The Garden

Derek Jarman had every right to expect that The Garden, his eighth feature film, would be his last. When it was released in 1990 the filmmaker, artist, and gay rights activist had been HIV+ for over three years and was visibly ailing. He would, however, miraculously go on to make three more films, Edward II (1991), Wittgenstein (1992), and Blue (1993). The last of these is undeniably one of the cinema’s great swan songs, but had he not survived to make it, The Garden would have made a more than fitting testimonial work. Like Blue, it is deeply personal and directly addresses Jarman’s mortality. Blue, however, is also sui generis; an experimental film made by a director who could no longer see. Moreover, the unchanging monochrome screen offers no evidence of the artist who was once nominated for the Turner Prize in recognition of “the outstanding visual qualities of his films.” The Garden, on the other hand, offers ample evidence of Jarman’s visual flair and acts as the culmination of the more avant-garde strand of Jarman’s oeuvre, which encompasses the Super 8 features, The Angelic Conversation (1985) and The Last of England (1987), and the collage-like War Requiem (1988).  

The Garden is often seen as a companion piece to The Last of England, but the differences between the two films are just as instructive. Jarman appears in both films as himself. Aside from appearing as a child in home movie footage shot by his father, in The Last of England, the adult Jarman is also shown sitting at his desk in his Bankside warehouse working on one of his elaborate scrap books. His presence in the film implies that its apocalyptic vision of Britain’s present and near future is the artist’s own. Towards the start of The Garden the filmmaker is again shown at his desk, now at Prospect Cottage, but this time he is clearly asleep. Later, he is filmed sleeping on his sick bed, which has been placed on the beach and is surrounded by angelic-looking men and women, naked from the waist up, who carry torches and circle him. What is only implied in The Last of England is here made explicit: the film is Jarman’s dream. This places The Garden more squarely than The Last of England within the tradition of the ‘trance film’, a sub-genre of avant-garde filmmaking which Jarman greatly admired. Building on Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet (1930), trance films like Maya Deren’s Meshes in the Afternoon (1943) and Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) cast the filmmaker themselves, rather than an actor surrogate, as a sleeping visionary who dreams their film into existence.¹

As a director who sought to only make personal films and who saw the cinema as a dream-like medium, the appeal of the trance film as a form should on one level be obvious. Critics like Jo George, however, have identified another reason why Jarman may have been drawn to it. She notes Jarman’s abiding interest in Old and Middle English poetry, which he first encountered during his English degree at King’s College London. He had even considered The Dream of the Rood, an Old English poem depicting the Crucifixion, as an alternative title for The Garden. George also sees the trance film as the direct cinematic descendant of the tradition of dream visions in Old and Middle English poetry, which includes works such as Pearl, William Langland’s Piers Ploughman (which Jarman longed to film) and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Book of the Dutchess and The House of Fame. In these works, the poet, who is often mentioned by name, describes falling asleep and their subsequent dream, which is always allegorical in nature. The sleeping Jarman (who is named off screen by the voice of Tilda Swinton) is therefore a visionary dreamer in the tradition of Chaucer and Langland as well as Deren and Anger. Also, like the medieval dream visions before it, The Garden is also clearly an allegory.²

If bringing together medieval dream poetry with the trance film demonstrates the relationship between the radical and the traditional in Jarman’s work, the religious and political allegory of The Garden shows the constant tension in it between the sacred and the profane. Comparing the plight of gay men and women under the repressive Thatcher government to Christ’s Passion may sound blasphemous to some, but at the 1991 Berlin Film Festival the film was awarded a prize from the International Catholic Film Office (OCIC), a special jury which recognises films of notable spiritual value, and which promote the values of the Gospels. At the 1964 Venice Film Festival a similar prize was awarded by the OCIC to one of the clear inspirations for The Garden, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew. If Jarman was never quite the confirmed atheist that Pasolini was, he similarly turned his back on his religious upbringing and was deeply critical of both the Catholic and Anglican churches, and particularly their stance on homosexuality. He and Pasolini nevertheless incorporated a great deal of religious imagery in their films. This imagery could be satirical and even blasphemous, but in The Gospel According to St Matthew Pasolini played things remarkably straight. Jarman, except for the mock credit card advert featuring Judas, follows suit in The Garden. 

