Derek Jarman

Modern Nature

Chroma is a meditation on the color spectrum by the celebrated late artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman. From the explosions of image and color in In The Shadow of the Sun, The Last of England, The Garden and Wittgenstein, to the somber blacks of his collages and tar paintings, Jarman has consistently used color in unprecedented ways, making his ideas on the subject of interest to filmmakers, film audiences, artists and students alike. Blue, his most personal and innovative film, consists of a compelling soundtrack accompanied by a monochrome blue image and is, among other things, a comment on Jarman's diminishing eyesight due to AIDS. In his signature style, a lyrical combination of classical theory, anecdote, and poetry, Jarman takes the reader through the spectrum, introducing each color as an embodiment of an emotion, evoking memories or dreams. He explains the use of color in Medieval painting through the Renaissance to the modernists and draws on the great color theorists from Pliny to Leonardo. He writes too about the meanings of color in literature, science, philosophy, psychology, religion and alchemy. Read either as a work on color, or a distillation of Jarman's artistic vision, Chroma presents an exciting perspective on the subject.

Chroma

Blue

Published by the House Sparrow Press imprint of Prototype Press, Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping is Derek Jarman’s only piece of narrative fiction. Written in 1971, it is a surreal, fabular, lyrical work – a literary fairytale acid-trip road movie hybrid – the energies and details of which influenced much of his later work across media. The story serves as a foundational text, laying out many of the themes, images and styling of Jarman’s work in painting, film and design whilst also being haunted by the then emerging ecological crisis in its juxtaposition of the beauty of nature with the reckless consumption of modernity.

This edition features facsimile images of the story’s handwritten drafts from Jarman’s archive, a link to an exclusive audio recording of Jarman himself reading the story in full, and is comprehensively informed by a vivid foreword from Philip Hoare, a deeply researched afterword by Jarman scholar Declan Wiffen, and a warm memoir by the artist Michael Ginsborg, a close friend of Jarman’s throughout the period of the story’s writing.


Through The Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping 

s an impassioned and provocative celebration of gay sexuality, overflowing with his blunt and uncompromising philosophy of life in the age of AIDS. Photos.

A Saint's Testament

At Your Own Risk

""Paradise haunts gardens," writes Derek Jarman, "and it haunts mine." Jarman's public image is that of a filmmaker of genius, whose work, dwelling on themes of sexuality and violence, became a byword for controversy. But the private man was the creator of his own garden-paradise in an environment that many might think was more of a hell than a heaven - in the flat, bleak, often desolate expanse of shingle that faces the nuclear power station in Dungeness, Kent. Jarman, a passionate gardener from childhood, combined his painter's eye, his horticultural expertise and his ecological convictions to produce a landscape which combined the flints, shells and driftwood of Dungeness; sculptures made from stones, old tools and found objects; the area's indigenous plants; and shrubs and flowers introduced by Jarman himself." "This book is Derek Jarman's own record of how this garden evolved, from its earliest beginnings in 1986 to the last year of his life. More than 150 photographs taken since 1991 by his friend and photographer Howard Sooley capture the garden at all its different stages and at every season of the year. Photographs from all angles reveal the garden's complex geometric plan, its magical stone circles, and its beautiful and bizarre sculptures. We also catch glimpses of Jarman's life in Dungeness: walking, weeding, watering, or just enjoying life." "Derek Jarman's Garden is the last book Jarman wrote. Like the garden itself, it remains as a fitting memorial to a brilliant and greatly loved artist who, against all odds, made a breathtakingly beautiful garden in the most inhospitable of places. It will appeal to all those who are themselves practicing gardeners, as well as to the legions of admirers of an extraordinary man."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Derek Jarman's Garden

The filmmaker noted for Sebastiane and Edward II , among other works, discusses his life and art, detailing his sexual awakening, the libidinous excesses of the sixties, his experiences in gay culture, and more.

Dancing Ledge

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY NEIL BARTLETT Smiling in Slow Motion is Derek Jarman's last journal, stretching from May 1991 until a fortnight before his death in February 1994. Jarman writes with his trademark humour and candour about friends and enemies, as he races through his final years of film-making, gardening and radical political protest. Written from Jarman's Charing Cross Road flat, his famed garden at Dungeness, and finally from his bed in St Bartholomew's Hospital, Jarman meditates on his own deteriorating health and the loss of his contemporaries. Yet Smiling in Slow Motion is not simply a chronicle of illness and regret: it is, at its heart, one of endeavour, determination and pride.

Smiling in Slow Motion

A film maker meditates--with fear and with humor--on his gradual blindness due to aids and on the fact that he is going to die. By the director of the film, Blue, author of the book, At Your Own Risk.

