This film was such an inspiration to me when I first saw it. It has a lot to do with what was coming out of the speakers. So much of it is shot silently on Super 8, so the sound had to be created from scratch. That’s the way I prefer to work. But with this film, I’ve never been able to separate the sound design and Simon Fisher Turner’s brilliant score.
Mark Jenkin
A contemporary review
Derek Jarman’s feature film work has become increasingly experimental in form, particularly since the silence imposed on him in the early 80s by lack of funding. The Angelic Conversation (1985), The Last of England (1987) and now The Garden all reflect Jarman’s frustration with the conventions of mainstream cinema and a new-found confidence in allowing his material to dictate its own form. This is due in part to the plain fact that what Jarman now needs to express can no longer be contained in a narrative format. In the 70s, his films were public celebrations of his homosexuality, a necessary stance at the time which excluded his own more private emotions. In the 80s, Jarman began to turn inwards, a tendency reinforced perhaps by the death of his father and the onset of AIDS. Home-movie footage of Jarman as a child with his family begins to appear in his films almost as a recuperation of ‘the good’ in the context of a film career dominated until then by aggressive, violent and sadistic themes and images.
The Garden is an explosive combination of scenes plumbing a variety of loves, hates and desires, all welded together by the story of the Passion. The film, among other things, is about Christianity, the media, police brutality, advertising, gay love and repression, the family, old age, AIDS and, in the end, Jarman himself. Biblical characters are fragmented so that Christ appears – once in a marvellous scene in the present day, on a road cutting through a desolate landscape – but is represented mainly by two gay lovers; similarly Tilda Swinton is an angel, a beachcomber and the Madonna. A young man in drag is Mary Magdalene, while the police in an extremely brutal scene become the torturing soldiers of Pontius Pilate.
The film exemplifies Jarman’s idea of a personal cinema, which previously existed only in the shorter Super-8 ‘home-movies’ he began in 1970 but which has now moved to centre stage. Interestingly, Jarman’s own cinematic ideas have gained from the imagistic camerawork of younger gay experimental filmmakers like John Maybury, Cerith Wyn-Evans, Chris Hughes and Richard Heslop, so that fast-cutting, pixillation and a sweeping camera have replaced what was once a much more static aesthetic, focused on tableaux rather than the energy and excitement of manipulating the film surface itself. As in The Last of England, The Garden is constructed around Jarman’s own persona as dreamer/fantasist/consciousness. The film is a dream in which the filmmaker plays or is the central protagonist, as in the ‘trance’ films of such American avant-gardists of the 1940s as Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos and Maya Deren. But its most immediate and perhaps conscious debts are to Cocteau (The Testament of Orpheus and Orphée itself), Pasolini (The Gospel According to St Matthew) and Powell (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp).
Yet of all Jarman’s features it is also the most allegorical, using the Passion of Jesus Christ to articulate not only emotional states but the nature of life itself, a Christian view by any account in which spiritual survival against the onslaught of corruption is paramount, where personal salvation is all. The style is quintessential Jarman in its overwrought tableaux, montage editing and bricolage ‘narrative’. Images and motifs recur: of fire (a Jungian symbol which first appeared in the home movies of the early 1970s); the passive gay male couple (first met in Angel and Sphinx in Jubilee and most intensely celebrated in his sadly neglected The Angelic Conversation); the splitting and excessive idealisation of women, particularly of late through the iconic presence of Tilda Swinton; and the indictment of modern society through a recuperation of the past, typically a pre-capitalist one, the period of the English Renaissance (Shakespeare and John Dee).
The Garden can be seen as the final film in an unwitting trilogy on the subject of the moral, social and spiritual decline of England which began with Jubilee in the late 70s, was followed by The Last of England in the late 80s, and ends with The Garden’s intensely private and painful allegory. The three films trace, almost tragically, Jarman’s shifting perspective from a largely public and social critique in which historical bonds were imaginatively tied through the ever-present figure of John Dee in Jubilee, to the bleak, fragmented and paranoid avant-gardism of The Last of England, and now a coming to rest in which hope is balanced against despair, love against anger, fear and loathing against peace and reconciliation.
