In the midst of watching all these AIDS films, a left turn, sort of: before sitting through Derek Jarman's Blue (I've never actually seen it with the blue screen throughout – which may hardly be necessary – but perhaps it's a good idea to do it), I thought I would see something that didn't require quite so much work: his film based on Britten's War Requiem (1989). I read the screenplay a couple of years ago, around the time that we performed the oratorio here with a mix of students and professionals, but I had never seen the film – this is a fairly okay DVD dubbed from a videotape (only one scene is practically ruined, the scene often shown in stills of the drag whores representing Britannia, which for some reason is completely overexposed).
Strange, messy, crazy: well, avant-garde – but actually seeing the film version of War Requiem is indeed more coherent than reading the screenplay. Perhaps not as many things are explained – although I don't have the screenplay to hand, I remember it is one of those that includes many notes, descripitions, and interpretations, as it's sort of a working document combined with a transcription – but, in actually seeing it, the emotional coherence of scenes is clear. (And it's nice to see a young Sean Bean, and a few startling scenes by Tilda Swinton; and the ending, with unexpectedly simple but overlapping gestures of care and memorial, over the gorgeous music of 'Let us sleep now/In paradisum' – sublime.)
I've always struggled with Jarman, since trying to endure the glacially paced Sebastiane years ago in San Francisco; he is always so chaotically strange – I mean I love the avant-garde, but let's face it, I like my experimentalism neatly and carefully calculated. (I'm never very enthusiastic about live albums or videos, either.) Jarman, on the other hand, is perfectly happy for the screen images to crowd on top of each other, drawn from different sources, different technologies, different patterns – he likes the messiness of them all, perhaps especially in this case, as they contrast with the polished craftmanship of the Britten. And, finally perhaps, I am a bit more in tune with all of that – this would still never be my favorite film, but it certainly is a striking one.
In fact, I have an urge to go see my recently acquired copy of his Wittgenstein – even though it has nothing whatsoever to do with what I'm working on; but it might be wonderful....
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