Jarman

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

Today is the anniversary of Derek Jarman’s death. It was twenty-six years ago and from AIDS; or from ‘an AIDS-related illness’, as the WikiPedia likes to state.

Jarman isn’t very well known in Spain; to me, he’d been only a name until I moved here – in the Peninsula, the quota of gay filmmakers seems to be completed with Almodóvar. Jarman, however, was a polymath, much more than someone behind a camera. An artist, poet, writer, gardener, activist and something else I’m quite probably missing.

‘Different’ is overused to describe his films, whereas the most accurate adjective – equally repeated – is ‘unique’. What I love most about them is their bounciness. They have the smell of school plays, their passion and tenacity. There isn’t room for naturalism in Jarman’s world, but a void the audience should fill, like a child wearing a metal helmet who everybody understands is a medieval warrior. In Sebastiane, for instance, we only need to see a group of Roman soldiers playing frisbee on a deserted beach to understand their isolation and boredom.

After being diagnosed with HIV in 1986, Jarman moved from London to the solitude of Dungeness, a shingle beach in Kent punctuated with Victorian fishermen cottages. He bought one. A nuclear power station at the far end of the beach is the equivalent to the castle in Edinburgh I pass by every day. It was a brave decision moving there. Or reckless, or free, or desperate. Regardless of his motives, I doubt that many people were willing to move to within five-hundred metres of a nuclear power station barely a year after the Chernobyl tragedy. 

Jarman baptised the house Prospect Cottage in the days in which receiving an AIDS diagnose meant receiving a death penalty. My partner and I made the stereotypical gay pilgrimage to Dungeness last summer. The house has yellow window frames; its garden is as chaotic as it is harmoniously colourful. In our short walk around it on a very windy day, I couldn’t stop imagining Jarman doggedly working outside, prioritising the exquisiteness of a little flower over the fear of dying.

Prospect Cottage is different and unique. Like his films. More than a legacy, the garden is another of Jarman’s lessons: beauty as an attitude, a resolution, an obligation, an always necessary act of stubbornness. No matter what. 

(There’s currently a campaign to #SaveProspectCottage and make it a centre for artists. Visit @artfund for more info and wonderful pictures of a very handsome Jarman, as well as images and videos of the house and the garden.)