Derek Jarman’s The Last of England

Painted in 1855, Ford Madox Brown’s artwork The Last of England captures a boat scene that was inspired by the emigration to Australia of sculptor Thomas Woolner in 1852.¹ With the White Cliffs of Dover in the background, the couple at the forefront of the painting nervously grasp each other as they embark on a new life overseas. Their reasons for leaving their homeland are not alluded to in Brown’s canvas, and the expressions on their faces suggest neither hope nor the optimism of a new beginning. Rather, the windswept journey is tinged with uneasiness. Taking its title from Brown’s painting, Derek Jarman’s The Last of England (1987) presents a similar vision of passage in which a group of people sit huddled on a London dock as an armed man wearing a balaclava watches over them. Set to Marianne Faithfull’s a cappella rendition of “The Skye Boat Song”, Jarman’s camera focuses on the despondent faces of the group, single tears tracing their cheeks, as they silently await an unknown fate. Through Jarman’s lens, The Last of England is no longer an image of anxious emigration but of apocalyptic exile. 

Shot in Super 8 and transferred to video, The Last of England opens with an uncredited Jarman scribbling notes into a large scrapbook. As his words are brought to life through the voice-over narration of Nigel Terry, the stability of the black and white scene is immediately undercut by the presence of fragmented and almost subliminal images of a man (“Spring” Mark Adley) moving through an industrial wasteland. Evocative of Terry’s narrative reference to “[i]mprisoned memories [that] prowl thro’ the dark,” the parallel images of the man preparing to shoot up heroin and violently desecrating a replica of Caravaggio’s Amor Vincit Omnia (Love Conquers All, 1602) appear as unleashed visions that intrude upon the main action. However, as the film progresses, any sense of a linear narrative is eschewed in favour of a delirious fever dream of chaotic impressions. In Kicking the Pricks (1987), Jarman’s journal that was written following the shooting of The Last of England and in the aftermath of his AIDS diagnosis, he reflects on the volatile structuring of the film with particular reference to the “disco” sequence that occurs in the first act. Jarman writes that “The cutting is staccato, and aggressive […] 1600 cuts in six minutes. The sequence crashes into the film unexpectedly, the pace is relentless. It should wind the audience. Why do I want to do this?”²

Although Jarman offers no answer to this question, it can be considered against the context of the film’s production within the fraught political backdrop of Margaret Thatcher’s leadership and the tabling of her conservative government’s Section 28 legislation. Significantly curtailing the expression of LGBTQIA+ rights in the United Kingdom, Section 28 barred “the promotion of homosexuality” and thus situates the conception of The Last of England in a period in which the gay community, which Jarman was openly a part of, was under threat.³ Nowhere is this clearer than in a scene in which a naked man and a man dressed like a terrorist in balaclava and gloves embrace on a Union Jack. Their movements, which at first appear to be tender and erotic, increasingly become more desperate as Jarman brazenly forces a juxtaposition of homoeroticism, terrorism and British patriotism in one frame. 

As a product of its socio-political time, The Last of England encapsulates the mood of destruction and chaos that was felt by those who were displaced by the economic and cultural impact of Thatcherism. The “aggressive” editing and the lack of visual cohesion connecting the film’s images reinforce the disturbed and unstable vision of society at the time. As Jarman appropriates different aesthetics (shifting between saturated colour and black and white cinematography), speeds (compressed time and extended time) and trajectories (playing the action forwards and backwards), he creates an anarchic poem that employs a collage style to evoke the tortured emotional geography of England. In so doing, Jarman also stages a cinematic protest that contrasts violent riot footage with the bucolic garden setting of childhood home movies that capture him playing with his sister, Gaye. If there is any contentment, it is securely located in the untouchable memories of the past.

This sense of destabilisation is furthered by the cacophonous sound design that, alongside Simon Fisher-Turner’s score, features parliamentary proceedings, radio broadcasts, gunshots, teleshopping segments and an excerpt from a speech delivered by Adolf Hitler. In an article for Screen, Daniel Humphrey argues that The Last of England “enacts a ‘dialectic of trauma’”, drawing attention to the manner in which the film’s construction – its patterns of repetition, inescapable visual loops and intertextuality – mobilises the echoes of a disturbing and traumatic experience.⁴ Indeed, when Terry’s narration quotes from Allen Ginsburg’s “Howl” (1956) and T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” (1925), it emphasises the cyclical nature of destruction that the film evokes. Mark W. Turner provides a compelling reading of the film’s intertextuality, claiming that: 

Jarman’s quoting of literary history should not be interpreted as a form of playfully postmodern historical pastiche. Jarman is a latter-day modernist, searching for a form that somehow holds in place, if not quite fully contains, fragments and layers of culture that might provide some cultural resonance, if not quite cohesion, at a time when Thatcher tells the nation that society does not exist.⁵

By the same token, the initial difficulty in extracting a clear narrative from the fragmented layers of Jarman’s filmic palimpsest more forcibly implicates the viewer in the construction of meaning. When Jarman wrote in his journal that he wanted to “wind the audience”, his desire was to jolt them out of complacency and open their eyes to the dystopian undercurrents of society. 

Although Jarman described his oeuvre as a “cinema of small gestures”, the gestures held within The Last of England are operatically grand in their encapsulation of torment.⁶ Indeed, the film culminates in what has arguably become its most iconic image of a bride (Tilda Swinton) interchangeably tearing at her wedding dress with a set of shears and her teeth as a bonfire rages in the background. Accompanied by the non-lyrical ululation of Diamanda Galás’ “Εξελόυμε (Deliver Me)”, and intercut with the vision of her husband (Spencer Leigh)’s execution, it is a despairing sequence of ruin and collapse. As the film ends with a nocturnal boat journey to an unknown destination, the viewer is reminded of Terry’s lament at the beginning of the film that “On every green hill mourners stand, and weep for The Last Of England.” 

The Last of England (1987 United Kingdom/West Germany 92 minutes)

Prod Co: Anglo International Films, Tartan Films, British Screen Productions Prod: Don Boyd, James Mackay Dir: Derek Jarman Scr: Derek Jarman Mus: Simon Fisher-Turner Phot: Richard Heslop, Christopher Hughes, Derek Jarman, Cerith Wyn Evans Ed: Peter Cartwright, Angus Cook, John Maybury, Sally Yeadon Prod Des: Christopher Hobbs Cos Des: Sandy Powell

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Spencer Leigh, “Spring” Mark Adley, Gerrard McArthur, Jonny Phillips, Gay Gaynor, Matthew Hawkins, Nigel Terry

Endnotes