In the Shadow of the Sun

In the Shadow of the Sun is the title of two films, substantially identical but materially distinct. The first, a silent Super 8 film made between 1972 and 1974 incorporating footage shot in 1971, was screened during the 1970s at Jarman’s studio home and at experimental film venues in London, accompanied by Hector Berlioz’s Grande Messe des morts. The second, a 16mm film comprising a blow-up of the first augmented with titles and a synchronised score by Throbbing Gristle, premiered in 1981 at the Berlin Film Festival. The 1981 film carries the credit “derek jarman 1972” dating its production from the time of its being conceived by Jarman rather than the date(s) of its shooting or completion in either gauge. This anachronism goes further than identifying the 16mm film with its Super 8 source; it suggests the direct transmission of a private vision, while placing that private vision in a historical, and therefore material, context. This push-pull effect of eliding and foregrounding materiality continues throughout the film. Jarman’s layering of long shots with bright close-ups, and the painterly softening of focus induced by refilming, mean that the viewer is continually looking into the depths of images whose flatness and opacity are emphasised, and recognising actions that suggest the psychology of an irrational narrative. The effect is a physical staging of the suspension of disbelief. 

Despite an early VHS release, this film has largely remained terra incognita, navigated around rather than explored, and there are studies of Jarman which omit to mention it entirely. If the first In the Shadow of the Sun was not quite private, but not part of the mainstream of experimental cinema either, the second seems not quite public: an experimental film from a director of sync-sound illusionist narrative features, too long for a short and too short for a commercial feature. In following The Tempest (1979) with this, Jarman asserted the unity of his work, and the centrality of a filmmaking practice that had been marginal even within a marginal film culture. Jarman ignored the divisions between what would now be called “artists’ film,” art cinema and the mainstream, and it is possible to view In the Shadow of the Sun as a narrative film, a use which the filmmaker’s synopsis in Dancing Ledge seems to invite. Viewed as such, it is the apotheosis of the fantasy genre, a film that seems to take place within a network of magic(k)al workings. 

The forms of Jarman’s subsequent Super 8-derived 16mm and 35mm films are easier to enter for audiences accustomed to illusionist narrative cinema; in The Garden (1990), the narrator (Michael Gough) offers us “a journey without direction,” but in In the Shadow of the Sun, there is no warning, no preparation for the moment of departure. The film begins in medias res with two projections combined into a single image track by refilming. One shows the view from the window of a car travelling through the countryside; the other records a staged scene of a man taking photographs of another man bound within a grid of fire, while a third man, ignoring the other two, points in a reclining position. Behind these figures, a bricked-up window and door are visible, with the journey in the other projection providing the view “beyond” them. It is fire that unifies the images; the flames in the second film seem like points of leakage for the light in the first, while the sun appearing over a hill portrays the flash of the photographer’s camera. Breaks in continuity are created by in-frame splices, a conventional superimposition of typewriter keys over the driving footage, and what appears to be one brief dimming of the bulb of the projector running the staged footage during the refilming process. Between the viewer and these elements, there is the motion of dirt and scratches. Thus, within the film’s opening minutes, we are presented with a range of possibilities from actuality to fantasy, taking in documentary refined to spectacle, narrative simplified to ritual, three different speeds of motion and an intentionally foregrounded use of post-production techniques, with each element competing for attention and inflecting the meaning of the others. That the staged scene is almost the action of a contemporary thriller, and that the driving footage is recognisable as driving footage, is as much acclimatisation as we are given, and what follows never gives us fewer options than this. Illusionistically speaking, we are always in more than one place and time. 

In the Shadow of the Sun has figures rather than characters; the actions of these figures are comprehensible, but their significance is not. Each of the scenes is staged enough to give us concepts to think about, which Jarman called “word-signs”:¹ they are incomplete, but point to the expectation of completion, as in a half-recovered text, or a symbolic text half-decoded. While process-and-structure filmmaking would explore the materiality of the representation without attributing significance to the represented action, the processes of this film draw new attention to the depictions they complicate. Repetitions are frequently achieved with refilming, with the result that the scale, brightness and colour of the repeated elements changes on each occurrence; the pointing man in the film’s opening scene reappears twice more at different sizes and saturations, finally resembling a luminous ghost. 

The combination of magic(k)al, ceremonial action, vivid colour and paradoxically serious camp in Jarman’s Super 8 films of the ’70s bears the influence of Kenneth Anger, but the differences between Jarman’s sensibility and Anger’s are more striking than the resemblances. Jarman’s vision is more materialist, austere and hermetic, and less sociological; where Anger identifies the glamour of American popular culture with the Will of the Crowleyan magician, Jarman situates the discovery of the cinematographic mechanism imaginatively within the history of alchemy. Anger cast rock stars as gods and adepts with the intention of harnessing the energy of their recognition; Jarman casts Fire Island, then in its heyday as a gay resort, as a desert defined by sculptural details and occupied by a single masked figure, in scenes that both recall his landscape paintings of the ’60s and ’70s and anticipate the design of his garden at Dungeness. 

The film concludes with the unravelling of its illusions. After the candles lit in front of the pyramids shake and break up into abstract light, we return to the men with the mirror, now zoomed out into long shot, revealing more of the vacant lot around them than we have seen since their first appearance. The fire that provided the shimmering effect on the shots taken from this position is diminished again by distance. This is followed by a handheld shot of one of the film’s participants standing with his hands in his pockets, visibly “out of character,” next to a flaming tree. Shortly after this, actuality footage returns in shots of boys riding their bikes across the waste ground where Jarman was filming. This moment corresponds to the phrase “barbarians ride through the ruins” in his synopsis,² which suggests that the collapse of the vision is its expansion. The film ends with a protracted loop of grain, what appears to be a wave, and the enlarged dots of a printed image, into which we peer for absent images, as though looking into the scrying mirror suggested by the name Jarman and James Mackay chose for their production company, Dark Pictures. 

The use of the word “ambient” to describe this film requires some contextualisation. In Dancing Ledge, Jarman recalls that “the first viewers wracked their brains for a meaning instead of relaxing into the ambient tapestry of random images. The language is there and it is conveyed – and you don’t know what you have to say until you’ve said it. You can dream of lands far distant.”³ Note the ambiguity of the second person. The effect is of a stream of consciousness, but not one flowing from an identifiable individual psychology; it is both the filmmaker’s consciousness and our own.  Without spoken language to define or provide resistance, the viewer’s imagination can move freely between registers, making something new of each viewing even after repeated viewings have made each superimposition familiar. The ambience of In the Shadow of the Sun is never arbitrary, and Jarman’s use of the phrase “relax into” suggests, far from passivity, an invitation to get out of our own way. 

In the Shadow of the Sun (1981 United Kingdom/West Germany 58 minutes)

Prod: James Mackay Dir: Derek Jarman Phot: Derek Jarman Ed: Derek Jarman Mus: Throbbing Gristle [Genesis P Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter Christopherson, Chris Carter]

Cast: Gerald Incandela, Andrew Logan, Karl Bowen, Francis Wishart, Christopher Hobbs, Luciana Martinez, Kevin Whitney 

Endnotes