Derek Jarman’s Heavenly Bodies
“My dreams are disturbed by ghastly luminous cathedrals that glow with a slight flickering of coals, the scarlet angels sinking into ash drift and ebb away over the darkening landscape.”--Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge
“You were the first person I met who could gossip about St. Thomas Aquinas and hold a steady camera at the same time.”--Tilda Swinton from “Letter to an Angel,” The Guardian
The week of September 26 through October 2, the Gene Siskel Film Center premieres DEREK, actress Tilda Swinton’s memoir and tribute to Derek Jarman, the director with whom she shared an eight-year creative collaboration through films including EDWARD II, THE LAST OF ENGLAND, WAR REQUIEM, and THE GARDEN. We screen three of their collaborations, CARAVAGGIO, WITTGENSTEIN, and BLUE, throughout the run of DEREK.
Jarman’s 1994 death robbed the British cinema of its most brashly creative provocateur and most independent-minded Renaissance man. Jarman brought wide-ranging knowledge of history, classical literature and art to his work, blending high art and pop culture with a keen sense of irony and extraordinary sensuality. The exquisite beauty of his oft-unclothed actors, the extravagant yet funky quality of his production design, and a pervasive eroticism are the hallmarks of Jarman’s enduringly sumptuous body of work.
--Barbara Scharres
Chicago premiere!
DEREK
2007, Isaac Julien, UK, 76 min.
“A cinematic scrapbook of the life and times of an iconoclast, aesthete, and provocateur…a defiant manifesto.”--Stephen Holden, The New York Times
“The dead hand of good taste” is the specter most feared by Oscar-winning actress Tilda Swinton (MICHAEL CLAYTON) in this very intimate search for avant-garde director Derek Jarman’s ghost amid the engagingly tumbled-together celluloid fragments of their creative collaboration. Jarman’s 1994 death from AIDS terminated a career marked by bold bohemian nose-thumbing and by inspired, playful, pan-sexually transgressive films including CARAVAGGIO, EDWARD II, and SEBASTIANE. Swinton’s passionate talking-heads-free tribute to her mentor and partner in hi-jinks includes a cornucopia of clips and revealing home movie footage. DigiBeta video. (BS)
Special discount: buy a ticket for DEREK and get a second ticket for any screening of BLUE, CARAVAGGIO, or WITTGENSTEIN at this discount rate (tickets must be purchased at the same time): General Admission $7; Students $5; Members $4.
September 26--October 2
Fri., Mon., and Wed. at 6:15 pm;
Sat. at 4:30 pm and 7:30 pm;
Sun. at 4:45 pm;
Tue. at 7:45 pm;
Thu. at 8:00 pm
BLUE
1993, Derek Jarman, UK, 76 min.
“You may sit through BLUE with nothing to see, but you leave it rich with images.”--Desson Howe, Washington Post
“As the Elizabethan words modulate from plummy to morbid to bracingly obscene to ethereal, the blue on the screen seems to undulate with feeling.”--Fernando F. Croce, cinepassion.org
Derek Jarman’s final adventure in filmmaking stands as a testament to a career filled with brave journeys into the unknown. Replicating on the screen the AIDS-induced monochrome blue haze that robbed him of normal sight, he draws his viewers into his world as never before. Seeing all that Jarman sees, we become one with the insightful raging, the wild stories, the nasty-funny decline, and the passionate will to live of an artist who remains a masterful weaver of tales to the end. With the voices of Nigel Terry, Tilda Swinton, and John Quentin, and music by Simon Fisher-Turner. 35mm. (BS)
Saturday, September 27, 6:00 pm
Monday, September 29, 7:45 pm
Wednesday, October 1, 7:45 pm
CARAVAGGIO
1986, Derek Jarman, Great Britain, 90 min.
With Nigel Terry, Tilda Swinton
The iconoclastic style of Derek Jarman found ripe subject matter in the private life of Renaissance painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, whose monumental religious paintings, rife with male nudity, are so strikingly erotic that they seem to mock the chaste values of the altars for which they were commissioned. CARAVAGGIO sees the world through the artist’s eyes, in lush color and profound chiaroscuro. Jarman charts Caravaggio’s struggles with the carnal through his tortured relationship with two models, the prostitute Lena (the beatific Swinton in her debut film role) and the indolent gambler Ranuccio (Sean Bean) as scenes of sanctity are inspired by the scum of the streets. 35mm. (BS)
Saturday, September 27, 9:00 pm
Sunday, September 28, 3:00 pm
Thursday, October 2, 6:15 pm
WITTGENSTEIN
1993, Derek Jarman, UK/Japan, 70 min.
With Karl Johnson, Tilda Swinton, John Quentin
“Quite possibly the best of Jarman’s narrative features, presented in a series of spare but powerful tableaux--beautifully and thoughtfully designed, like Joseph Cornell boxes.”--Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
A huge hit at the Berlin Film Festival when first released, Jarman’s anything-but-typical biopic of the German-born, Cambridge-based philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein presents his life as an episodic series of gripping encounters with figures ranging from Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes (Quentin), Russell’s mercurial mistress (Swinton), to a green Martian. 35mm. (BS)