema. The vibrant layers of music, set and colour, along with the powerful performance of a young Judy Garland, was a pivotal experience for the film-maker.
Director: Victor Flemming, USA, 1939, 101 mins, 35 mm
12 pm Sunday 30 March: Le Testament d’Orphée (15)
The last film made by Cocteau is a visual summing up of the poet's own life. Gazing one after the other into the multiple mirrors of his loves and his works, the film re-creates his personal myth.
Director: Jean Cocteau, France, 1960, 83 mins, 35 mm
This film is accompanied by the short film Un Chien Andalou (15)
With its notorious opening sequence and succession of outlandish and arresting images, Un Chien Andalou has always shocked and bemused. Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel claimed that their first collaboration on film was merely a succession of jokes dictated purely by dream logic, which was resistant to rational analysis. But its satirical anti-clericalism has always been obvious, and later audiences have been consistent in interpreting the film as a tragi-comic dream of desire and its inevitable frustration.
Director: Luis Buñuel, France, 1928, 25 mins,
12 pm Sunday 6 April
Shorts Programme 1— a selection of short films by Derek Jarman’s contemporaries
Advisory Certificate For Programme (15)
Absurd
Absurd is a collage of Maybury’s earlier work with new footage, expressing and reflecting his experience of the past decade. Like his earlier films, it weaves a rich tapestry of decadent, erotic and personal imagery.
Director: John Mayury, UK, 1986, 5 mins, video, (transferred to BETA SP)
Kiss 25 Good Bye
Demonstration footage from 1991, featuring Derek Jarman.
Director: Steve Farrar, UK, 1991, 6 mins, 35 mm, (transferred to BETA SP)
Behind Closed Doors
Fragments of dreams, nightmares and memory are drawn together through landscape and natural sounds. The film references The Deposition, by Renaissance painter Raphael, and features Derek Jarman, Richard Heslop and Steve Farrer.
Director: Anna Thew, UK, 1988, 15 mins, 16mm and BETA SP
Degrees of Blindness
Focusing on the relationship of representation to position, the film’s assertion is that what we perceive is crucially dependent on what we are. This critical meditation on the modern city displays a technological landscape where everything appears free-floating in a shifting and disturbing territory.
Director: Cerith Wyn Evans, UK, 1988, 19 mins, video, (transferred to BETA SP)
Domestic Sanitation; Latex Glamour Rodeo
Documentation of part one of a live performance by Helen Chadwick, held in Brighton during the summer of 1976 when women were making and putting on prosthetic skin and fantasy costumes in an attempt to mock the glamour industry.
Director: Helen Chadwick, UK, 1976, 15 mins, Super-8, (transferred to BETA SP)
Christine Binnie and Jennifer Binnie
Documentary of a Super-8 performance from 1979-84, including Cerith Wyn Evans and Grayson Perry.
Director: Christine Binne and Jennifer Binnie, UK, DATE, 27 mins, DVD
12 pm Sunday 13 April
Shorts Programme 2: Derek Jarman’s Film Poetry of the Small Medium Lives On
Advisory Certificate for Programme (15)
Black Palms
A reference to cinema and its relationship with enchantments and magic. Milani’s film fuses illusions with hallucinations, using the absence and presence of a magician in front of the sea as an allegory of intimate sensations and the melancholy of past moments.
Director: Jacopo Miliani, Italy, 2007, 2 mins, DVD
The Storm
A car makes its way through the storm, lost in a recollection of memories.
Director: Tina Keane, UK, 2007, 1 min, DVD
Summerhouse
Filmed by a lake in Finland, the Summerhouse is a semi performative piece featuring squares of perspex and their reflection of the natural environment, both framing and dramatically contrasting its setting.
Director: Laura Buckle, Finland, 2007, 2 mins and 2 seconds, DVD
Swiss Plot
A visual diary of the passing moments of daily life using the languages of the artist's Gallic childhood and Anglo adulthood, as she travels back and forth to Switzerland to visit her sick mother. Avoiding any straightforward narrative intention, causation or chronological structure, the plot takes the form of a film fragment.
Director: Julia Brazel, UK, 2006, 4 mins and 38 seconds Super-8 (transferred onto DVD)
Empathy with Trees
A personal reflection on Anderson’s experience of school, which forms part of a series of script-led self-portraits.
Director: Seraphina Anderson, UK, 2006, 3 mins, BETA SP
Get Me a Mirror
A linear description of unfolding mental events through images of decaying femininity.
Directed by: Bonnie Camplin, UK, 2005, 5 mins 55 secs, BETA SP
This is not an AIDS advertisement
Artist and film-maker Isaac Julien’s short film looks at the survival of sexual desire during the height of society’s fears around AIDS. The pulsating soundtrack and hot-pink visual tinting places men as objects of desire in this unashamedly erotic and stylish video.
Director: Isaac Julien, UK, 1987, 11 mins, BETA SP
Loverfilm
Excerpts from the director’s journals and statute books of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Director: Michael Brynntrup, Germany, 1996, 22 mins, video, (transferred onto BETA SP)
Swan
A seductive look at a white swan preparing for flight, flexing and caressing, extending and folding its wings as if in preparation for a lengthy journey. At once both graceful and strong, the viewer becomes aware of the uncomfortable closeness to this creature and its underlying power.
Director: Alia Syed, UK, 1986, black and white, 4 mins, video, (transferred to BETA SP)
Assasin
An exploration of the archetypal character of the assassin in crime cinema. Taking as it starting point the plotting of a murder by a couple in love, the film creates a new text in which the binding effects of narrative have been dissolved. Part picture puzzle, part fragmented image-sequence the film operates as a form of inner speech, often disconnected and incomplete.
Director: Michael Maziere, UK, 2006, 10mins, video (transferred to BETA SP)
The Space Between
A shattering of time and space into shards of light. Featuring footage shot in India and reworked in the optical printer into a rigorous, flickering duality.
Director: Brad Butler & Karen Mirza, UK, 2005, 12 mins, 16mm and video
Paris – FRANPRIX
The unsolicited social and economic networks that surround a supermarket in the crumbling 20th arrondissement in Paris, become a site for looking at memory, respect, hope and despair as the product is followed from its 8 am bulk delivery to its 8 pm disposal and eventual consumption.
Director: Mark Aerial Waller, UK, 2003, 11 mins, video, (transferred to BETA SP)
Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton Programme
12 pm Sunday 30 March: Shorts Programme 1
12 pm Sunday 6 April: Caravaggio (18)
A powerful meditation on sexuality, criminality and art, Caravaggio brings together Derek Jarman's twin worlds of film and painting. A brilliant account of the controversial Italian painter caught between the demands of Church patronage and his own sexual desires, who eventually murders his lover and dies in exile.
Director: Derek Jarman, UK, 1986, 93 mins, 35 mm
12 pm Sunday 13 April: Last of England (18)
Director: Derek Jarman, UK 1987, 87 mins, 35 mm
Greenwich Picturehouse, Greenwich Programme
12 pm Sunday 23 March: Shorts Programme 2
12 pm Sunday 30 March: Caravaggio (18)
Director: Derek Jarman, UK, 1986, 93 mins, 35 mm
12 pm 6 April: Le Testament D’Orphée with the short film Un Chien Andalou
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