![\"Derek](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/2.jpg\")
Derek Jarman, The Union Flag in Flames during Jordan\u2019s Dance (1977). All images are \u00a9 2014 LUMA Foundation.<\/p>\n Derek Jarman, The Union Flag in Flames during Jordan\u2019s Dance (1977). All images are \u00a9 2014 LUMA Foundation.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a hazy aura of the unknown surrrounding Derek Jarman\u2019s Super 8 films from the seventies and eighties. Even for the more diligent of his students and devotees, the footage is hard to find. Not distributed like his feature films, they\u2019re glimpsed through his writing, in books about his work or maybe at the odd screening if you happen to hear about it. Some of them have never really been available at all. <\/i>Now, thanks to longtime champion of Jarman\u2019s experimental work James Mackay, that\u2019s hopefully about to change.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/43.jpg\")
A still from At Low Tide (1972). All images are \u00a9 2014 LUMA Foundation.<\/p>\n
When Jarman died, Mackay – a friend and collaborator – was left with a brown suitcase of film reels. JARMAN read the letters stencilled on its lid. Inside were about eighty titles, and Mackay set about trying to preserve every one. Twenty years on from Jarman\u2019s death, and with the help of the LUMA Foundation, the long restoration process is finished. Along with the films, Mackay has also compiled a book, \u201cDerek Jarman: Super 8<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n Jarman was given a Super 8 camera as a gift and made his first film with it, \u201cStudio Bankside\u201d, at the very start of the seventies. Until then, making \u2018home movies\u2019, as Jarman referred to them, was something his father did, a suburban pastime laden with all the normative associations such pastimes bring. For Jarman, though, this was fertile ground for him to get to work. During the years he worked with Super 8, he wrested the home movie from its conventional roots and made it his own.<\/p>\n The Super 8’s, like much of Jarman\u2019s work, can be frustrating. They often evade any clear message, are sometimes entirely impregnable, and hand you montage wherever you look for meaning. As Peter Fillingham observes in his essay in the book, its bound up with language – the films\u2019 repeated refusal of words and speech unmoors us.<\/p>\n What \u201cDerek Jarman Super 8\u201d <\/i>does best is embrace this awkward aspect of the filmmaker\u2019s work. The collections of striking stills, chosen by the contributors to the book, most of whom knew or worked closely with Jarman, don\u2019t try to explain anything away. As with any viewing of his work, comprehension sometimes hovers, then slips away. As Fillingham puts it, “I am bereft. Just at the point of understanding, of grasping the image… [it] disappears and I want it back.” The stills let you pause at least, setting each frame side by side with its successor.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Super 8 film turns fifty this year. When Kodak launched it on the market, it was a democratic step forward for filmmaking<\/a>. Not only easy to use, it was inexpensive, and the book recounts just how crucial this was to Jarman. It liberated him, setting him free from the watchful gaze of funders. With Super 8, he could be at his most experimental.<\/p>\n Once Jarman started making his own home movies, he began to capture countercultural London with an astute but casual eye. The wastelands by his home in Butler\u2019s Wharf became a makeshift studio, his friends his cast. When you watch them, or study the stills, you\u2019re immersed in a London now long gone, before AIDS and aggressive regeneration joined forces to change the city forever.<\/p>\n There\u2019s an immediacy to the Super 8 footage, and a frequent intimacy too. Mackay\u2019s commentaries are valuable here, and his insights shed precious, often unexpected light on the films. He mentions, for instance, that Jarman first started using a handheld camera when he filmed \u201cKen Hicks\u201d. <\/i>Nine minutes of slow footage, it studies Ken as he strips off his clothes, rubs oil into his skin then ritualistically removes it. Knowing it\u2019s the first film Jarman made without the steadying presence of the tripod inflects it, sensuously inserting Jarman\u2019s own body into the portrait.<\/p>\n At the end of his life, when Jarman\u2019s refusal of narrative film <\/a>came full circle with “Blue” (1993), <\/i>he wanted to make a rich compilation of his Super 8 films, revisiting his most personal medium in the final stages of the illness that would kill him. The result, \u201cGlitterbug\u201d,<\/i> which Mackay helped him make, was, in many ways, the start of a process that ends with this book. It required Jarman, now almost blind, to trawl through hours of his own archive and he never saw the finished film. What it showed, however, was the significance the reels held for the filmmaker, and how much he loved what contributor Sarah Turner calls their \u201calchemy of mistakes\u201d. It\u2019s not that Jarman chose montage over meaning as a matter of preference, but that in the end it offered him a pathway to it. As he once said of his approach to film, \u201cthere are no big plans which have to be fulfilled\u201d. Standing back and looking at his entire oeuvre, it\u2019s the Super 8’s that finally prove this to be true.<\/p>\n “Derek Jarman Super 8” by James Mackay is published by Thames & Hudson<\/a> at \u00a319.95<\/strong><\/p>\n MORE:\u00a0 Cyprien Gaillard’s New Film “Nightlife”<\/a> at Spr\u00fcth Magers<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/187.jpg\")
A still from Gerald\u2019s Film (1975), an elegiac portrait of Gerald Incandela, filmed among the ruins of a decayed Victorian boathouse in Essex. All images are \u00a9 2014 LUMA Foundation.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/137.jpg\")
A still from My Very Beautiful Movie (1974), a film that captured Fire Island in New York. All images are \u00a9 2014 LUMA Foundation.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/106.jpg\")
A still from Sulphur (1974). All images are \u00a9 2014 LUMA Foundation.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/154.jpg\")
A still from Sloane Square: A Room of One\u2019s Own (1974-76): a removal party celebrates a forced eviction. All images are \u00a9 2014 LUMA Foundation.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/117.jpg\")
A still from Journey to Avebury, a landscape film saturated in gold that maps the great Neolithic stone circle and its surroundings at Avebury. All images are \u00a9 2014 LUMA Foundation.<\/p>\n
Text by Imogen Greenhaigh<\/a><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n