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I hear the old gods sighing
At the start of June, I had this idea of reviewing strictly queer movies for Pride, but then the defining characteristics of the month turned out to be insurance wrangling, medical problems, political horror, and helping friends move, and I do not know if it will happen. Nonetheless, last night ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks and I watched Derek Jarman's Sebastiane (1976), which we had been talking about since 2011. Full of naked male bodies and colloquial Latin, it lives up wholeheartedly to its big gay classical reputation. And if you are thinking of double-featuring it with some swords and sandals, you might want to think again. It is weirder and more mysterious than most films about the ancient world, never mind about Christian saints. It is violent and numinous. It's grounded in sea, sand, palm fronds, incessant winds. Strigils. Gilded frisbees. Jokes about Cecil B. DeMille. Jarman announced himself right from the start.
Sebastiane is the vocative of the name Sebastianus; it is an address, a call across time to the saint who is not yet a saint when the film opens, just the Captain of Diocletian's Praetorian Guard, a wiry, young dark-bearded man (Leonardo Treviglio) as spare and beautiful as an icon of the Christ he claims to worship, although the God for whom he will die in the desert sun of his exile—pierced ecstatically with arrows, the whole world bent to the moment of his martyrdom—feels increasingly more pagan and syncretic, pain-hallowed and transcendently narcissistic. Exiled to a harsh, remote outpost by the emperor whose favor he lost with a gesture of compassion, he is loved by his fellow soldier Justin (Richard Warwick), mocked by the disgraced courtier Maximus (Neil Kennedy), and desired by his commanding officer Severus (Barney James), and turns away from all of them into the solitary contemplation of himself and his God, the languorous sluice of water over hot hard-muscled skin, a rippling silhouette of reflection in the green shallows of a rock pool, the burning blue gulf of the sky out of which a figure credited as "Leopard Boy" (Gerald Incandela) who looks for all the world like Dionysos in a spotted panther skin, his thyrsos shimmering against the lens flare of the sun, circles Sebastian staked out on the sand and without a word moves on, leaving behind him a sensual hymn of burning caresses and kisses like molten gold, "punishments . . . like Christ's promise." Sebastian has already been flogged by Severus; his sun-scorched body will be scoured with sand. Eventually there will be arrows, gliding home with the soundless inevitability of a dream. Poor Severus, with his rock star's aureole of golden hair and his strong sun-pinked face as beautiful in its northern way as Sebastian's. His problem is not that he loves another man—not in a setting where bored, horny soldiers joke about sex with and between women as much as they joke about sex with and between men, where some of the most sensual screentime is devoted to the gleaming, entangled flesh of Janusz Romanov's Anthony and Ken Hicks' Adrian as they make love in the crystalline splashes of the pool—but that nothing he can do to the man he loves, not to wound him, not to please him, not to destroy him, means anything compared with that illimitable ravishment of light. His climactic, forceful plea is met with laughter, hardly saintlike: "You think your drunken lust compares to the love of God . . . You impotent fool. You'll never have me and you've never had me." Unlike God, who already has and always will. All Severus' desire can do is render up its object unto his rival.
Sebastiane was Jarman's first feature film as director; it was co-directed with editor Paul Humfress and co-written with producer James Whaley and it is the only one of his films I've seen that feels even a little like anyone else's. Its charged, documentary eye on the ancient world owes a debt to Pier Paolo Pasolini's Edipo re (1967) and Medea (1969). The decadent jubilee of the Emperor Diocletian recalls the masque of Louis XIII in Ken Russell's The Devils (1971), for which Jarman was production designer. It's still very much Jarman's own. It has his look of paintings come to life, his precision of color even in a dry, sharp landscape of dunes and stones and scrub. (London plays Rome for the first five minutes; Sardinia plays the remote edge of empire for the rest of the film.) Time slips in Sebastiane as it does in all of Jarman's films. The garrison with its barracks and watchtower has been ruined since the time of the Romans, but these Romans live in it as though its walls are freshly whitewashed, its stones not yet softened by millennia of hot salt air. In the fancy-dress riot of Diocletian's court, we saw gilded laurels and loin-wraps and togas galore and then the notorious Mammea Morgana ("After their triumph, the whole regiment marched into her and got lost") is played by punk icon Jordan just as if she'd lounged over from SEX or Jubilee (1977) with her bleached bouffant and raccoon eyes. The music throughout is Brian Eno's, minimalist electronic washes and glass-chiming bells. It may take a moment to realize that the object the soldiers are skimming back and forth on the beach is not a discus, but it's really not. The screenplay was translated into Silver-ish Latin by Jack Welch and it is as needed mystical, coarse, erotic, and funny. I thought Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part 1 (1981) had originated the Oedipus/motherfucker joke, but no, it looks like it was Sebastiane. None of this should work any more than Elisabeth Welch in The Tempest (1979) or the Martian in Wittgenstein (1993). It all works. It doesn't feel like pantomime or reconstruction; it feels raw and quotidian and uncanny and true. No one in this ancient world quite thinks the way we do, no matter how recognizable their emotions. No one caught in the drag of a myth can be entirely realistic. The blood is stage blood, the arrows a practical effect. The body is the pivot and the body is real.