Testamento di un santo. A vostro rischio e pericolo

In 1986 Derek Jarman started filming THE LAST OF ENGLAND, one of his most original and innovative films. It is also his most personal work the one with the strongest autobiographical content. Shortly after the filming began, Derek Jarman started work on this book which contains diary entries, interviews and notes from the script. Jarman writes of his extraordianary childhood and his kleptomaniac father; the process through which he came to terms with his sexuality; his early work as painter and designer; and finally his debut as a film director. Throughout, however, the reader will follow Jarman at his most serious as he writes of the corruption of the cinema industry, of the moral and personal consequences of the AIDS virus, and his perception of the down side of Thatcher's Britain.

Kicking the Pricks

En 1986 Derek Jarman supo que había contraído VIH. Contra lo que prescribía la época, no se ocultó: se volvió una de las pocas caras visibles de la epidemia y la convirtió en un desafío estético. Filmó seis largometrajes y realizó el último de ellos, Blue (1993), cuando ya había perdido la visión del ojo derecho y padecía serias dificultades para controlar sus movimientos. En este momento, un año antes de su muerte, escribe Croma. Entre las páginas de este original y ecléctico tratado sobre el color, que presta atención al fenómeno tanto en la más humilde de sus manifestaciones materiales, la obtención de pigmentos, como en las condiciones históricas de sus usos y sus diversas funciones en la historia del arte y las ideas, Jarman se despide de la biblioteca, de su jardín, del pasado, del sexo, de sus amigos, de la vida y también de ese color que ya apenas puede entrever. En un singular camino de elegía furiosa, propone a su lector una intimidad intensa y lacerante.

CROMA

Tilda Swinton

Stephen Farthing

Edward Webb-Ingall

Offers insight into the life and working method of the filmmaker, sharing drawings, photographs, poetry, and working scripts.

Derek Jarman's Sketchbooks

Chris Goode

James Whaley

Faith in the establishment collapsing everywhere. The far right on the march. Culture wars and random violence – all decked out in red, white and blue. But a spirit of anarchy hangs in the air, the desire to burn it all down and start over. Derek Jarman's iconic film captured punk at its giddy height: a riot of music, DIY fashion, and every kind of sex – with a little pyromania thrown in. Forty years on, this new stage adaptation of Jubilee remixes it for the social and political turmoil of 2017. The cast of the original production at the Royal Exchange Manchester was led by one of the film's original cast members, legendary punk warrior Toyah Willcox. Centred around a marauding girl gang on a killing spree and a time-travelling Queen Elizabeth I, it's a story of what happens when creativity and nihilism collide.

Jubilee

Stephen McBride

Ken Butler

Queer Edward II

A fascinating journal written after the creation of Derek Jarman’s The Last of England, covering the making of the film itself and the origins of its deeply autobiographical content. In 1986 Derek Jarman started filming The Last of England, one of his most original and innovative films. It is also his most personal work, with the strongest autobiographical content. Shortly after filming began Derek Jarman started work on this book, which contains diary entries, interviews and notes from the script. Jarman writes of his extraordinary childhood and his kleptomaniac father; the process by which he came to terms with his sexuality; his early work as painter and designer; and finally his debut as a film director. Throughout, however, the reader will follow Jarman at his most fervent, as he writes of the corruption of the cinema industry, of the moral and personal consequences of the AIDS virus, and of the evils of Thatcher's Britain.

Kicking The Pricks

'I planted a dog rose. Then I found a curious piece of driftwood and used this, and one of the necklaces of holey stones on the wall, to stake the rose. The garden had begun. I saw it as a therapy and a pharmacopoeia.' In 1986 artist and filmmaker, Derek Jarman, bought Prospect Cottage, a Victorian fisherman's hut on the desert sands of Dungeness. It was to be a home and refuge for Jarman throughout his HIV diagnosis, and it would provide the stage for one of his most enduring, if transitory projects - his garden. Conceived of as a 'pharmacopoeia' - an ever-evolving circle of stones, plants and flotsam sculptures all built and grown in spite of the bracing winds and arid shingle - it remains today a site of fascination and wonder. Pharmacopoeia brings together the best of Derek Jarman's writing on nature, gardening and Prospect Cottage. Told through journal entries, poems and fragments of prose, it paints a portrait of Jarman's personal and artistic reliance on the space Dungeness offered him, and shows the cycle of the years spent there in one moving collage. '[Derek] made of this wee house, his wooden tent pitched in the wilderness, an artwork - and out of its shingle skirts, an ingenious garden - now internationally recognised. But, first and foremost, the cottage was always a living thing, a practical toolbox for his work' Tilda Swinton, from her Foreword

A Dungeness Notebook

Pharmacopoeia

The Complete Film Script and Commentaries

Derek Jarman's Caravaggio

Derek Jarman was one of our most celebrated artists- painter, poet, film-maker - and the author of many books, including the bestsellers Modern Nature and At Your Own Risk. The film scripts collected here for the first time- including Akenaten, Jubilee, Bob-Up-A-Down, B Movie: Little England/ A Time of Hope, Neutron and Sod 'Em - confirm Derek Jarman's reputation as a leading independent film-maker.

Derek Jarman

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