Derek Jarman

In 1634 France, charismatic Father Urbain Grandier becomes the target of a sexually obsessed nun’s witchcraft accusations, which corrupt church and state officials are all too happy to exploit.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

A retelling of the life of the celebrated 17th-century Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio through his brilliant, nearly blasphemous paintings and his flirtations with the underworld.

When the young, attractive Joe Orton meets the older, more introverted Kenneth Halliwell at drama school, he befriends the kindred spirit and they start an affair. As Orton becomes more comfortable with his sexuality and starts to find success with his writing, Halliwell becomes increasingly alienated and jealous, ultimately tapping into a dangerous rage.

England, 14th century. King Edward II falls in love with Piers Gaveston, a young man of humble origins, whom he honors with favors and titles of nobility. The cold and jealous Queen Isabella conspires with the evil Mortimer to get rid of Gaveston, overthrow her husband and take power…

Queen Elizabeth I visits late 1970s England to find a depressing landscape where life has changed since her time.

Ten short pieces directed by ten different directors, including Ken Russell, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman, Bruce Beresford, and Nicolas Roeg. Each short uses an aria as soundtrack/sound, and is an interpretation of the particular aria.

Against a plain, unchanging blue screen, a densely interwoven soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music attempt to convey a portrait of Derek Jarman's experiences with AIDS, both literally and allegorically, together with an exploration of the meanings associated with the colour blue.

Rome, AD 303. Emperor Diocletian demotes his favourite, Sebastian, from captain of the palace guard to the rank of common soldier and banishes him to a remote coastal outpost where his fellow soldiers, weakened by their desires, turn to homosexual activities to satisfy their needs. Sebastian becomes the target of lust for the officer Severus, but repeatedly rejects the man's advances. Castigated for his Christian faith, he is tortured, humiliated and ultimately killed.

A dramatization, in modern theatrical style, of the life and thought of the Viennese-born, Cambridge-educated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose principal interest was the nature and limits of language. A series of sketches depict the unfolding of his life from boyhood, through the era of the first World War, to his eventual Cambridge professorship and association with Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes. The emphasis in these sketches is on the exposition of the ideas of Wittgenstein, a homosexual, and an intuitive, moody, proud, and perfectionistic thinker generally regarded as a genius.

During World War I, British soldier Owen is mortified by the examples of cruelty that surround him in the trenches. He combats these terrifying images by maintaining hope in his love for an army nurse. But he also begins to accept his fate as another battlefield sacrifice.

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

In the Paris of the 1910s, brash young sculptor Henri Gaudier begins a creative partnership with an older writer, Sophie Brzeska. Though the couple is 20 years apart in age, Gaudier finds that his untamed work is complemented by the older woman's cultural refinement. He then moves to London with Brzeska, where he falls in with a group of avant-garde artists. There, Gaudier encounters yet another artistic muse in passionate suffragette Gosh Boyle.

Prospero, a potent magician, lives on a desolate isle with his virginal daughter, Miranda. He's in exile, banished from his duchy by his usurping brother and the King of Naples. Providence brings these enemies near; aided by his vassal the spirit Ariel, Prospero conjures a tempest to wreck the Italian ship. The king's son, thinking all others lost, becomes Prospero's prisoner, falling in love with Miranda and she with him. Prospero's brother and the king wander the island, as do a drunken cook and sailor, who conspire with Caliban, Prospero's beastly slave, to murder Prospero. Prospero wants reason to triumph, Ariel wants his freedom, Miranda a husband; the sailors want to dance.

The artist's personal commentary on the decline of his country in a language closer to poetry than prose. A dark meditation on London under Thatcher.

In 70s Great Britain, a gay teacher is forced to hide his sexuality by day while living his secret life by night.

A nearly wordless visual narrative intercuts two main stories and a couple of minor ones. A woman, perhaps the Madonna, brings forth her baby to a crowd of intrusive paparazzi; she tries to flee them. Two men who are lovers marry and are arrested by the powers that be. The men are mocked and pilloried, tarred, feathered, and beaten. Loose in this contemporary world of electrical-power transmission lines is also Jesus. The elements, particularly fire and water, content with political power, which is intolerant and murderous.

The Angelic Conversation is a lyrical, haunting film about a young man’s search for love in a dreamlike landscape. Its tone is set by the juxtaposition of slow moving homo-erotic images and opaque landscapes through which two men take a journey into their own desires. Offscreen, Dame Judi Dench recites a sequence of Shakespeare's sonnets that counterpoint the action. Jarman called it, “My most austere work, but also the closest to my heart.”

The innovative and influential British filmmaker Derek Jarman was invited to direct the Pet Shop Boys' 1989 tour. This film is a series of iconoclastic images he created for the background projections. Stunning, specially shot sequences (featuring actors, the Pet Shop Boys, and friends of Jarman) contrast with documentary montages of nature, all skillfully edited to music tracks.

Thirteen Smiths' recordings, half of them in a club with a live audience. These alternate with five rock videos, two directed by Derek Jarman (Panic and Ask), two by Tim Broad (Girlfriend in a Coma and Stop Me...), and one by Paula Grief and Richard Levine (How Soon Is Now?). It concludes with Jarman's short film, "The Queen Is Dead," with a three-song soundtrack. The rock videos, particularly Jarman's, are filled with multiple and superimposed images, changing tints, and little narrative coherence; they get their pace from the music's rhythm. Androgyny, dancing children, belching smokestacks, graffiti, angry young men, a waif in a cap: collages of modern alienation.

'The Shadow of the Sun' draws upon Derek Jarman’s interest with alchemical processes as a metaphor for reprocessing Super-8 film. Jarman once described film’s union of light and matter as “an alchemical conjunction” and experimented throughout his career with creating dream symbolism through the superimposition of image and action. Originally called English Apocalypse, the film’s final title is derived from a 17th Century alchemical text that used the phrase as a synonym for the philosopher’s stone – the highly sought substance that turns base metals into gold and silver. The film was intended as a step toward the idea of an ambient video, that like its musical counterpart, was designed to enhance an environment.

Ostia is a fascinating short film directed by Julian Cole and produced for the Royal College of Art, which reconstructs the events leading up to the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Ostia relocates the proceedings to London and stars Derek Jarman as Pasolini. The film features an evocative dream sequence which is accompanied by poignant excerpts from Pasolini’s own poetry, as read by Jarman.

An experimental film of the group Throbbing Gristle in concert.

12 minute short film for 'Broken English' directed by Derek Jarman, comprised of “Witches Song”, “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” and “Broken English”. Part of the “The Dream Machine” vignette (1983).

Super 8 footage shot on location in Sardinia in 1975.

Series of single made-for-television dramas.

The Comic Strip is a group of British comedians, who do parodies of films, literature and sometimes major events.