Derek Jarman

British filmmaker, author, AIDS activist, and all-around cultural upstart, Jarman has written a moving, visually evocative memoir of his life and times. One of the first filmmakers to project an unabashed gay sensibility onto screen, Jarman creates here a montage of autobiography, interviews, and social history that shifts back and forth through time, resulting in an intriguing portrait of his personal and artistic growth from the 1940s to the present. Jarman is able to distill the essence of an era with just a few well-chosen anecdotes. He is outraged at what he sees as the complicit passivity of the British government's response to the AIDS epidemic; throughout, he drops the uncaring words of government officials like deadly bombs. Some readers may find his honesty brazen and offensive, but Jarman is truly a spokesman for his tribe, a teacher and a sage who, while staring death in the face, keeps his eyes open to report back with a deep understanding of what is important to the gay community. Highly recommended. - Jeffery Ingram, Newport P.L., Ore. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"I step into a blue funk,'' British author and filmmaker Jarman writes early on in this screenplay of of his final--and award-winning--film, which deals with his gradual loss of sight due to complications from AIDS. As a movie, Blue was powerful, disturbing and experimental, devoid of visual images while presenting the voices of Jarman and several actors speaking over a blue screen for more than an hour. As a text, it offers a briefer, more personal and poignant experience. Jarman's writing hovers between poetry and prose, images and metaphors tumbling over one another: "My mind bright as a button but my body falling apart--a naked light bulb in a dark and ruined room.'' The author, who wrote previously about his illness in Modern Nature and At Your Own Risk , careens through a variety of topics, randomly etching whatever is on his mind, from Marco Polo, Czar Ivan, van Gogh and Sarajevo to many things blue: jeans, sky, water and delphiniums. More than just the record of an artist losing his sight, this is a look at how a man accepts his impending death with fear, hope, humor and understanding. "Blue is darkness made visible,'' writes Jarman, who died in February 1994 at the age of 52.

Chroma is a meditation on the color spectrum by the celebrated late artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman. From the explosions of image and color in In The Shadow of the Sun, The Last of England, The Garden and Wittgenstein, to the somber blacks of his collages and tar paintings, Jarman has consistently used color in unprecedented ways, making his ideas on the subject of interest to filmmakers, film audiences, artists and students alike. Blue, his most personal and innovative film, consists of a compelling soundtrack accompanied by a monochrome blue image and is, among other things, a comment on Jarman's diminishing eyesight due to AIDS. In his signature style, a lyrical combination of classical theory, anecdote, and poetry, Jarman takes the reader through the spectrum, introducing each color as an embodiment of an emotion, evoking memories or dreams. He explains the use of color in Medieval painting through the Renaissance to the modernists and draws on the great color theorists from Pliny to Leonardo. He writes too about the meanings of color in literature, science, philosophy, psychology, religion and alchemy. Read either as a work on color, or a distillation of Jarman's artistic vision, Chroma presents an exciting perspective on the subject.

From his sexual awakening in postwar England to life in the sixties and beyond, Derek Jarman tells his life story with the in-your-face immediacy that became his trademark style in both his films and writing. Accompanied by nearly one hundred photographs of Jarman, his friends, lovers, and inspirations, the candid accounts in Dancing Ledge provide intimate and incredibly vivid glimpses into this iconoclastic filmmaker's life and times.

Brutal Beauty presents Isaac Julien's refreshing vision of Derek Jarman as a true Renaissance man--a painter, director, activist, diarist and gardener--whose infectiously prolific range of enterprises belies a consistent preoccupation with liberated sexual politics and the defiance of inherited mores.

"Paradise haunts gardens," writes Derek Jarman, "and it haunts mine." Jarman's public image is that of a filmmaker of genius, whose work, dwelling on themes of sexuality and violence, became a byword for controversy. But the private man was the creator of his own garden-paradise in an environment that many might think was more of a hell than a heaven - in the flat, bleak, often desolate expanse of shingle that faces the nuclear power station in Dungeness, Kent. Jarman, a passionate gardener from childhood, combined his painter's eye, his horticultural expertise and his ecological convictions to produce a landscape which combined the flints, shells and driftwood of Dungeness; sculptures made from stones, old tools and found objects; the area's indigenous plants; and shrubs and flowers introduced by Jarman himself. This book is Derek Jarman's own record of how this garden evolved, from its earliest beginnings in 1986 to the last year of his life. More than 150 photographs taken since 1991 by his friend and photographer Howard Sooley capture the garden at all its different stages and at every season of the year. Photographs from all angles reveal the garden's complex geometric plan, its magical stone circles, and its beautiful and bizarre sculptures. We also catch glimpses of Jarman's life in walking, weeding, watering, or just enjoying life. Derek Jarman's Garden is the last book Jarman wrote. Like the garden itself, it remains as a fitting memorial to a brilliant and greatly loved artist who, against all odds, made a breathtakingly beautiful garden in the most inhospitable of places. It will appeal to all those who are themselves practicing gardeners, as well as to the legions of admirers of an extraordinary man.

Book by Jarman, Derek

Part diary, part observation, part memoir, Smiling in Slow Motion concludes the journey begun in Modern Nature. These previously unpublished journals stretch from May 1991 until two weeks before the author’s death in February 1994.

Published here for the very first time, ​Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping is Derek Jarman’s only piece of narrative fiction. Written in 1971, it is a surreal, fabular, lyrical work – a literary fairytale acid-trip road movie hybrid – the energies and details of which influenced much of his later work across media. The richly poetic story, a cinematic prose quest, tracks the journey of a blind young King and his valet, disguised as beggars, who set out in no particular direction and with no particular purpose. Departing from Fargo, across the frontier of Movietown, along the Superhighway and picnicking on the Lawns of Paradise, they encounter vivid characters like Pierrot, Borgia Ginz and Topaz, an Emperor who ‘smiles with the art of mirrors’, as well as a Sphinx with ‘Silence is Golden’ written in her eyes. The story serves as a foundational text, laying out many of the themes, images and styling of Jarman’s work in painting, film and design whilst also being haunted by the then emerging ecological crisis in its juxtaposition of the beauty of nature with the reckless consumption of modernity. This edition features facsimile images of the story’s handwritten drafts from Jarman’s archive, a link to an exclusive audio recording of Jarman himself reading the story in full, and is comprehensively informed by a vivid foreword from Philip Hoare, a deeply researched afterword by Jarman scholar Declan Wiffen, and a warm memoir by the artist Michael Ginsborg, a close friend of Jarman’s throughout the period of the story’s writing.