Vibrational Assemblages and the Queer Quotidian: Glitterbug

His obsession with texture, shape and light was why, in his work, each design element, each object, is so charged with significance; and why his interest lay with the objects rather than in the demands of the story. His cinema was an extension of our ability to study our surroundings; cinema as a way of reminding us, even teaching us, how better to see.¹

Derek Jarman’s posthumous Glitterbug (1994) jitters, glitters, and shimmers with a life well lived. A companion piece to Blue (1993) and lovingly assembled by Jarman’s friends and collaborators after his death in 1994, Glitterbug is an aphoristic, film-as-diary collage of Super 8 images collected from his life and oeuvre that breezily float in the interstices between action and memory. Broadcast only three days after Jarman’s funeral, Glitterbug documents both his creative process and renders moments of tenderness between friends, lovers, and strangers. Glitterbug was originally pitched years in advance by Jon Savage as a semi-autobiographical documentary of Jarman’s early life, however, in typical Jarman fashion, the film transformed into something more experimental. Eschewing conventional narrative entirely and opting for a dreamlike, temporally distinct and multilayered wordless approach that is interested in the queer quotidian, Glitterbug’s form is diaphanous, light like silk, yet heavy with the weight of the past and of memory itself. 

One could consider Glitterbug as that moment after Blue stops, when all of life’s memories come into frenzied, rapid clarity. A life and all its detritus – tidbits and lore shutter into brief focus, before hurriedly escaping the frame. Jarman once said that “narrative is the first trap of commercial cinema,”² and this axiom rings true in Glitterbug’s images that refuse any stable or fixed meaning. This is what makes his work, by its very definition, queer.

Jarman’s involvement in Glitterbug was minimal, however, he was integral to a number of aesthetic and formal decisions made during the construction of the film. While Jarman did not live to see the film finished, he was present in the curation of some of the footage and he did provide commentary that was not used in the final cut. Jarman attended a few recording sessions for the music accompaniment provided by Brian Eno, which did eventually morph into the film’s final, wordless soundtrack.

A bell rings out into the void. Eno’s score drones on. An image of the docks down by the Thames, swathed in black and white, limned with desire. Studios become raves. Jarman’s Sloane Square apartment rendered in a stationary shot, with time sped up. In his home, where he whittles away on his scripts and talks on the phone with his friends and collaborators, there comes into view all of life; living, working, reading, sleeping, pacing, hosting, re-arranging, smoking, listening to music, dancing, touching. With no single point of contact, with a constant rearranging of subject and object position, Jarman’s Glitterbug rejects conventional narrative linearity. This is part and parcel of Jarman’s artistic ethos – as a disruptor of straight hegemony and restrictive social ideology, what he terms “heterosoc”.³  How to think beyond, and live a life outside of, heterosexual society and all its suffocating conformity? One can glimpse those counterpublics nestled throughout Glitterbug. This is both a historical document and a collage of Britain on the edge of collapse. Underneath there existed an underground utopia, a world of drag; the exuberant crowning of a queen. When the scene slows down, Jarman’s eye roves over the set, interested in the little performances that make up a world where everything becomes art; a fantastical queer world of wolves and punks and pansies and fairies. When he does venture into the wild beyond the intimacy of just his friends, the tourist-cum-voyeur lingers on images of strangers caught deep in thought. All the beauty and all the grief of the stranger comes into tender view. 

In the 1960s, Jarman sat for his BA General degree, taking classes in History, the History of Art and Architecture, and English Literature. An intense focus on making everything art. The Last of England (1987)’s fire dance. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo of William S. Burroughs. Glitterbug similarly takes its aesthetic cues from Burroughs’ signature cut-up collage technique. This mode is an especially queer one that allows space for new subjectivities to emerge and be given new meaning from old context. Glitterbug is like a scrapbook, in how Declan Wiffen writes that “collaging scraps of text, images and ideas from various places can be understood as a queer modality for its method of undermining stable identities, celebrating hybrid lineages and reinterpreting found materials.”⁴ Palimpsest-like, Jarman’s images talk; they are filled to the brim with secret meaning and histories deposited under a layer of gossip and tête-à-tête. These images gabber on, they spill forth and cheekily move aslant and askew – one can never quite fully grasp or understand the multilayered worlds stacked on top of each other in Glitterbug. Hermetically sealed, these are little fictions, plucked from reality. In these snapshots of a life, images whiz past the viewer’s mind’s eye where new meanings – free from the restraints of conventional narrative form – wash over one another. From the B-side of A Journey to Avebury (1971): rock patterns and shadows form the contours of Avebury henge. A real sense of deep time and history embedded in these neolithic, ancient rocks. A bacchanal of oiled-up boys resplendent in the Sardinian sun on the set of Sebastiane (1976) as if taken straight out of a Henry Scott Tuke painting. Jarman ostensibly has a painterly eye; his images are awash with a poetic, punk and queer sensibility formed in his first love: painting. His practice is informed by a deep interest in the history of visual art and literature. This can be gleaned in Glitterbug, where we see Jarman’s studio is filled to the brim with candles, looking glasses, mannequins, costumes, dolls, plants, paint, brushes, books – the flotsam of a painterly life. 

Glitterbug thrusts friendship into the mytho-poetic realm. At the beating heart of the film is Tilda Swinton. When the camera eventually lands on her, it simply cannot look away. Swinton returns Jarman’s gaze; snapping photographs of him. Astride a statue, arm held high above her head, sword in hand, she gazes triumphantly down at Jarman. They have their own secret world. Swinton runs through topiary with the biggest smile in the world, pure with joy and love, beaming at the camera. These montages of Jarman’s friends, lovers, and collaborators have an out-of-time aura about them. Without any narrative, we can see friends making life into the grandeur of myth; making the everyday fantastic. 

In a 1985 interview, Jarman lamented the state of government funding for the type of films he wanted to make. He rejected the thought of doing anything mainstream ever again after a semi-conventional production post-Caravaggio (1986). He stated: “I went back to doing Super 8s […] and last year (1984) I finally had the courage of my convictions to say, right, that sort of film-making, my own peculiar sort of film-making, is really my film-making.”⁵ One can easily see how at home he is in this film. Art that exists outside of monetary gain. We are given a sidelong view of the worlds that Jarman made home in – we see friends, lovers caught unawares, lives captured and rendered on grainy Super 8. The queer quotidian: snapshots of shaving, showering, making, loving. 

Glitterbug captures the time in between the bigger things; the moments that swim around larger memories. This portrait-as-poetry documents a sheer lust for life, of Jarman’s unbridled spirit, his creativity, creation and collaboration. In these images rich with desire and love, we can peep a look at the life of one of queer cinema’s most important artists. 

Glitterbug (1994 United Kingdom 55 mins)

Prod: James Mackay Dir: Derek Jarman Ed: Andy Crabb Phot: Derek Jarman Mus: Brian Eno 

Cast: Derek Jarman, Tilda Swinton, William S. Burroughs, Genesis P-Orridge, Michael Clark, Toyah Willcox, Adam Ant, Duggie Fields, Andrew Logan (all archive footage)

Endnotes