The ending proves a point I had suspected after seeing Liam Gavin's A Dark Song (2016) earlier this year, a mostly exceptional movie about ritual magic and grief that almost lost me at the climax when it pulled out the CGI after ninety minutes of building its atmosphere of dread and divinity through a rigorous avoidance of special effects. I thought it should be possible to make an angel as terrifying as Rilke says with nothing more than the way the camera looked at it. In the last minutes of Sebastiane, the very simple use of a fisheye lens warps the landscape into the globe of the earth, the earth itself into the witness of Sebastian with his wrists bound and his head flung back and his body pierced with seven arrows as one by one each man who martyred him kneels, even Maximus who spent the bath scene complaining about the declining quality of the orgies in Rome, even Severus at last. The world alters and we see it. Everything else is men standing around in ninety-degree heat, probably getting sunburned. The palm branch bends like a banner in the wind. I don't like the idea of running out of Derek Jarman, but the alternative is never watching The Garden (1990) or Blue (1993) or a lot of Super 8, never again letting him change the inside of my head as he changed so much of the world outside. Saint Derek of Dungeness with his own plague arrows, his own Apollo and Adonis. This martyrdom brought to you by my devoted backers at Patreon.
rushthatspeaks and I watched Derek Jarman's Sebastiane (1976), which we had been talking about since 2011. Full of naked male bodies and colloquial Latin, it lives up wholeheartedly to its big gay classical reputation. And if you are thinking of double-featuring it with some swords and sandals, you might want to think again. It is weirder and more mysterious than most films about the ancient world, never mind about Christian saints. It is violent and numinous. It's grounded in sea, sand, palm fronds, incessant winds. Strigils. Gilded frisbees. Jokes about Cecil B. DeMille. Jarman announced himself right from the start.Sebastiane is the vocative of the name Sebastianus; it is an address, a call across time to the saint who is not yet a saint when the film opens, just the Captain of Diocletian's Praetorian Guard, a wiry, young dark-bearded man (Leonardo Treviglio) as spare and beautiful as an icon of the Christ he claims to worship, although the God for whom he will die in the desert sun of his exile—pierced ecstatically with arrows, the whole world bent to the moment of his martyrdom—feels increasingly more pagan and syncretic, pain-hallowed and transcendently narcissistic. Exiled to a harsh, remote outpost by the emperor whose favor he lost with a gesture of compassion, he is loved by his fellow soldier Justin (Richard Warwick), mocked by the disgraced courtier Maximus (Neil Kennedy), and desired by his commanding officer Severus (Barney James), and turns away from all of them into the solitary contemplation of himself and his God, the languorous sluice of water over hot hard-muscled skin, a rippling silhouette of reflection in the green shallows of a rock pool, the burning blue gulf of the sky out of which a figure credited as "Leopard Boy" (Gerald Incandela) who looks for all the world like Dionysos in a spotted panther skin, his thyrsos shimmering against the lens flare of the sun, circles Sebastian staked out on the sand and without a word moves on, leaving behind him a sensual hymn of burning caresses and kisses like molten gold, "punishments . . . like Christ's promise." Sebastian has already been flogged by Severus; his sun-scorched body will be scoured with sand. Eventually there will be arrows, gliding home with the soundless inevitability of a dream. Poor Severus, with his rock star's aureole of golden hair and his strong sun-pinked face as beautiful in its northern way as Sebastian's. His problem is not that he loves another man—not in a setting where bored, horny soldiers joke about sex with and between women as much as they joke about sex with and between men, where some of the most sensual screentime is devoted to the gleaming, entangled flesh of Janusz Romanov's Anthony and Ken Hicks' Adrian as they make love in the crystalline splashes of the pool—but that nothing he can do to the man he loves, not to wound him, not to please him, not to destroy him, means anything compared with that illimitable ravishment of light. His climactic, forceful plea is met with laughter, hardly saintlike: "You think your drunken lust compares to the love of God . . . You impotent fool. You'll never have me and you've never had me." Unlike God, who already has and always will. All Severus' desire can do is render up its object unto his rival.