The formal qualities of The Garden also require attention. Jarman is one of British cinema’s few undisputed auteur filmmakers, but the thread that makes all 11 films cohere as an oeuvre is the sheer force of his personality – the balancing of an unironic love of culture and tradition with a puckish, punkish sense of provocation; the deeply personal examination of his sexuality and his illness – not a signature visual style. Stylistically, Jarman’s films divide into roughly five categories: the early 16mm features (Sebastiane [1976], Jubilee [1978] and The Tempest [1979]); the 35mm studio productions (Caravaggio [1986], Edward II, Wittgenstein); the Super 8 experimental films (The Angelic Conversation and The Last of England); Blue, which stands alone as an abstract experimental film; and War Requiem and The Garden, which are shot on a variety of film formats. War Requiem, for the most part, belongs to the 35mm studio category, but it also features scenes shot with green screen, flashback segments shot in Super 8, and montages of found footage. The Garden, however, is a genuine collage. 

Indeed, The Garden may be Jarman’s most visually radical film. Jarman had already shown the potential for cutting together Super 8 footage shot with different colour stocks, filters and frame rates in The Last of England. The Garden, however, goes a good deal further and combines Super 8 footage of different colours and frame rates with material shot on other filmmaking formats both professional (16mm) and amateur (video), as well as location work and green screen projection, and footage captured with and without synchronised sound. The result is a free-associative audio-visual montage that makes good on the promise made in the opening voiceover (spoken by Jarman regular, Michael Gough) to take the viewer “on a journey without direction, uncertainty, and no sweet conclusion.”

Finally, it is important to mention the all-important location that gives the film its title. In 1986, shortly after being diagnosed with AIDS, Jarman bought Prospect Cottage located on a pebble beach in the shadow of Dungeness B nuclear power plant. In this most unlikely of places Jarman began to grow one of the most idiosyncratic and celebrated gardens in the United Kingdom, one which is still a pilgrimage site for both fans and garden enthusiasts who would probably never darken the doors at a Jarman retrospective. 

Jarman had many reasons for wanting to shoot the film there, and they all say something instructive about Jarman and the film. One consideration was, of course, budgetary. Jarman personally owned the land and therefore did not have to pay nor seek permission to film there. Then there was the practical matter of working around his illness, which had made long days on set difficult. By filming in his own house and garden, Jarman was able to rest when required. On a symbolic level it can stand in for the many significant gardens in the Bible: Eden, the paradise two lovers are cast out of; Gathsemenee, the site of Christ’s betrayal; and the Garden Tomb where Christ is buried and resurrected. Jarman would also have been aware that the allegorical importance of gardens in the Bible carried over into the medieval dream vision the film owes so much to. 

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, there were personal reasons. By making this film in his own garden he is not only immortalising one of his proudest achievements, but also blurring the boundaries between the professional feature film and the amateur home movie. For Jarman, who claimed to make films “for the camaraderie”,³ it was essential for his films to have the feel of the latter. The Garden, with its seemingly free-form structure and style, its sense of improvisation, its unashamed messiness, and its deeply personal nature certainly achieves that. But in terms of scope, ambition, formal innovation, and social and political significance, The Garden is unquestionably one of the most important British feature films of the Thatcher period. 

The Garden (1990 United Kingdom 95 mins)

Prod Co: Basilisk Communications Prod: James Mackay Dir, Scr: Derek Jarman Phot: Derek Jarman, Christopher Hughes, Richard Heslop Ed: Derek Jarman, Peter Cartwright, Kevin Collins Mus: Simon Fisher Turner Cos Des: Annie Symons

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Johnny Mills, Philip MacDonald, Pete Lee-Wilson, Spencer Leigh, Jody Graber, Roger Cook, Kevin Collins, Jack Birkett

Endnotes