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I didn't know I was dead till I was fifteen
Because I wasn't conscious enough to do it justice last night, I wanted to write more about Derek Jarman's Jubilee (1977), but I'm not sure I can get a better description than a gorgeous cut-up flier of a film. It is documentary of the ways in which the people at the forefront of London's punk scene dressed and the music they listened to. It is satirical in its extrapolation of incipient Thatcherism into a combination anesthetized media state and literally London's-burning dystopia. It is framed by Elizabethan magic, so that under its skin you can see The Tempest (1979) shifting to find shape. And every time you think it has settled into one of these modes, it sideswipes itself with a moment of violent nihilism or a mirror-flash of the numinous or aimless, affectionate larking-about and there's the scissor edges and the bricolage—it doesn't all feel like the same film and I'm not sure it's meant to. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks called it a found object. It seems to have been filmed a bit like one. I find it fascinating that it was Jarman's second movie, because it feels like the natural next step from his Super 8 shorts. (Of course, I'm not sure how else he could have followed up a debut entirely in Latin and mostly in the nude.) I am sorry that Ian Charleson in later life disclaimed his involvement with it, because I will never again be able to watch Chariots of Fire (1981) without remembering him naked in bed with Karl Johnson—"My brother's great, isn't he?"—or forget that his first line in a feature film was "You clammy slag, you've sat on the KY with your fat arse!" I agree with Rush that someone should actually enter Jordan's tits-out, trident-brandishing take on "Rule, Britannia" in the Eurovision Song Contest, because we think it might win. I am not describing this film at all. Go read Tilda Swinton. Read Jarman himself, if you can get hold of Dancing Ledge (1993). The other phrase I keep coming back to is very angry William Blake, but that will only tell you some of it. People are not pretty when they die. But look how the light goes away.
rushthatspeaks called it a found object. It seems to have been filmed a bit like one. I find it fascinating that it was Jarman's second movie, because it feels like the natural next step from his Super 8 shorts. (Of course, I'm not sure how else he could have followed up a debut entirely in Latin and mostly in the nude.) I am sorry that Ian Charleson in later life disclaimed his involvement with it, because I will never again be able to watch Chariots of Fire (1981) without remembering him naked in bed with Karl Johnson—"My brother's great, isn't he?"—or forget that his first line in a feature film was "You clammy slag, you've sat on the KY with your fat arse!" I agree with Rush that someone should actually enter Jordan's tits-out, trident-brandishing take on "Rule, Britannia" in the Eurovision Song Contest, because we think it might win. I am not describing this film at all. Go read Tilda Swinton. Read Jarman himself, if you can get hold of Dancing Ledge (1993). The other phrase I keep coming back to is very angry William Blake, but that will only tell you some of it. People are not pretty when they die. But look how the light goes away.
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I agree with Rush that someone should actually enter Jordan's tits-out, trident-brandishing take on "Rule, Britannia" in the Eurovision Song Contest, because we think it might win.
I think Eurovision was lost when Ireland entered Dustin the Turkey and didn't win. Actually, that's not altogether true--I think Eurovision was lost from the very beginning.* That said, I'd be very much delighted if this should happen.
*Despite spawning Riverdance.