Derek Jarman "Early Films (Super-8mm)"
Elizabeth Dee
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Elizabeth Dee Gallery presents an exhibition of early films by Derek Jarman, one of the most important and groundbreaking figures of British Independent cinema. Although his oeuvre crossed a range of media boundaries including literature, painting, set design, gardening, and activism, Jarman is best known for his film work, producing over 40 films from the early 1970s until his untimely death in 1994. His full length features such as the homoerotic Sebastiane (1976), one of the first films to represent gay sexuality and the first to be shot entirely in Latin, Jubilee (1977), arguably the first punk film, and the poignant Blue (1993) established Jarman as one of the primary catalysts for a generation of artists and filmmakers whose work is marked by a visionary and dark, subversive imagination. However, it is his early work produced in Super-8, a medium he returned to throughout his career, that reveals the style and sensibility of Jarman’s unique artistic vision and the range of approaches he would come to take in his more well know feature length works.
Highly personal, poetic and affecting, Jarman’s Super-8 works fall roughly into two, overlapping categories: documents of his immediate environment and imaginative experiments in film-making that sought to express emotion through image rather than acting. The films are “fascinating in their multi-layeredness; they interweave reworkings of history, recuperations of iconic figures, avant-garde forms, personal diaries, gay polemics, political statements and social documents.” (1) Referred to as “home movies” by the artist and often screened for small audiences composed of Jarman’s close friends (many of whom served as the actors in the films), the Super-8s express Jarman’s personal concerns and interests as an artist at the time rather than reflect popular trends in mainstream narrative cinema.
Media
Schedule
from January 17, 2009 to February 21, 2009