Sebastiane was Jarman's first feature film as director; it was co-directed with editor Paul Humfress and co-written with producer James Whaley and it is the only one of his films I've seen that feels even a little like anyone else's. Its charged, documentary eye on the ancient world owes a debt to Pier Paolo Pasolini's Edipo re (1967) and Medea (1969). The decadent jubilee of the Emperor Diocletian recalls the masque of Louis XIII in Ken Russell's The Devils (1971), for which Jarman was production designer. It's still very much Jarman's own. It has his look of paintings come to life, his precision of color even in a dry, sharp landscape of dunes and stones and scrub. (London plays Rome for the first five minutes; Sardinia plays the remote edge of empire for the rest of the film.) Time slips in Sebastiane as it does in all of Jarman's films. The garrison with its barracks and watchtower has been ruined since the time of the Romans, but these Romans live in it as though its walls are freshly whitewashed, its stones not yet softened by millennia of hot salt air. In the fancy-dress riot of Diocletian's court, we saw gilded laurels and loin-wraps and togas galore and then the notorious Mammea Morgana ("After their triumph, the whole regiment marched into her and got lost") is played by punk icon Jordan just as if she'd lounged over from SEX or Jubilee (1977) with her bleached bouffant and raccoon eyes. The music throughout is Brian Eno's, minimalist electronic washes and glass-chiming bells. It may take a moment to realize that the object the soldiers are skimming back and forth on the beach is not a discus, but it's really not. The screenplay was translated into Silver-ish Latin by Jack Welch and it is as needed mystical, coarse, erotic, and funny. I thought Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part 1 (1981) had originated the Oedipus/motherfucker joke, but no, it looks like it was Sebastiane. None of this should work any more than Elisabeth Welch in The Tempest (1979) or the Martian in Wittgenstein (1993). It all works. It doesn't feel like pantomime or reconstruction; it feels raw and quotidian and uncanny and true. No one in this ancient world quite thinks the way we do, no matter how recognizable their emotions. No one caught in the drag of a myth can be entirely realistic. The blood is stage blood, the arrows a practical effect. The body is the pivot and the body is real.
The ending proves a point I had suspected after seeing Liam Gavin's A Dark Song (2016) earlier this year, a mostly exceptional movie about ritual magic and grief that almost lost me at the climax when it pulled out the CGI after ninety minutes of building its atmosphere of dread and divinity through a rigorous avoidance of special effects. I thought it should be possible to make an angel as terrifying as Rilke says with nothing more than the way the camera looked at it. In the last minutes of Sebastiane, the very simple use of a fisheye lens warps the landscape into the globe of the earth, the earth itself into the witness of Sebastian with his wrists bound and his head flung back and his body pierced with seven arrows as one by one each man who martyred him kneels, even Maximus who spent the bath scene complaining about the declining quality of the orgies in Rome, even Severus at last. The world alters and we see it. Everything else is men standing around in ninety-degree heat, probably getting sunburned. The palm branch bends like a banner in the wind. I don't like the idea of running out of Derek Jarman, but the alternative is never watching The Garden (1990) or Blue (1993) or a lot of Super 8, never again letting him change the inside of my head as he changed so much of the world outside. Saint Derek of Dungeness with his own plague arrows, his own Apollo and Adonis. This martyrdom brought to you by my devoted backers at Patreon.
no subject
Astonishing review. Thank you.
Nine
no subject
You're welcome. It was an astonishing movie.
no subject
no subject
Enjoy! The BFI just put it out on Blu-Ray, if that makes it easier to find.
(That is a great icon for this conversation.)
no subject
no subject
Thank you!
As far as I can reconstruct, Jarman imposed himself irresistibly on my awareness in 2008 and everything since then has been a process of finding his movies. He is much more available on U.S. home formats now than even eight years ago when we started actually watching him. I am really glad of it. For a while we were just reading his books and I had a bootleg of The Angelic Conversation that I thought was just the soundtrack. Sebastiane turned up this month on FilmStruck in a bundle for Pride, so it was a no-brainer that we were going to watch it, but it was rewarding in ways I had not expected, which I think is true of all of Jarman's films. The Garden still doesn't have a Region 1 DVD release.
no subject
no subject
Thank you.