Caravaggio

John Berger, the celebrated writer and critic, wrote a personal letter to Derek Jarman after he had watched Caravaggio (1986). “You have made a masterpiece,” he wrote, “easily the best film about a painter.” Such praise must have delighted Jarman, especially after the rather lukewarm reception of his film by professional reviewers in the British press. They tended to love the visual beauty of the film, but grumbled about “far too little happening” (John Russell Taylor, Sight and Sound), and the obscurity of the plot (Alan Stanbrook, Stills). Waldemar Januszczak, in The Guardian, saluted a “tour-de-force” of filmmaking, but complained pedantically that the film distorted the actual life of the historical Caravaggio.¹

Despite Januczak’s expectations, the film is not a biography of the late-Renaissance painter Caravaggio (1573-1610). For one thing, very little information about his life survives in the historical record, and even less was available forty years ago. Jarman’s research for the film consisted mainly of successive trips to Rome to study the paintings, which survive triumphantly in the churches of San Luigi dei Francesi, Santa Maria del Popolo, and the collection of the Doria Pamphili Gallery, and elsewhere. Instead of a biography, he created an imagination of an artist at work in a particular time and place, and within a particularly bifurcated society, stretching from the Pope at one end to rough and low street life at the other. But it is imagined in a way that clears a path for contemporary concerns. Questions of class, sexuality, and individual psychology in “attrition” (to use one of Jarman’s favourite words) with society. Art emerges, according to Jarman, who was himself a painter, from such attrition. Caravaggio quotes the psychologist Carl Jung: “The Gods have become diseases.”

Jarman was deeply frustrated by a long delay (seven years) between the idea of the project landing on his desk – sent to him by the art dealer Nicholas Ward-Jackson – and the beginning of filming in 1985. The rise to power in Britain of the Conservative Party and its Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher coincided with the British Treasury closing a (perfectly legal) tax loophole that had helped fund Jarman’s The Tempest (1979). Together with the extremely negative reaction to that film in the USA, all this caused a chill which deterred investors. Eventually the British Film Institute itself found half a million pounds to fund the film, which therefore went ahead in a greatly reduced scope. Instead of Italian locations and the use of Cinecittá, the film was made entirely in a London studio. One of the things that the delay prompted Jarman (through Ward-Jackson) to do was to write the first of his great memoirs, Dancing Ledge (1984).

During the delay, Jarman had developed a completely different form of filmmaking, a personal approach based in Super 8. He worked in all three film gauges, liking Super 8 best for its sheer lightness, flexibility and sense of personal filmmaking. For it he used video transfer for editing, which had been made possible by the invention and expansion of facilities for music video, new at the time. In the Shadow of the Sun appeared in 1980, Imagining October in 1984, and The Angelic Conversation in 1985. Jarman called this his “cinema of small gestures” because of the way his use of very slow, stepped motion forced the viewer’s attention onto slow and small events and movements, such as ways in which men walk, or the gold teeth of a smiling child in Baku, or the movement of a fan. Small gestures such as a tear trickling down a mother’s face can be seen in Caravaggio‘s very different scale. This film shows Jarman perfectly comfortable with 35 mm too, helped here by Gabriel Beristain, the celebrated Mexican cinematographer. He returned to this gauge in Edward II (1991), Wittgenstein (1993), and Blue (1993). The slow pace of Caravaggio, the feeling of looking at things rather than looking for the next turn of the plot, shows the trace of Jarman’s Super 8 practice, although a contemplative atmosphere is present in his earlier feature films too, especially in Sebastiane (1976). In general, of course, Jarman is famous for having come to dislike narrative in feature films. “The story that’s been told to death,” as he put it, “the wordy narrative”.

So there is no wordy narrative in Caravaggio. Such exposition as there is comes in the form of voice-overs, which Jarman went on to use very effectively in The Last of England (1987) and The Garden (1990). In keeping with this laconic mode, Caravaggio also quotes, at least once, the enigmatic philosophy of the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. This brings up the importance of ancient Greek culture for Jarman, and in particular how the film also registers the importance of Neo-Platonism for the Renaissance. In general Jarman was attracted to the problematic historical period 1570-1620 in Europe. He made films of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Christopher Marlowe’s play Edward II; while his film Jubilee (1978) features Elizabeth I and her magician, John Dee, among its memorable characters. (In that film Elizabeth I also quotes Carl Jung). Shakespeare’s sonnets are read by a female voice on the soundtrack to Jarman’s The Angelic Conversation. However, as he explained in the book published to accompany Caravaggio, the film dramatises the moment when the lively neo-Platonism of the Renaissance (accepting, as that was, of classical learning and gay love) was eclipsed by a dour Counter-Reformation reaction emanating from the Church of Rome. 

The film begins and ends with Caravaggio on his deathbed. It is about the closing of an open, adventurous cultural era. The sense of an ending is heavy throughout the film. At the time of its making, there was an additional chill aside from, but involving, the mistakes and reprehensible moral failings of the British Government. HIV/AIDS had begun to emerge as a terrifying threat in 1983-4. Already, by 1985, an old friend of Jarman’s, the painter Mario Dubsky, had died of AIDS. Death cast its shadow over an era of carefree sexual activity that had only started as recently as 1967, with the Parliamentary Act that decriminalized sexual activity between consenting adult men. In the 1980s the Government neglected to act fast to combat the threat of the new virus, and seemed indifferent to the problem. This uneasy background throws into higher relief Caravaggio’s attempts to navigate through constraints emanating from the powerful. Among other things, the film refers to the eclipse of the freer, more accepting and venturesome era of the Renaissance by a repressive and militant Counter-Reformation centred in papal authority and intolerance of difference. In this unpromising context arose a painter who was able to redeem his life in the extraordinary lifelikeness of a series of lovingly painted works full of humanity, compassion, acceptance and understanding. 

Caravaggio (1986 United Kingdom 93 mins)

Prod: Sarah Radclyffe Dir: Derek Jarman Scr: Derek Jarman, Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Nicholas Ward-Jackson Ed: George Akers Phot: Gabriel Beristain Prod Des: Christopher Hobbs Cos Des: Sandy Powell Mus: Simon Fisher-Turner

Cast: Nigel Terry, Sean Bean, Garry Cooper, Dexter Fletcher, Spencer Leigh, Tilda Swinton, Nigel Davenport, Robbie Coltrane, Michael Gough

Endnotes