Michael O’Pray, Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1991
The Garden
Director: Derek Jarman
Production Company: Basilisk
In association with: Channel Four, British Screen, ZDF – Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, Uplink
Producer: James Mackay
Production Manager: Nick Searle
Production Manager (Studio): Sarah Swords
Production Assistant: Jo Scarlett Coriat
Assistant Directors: Matthew Evans, David Lewis, Ian Francis
Casting: Debbie McWilliams, Michelle Guish
Casting (Extras): Simon Turner
Director of Photography: Christopher Hughes
Additional Photography: David Lewis, James MacKay, Nick Searle
Camera Operators: Steve Farrer, Richard Heslop, Christopher Hughes, Derek Jarman
Editor: Peter Cartwright
Production Designers: Derek Brown, Christopher Hobbs
Scenic Artist: Annie Lapaz
Costume Designer: Annie Symons
Make-up: Thelma Mathews
Music: Simon Fisher Turner
Music Performed by: Martyn Bates, Dean Broderick, Glen Fox, Paul Jayasinha, Andrew Okrezeja, Melanie Pappenhiem, Ian Shaw, David Sinclair, Brian Springbacrou, El Tito, Hugh Webb, Alexander Balanescu, Tony Hinnigan, Jonathan Carney, Kate Musker, Mark Horn
String Arrangements: Dean Broderick
Music Recording: Marvin Black, Richard Preston
Synclavier Operator: Andy Kennedy
Sound Recording: Gary Desmond
Sound Re-recording: Peter Maxwell
Sound Editor: Nigel Holland
Foley Artists: Bill Garlick, Beryl Mortimer
Adviser: Simon Goldberg
Cast
Tilda Swinton (Madonna)
Johnny Mills, Kevin Collins (lovers)
Pete Lee-Wilson (Devil)
Spencer Leigh (Mary Magdalene/Adam)
Jody Graber (young boy)
Roger Cook (Christ)
Jessica Martin (singer)
Philip Macdonald (Joseph/Jesus)
Dawn Archibald (nature spirit)
Michael Gough (voice-overs)
Maribelle La Manchega (Spanish dancer)
Orlando (Pontius Pilate)
Mike Tezcan, Matthew Wilde (policemen)
Milo Bell
Vernon Dobtcheff
Leslie Randall
UK-Germany-Japan 1990
92 mins
Digital
The screening on Wed 1 Apr will be introduced by artist Sarah Wood
SIGHT AND SOUND
Never miss an issue with Sight and Sound, the BFI’s internationally renowned film magazine. Subscribe from just £25*
*Price based on a 6-month print subscription (UK only). More info: sightandsoundsubs.bfi.org.uk
BFI SOUTHBANK
Welcome to the home of great film and TV, with three cinemas and a studio, a world-class library, regular exhibitions and a pioneering Mediatheque with 1000s of free titles for you to explore. Browse special-edition merchandise in the BFI Shop.We're also pleased to offer you a unique new space, the BFI Riverfront – with unrivalled riverside views of Waterloo Bridge and beyond, a delicious seasonal menu, plus a stylish balcony bar for cocktails or special events. Come and enjoy a pre-cinema dinner or a drink on the balcony as the sun goes down.
BECOME A BFI MEMBER
Enjoy a great package of film benefits including priority booking at BFI Southbank and BFI Festivals. Join today at bfi.org.uk/join
BFI PLAYER
We are always open online on BFI Player where you can watch the best new, cult & classic cinema on demand. Showcasing hand-picked landmark British and independent titles, films are available to watch in three distinct ways: Subscription, Rentals & Free to view.
See something different today on player.bfi.org.uk
Join the BFI mailing list for regular programme updates. Not yet registered? Create a new account at www.bfi.org.uk/signup
Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
Questions/comments? Contact the Programme Notes team by email