"I remember the sea," Swinton begins, "I remember the garden I remember the cottage but most of all, I remember you, dear Derek." Jarman’s compulsive drive to visually realize his inner-life ensured his place as artist-as-icon, and Swinton and Julien aptly pay tribute to his singularity with their hermetic hagiography. These scenes can be as stuffy and ostentatious as the worst of Jarman’s work, though Swinton and Julien’s grief is genuine. The text is read as a voice-over, with Swinton thudding through steely London, dutifully staring at the camera as Julien accents her anomie with slow spasms of rack-focusing. Swinton conjures a paradise lost with her overheated direct address, sniveling that "things have gotten awfully tidy" since Jarman’s death. Julien has a wealth of primary images to draw upon for these segments, since Jarman so compulsively manifested his passions onscreen, if anything, hedging more towards autobiography as his career progressed. Derek traces the director’s career with straining linearity, not stopping to annotate any of Jarman’s armchair musings.
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The film’s narration is limited to the 1990 interview and frequent Jarman actress Tilda Swinton’s "Letter to an Angel" (available in full as an extra on the Edward II DVD). Julien, himself an art-school polymath, draws a tight circle around Jarman. This contrast between amour fou and a rigid sense of self-preservation rivets Jarman’s collected works, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from Derek, a documentary tribute which does not seek to enlarge or complicate the filmmaker’s legacy so much as succor its loss. Later, accompanying shots of nubile lads and Scorpio Rising (1964) leather, Jarman emphasizes his desire to have sex in public as a kind of a revenge on the society which would repress his desires-a neat enough corollary for the let-it-blurt axiom of his serviceable film style. Over the sepia, postwar home movies that Jarman worked into films like The Last of England (1988), the artist recounts getting caught in bed with a boy during prep school and being "raked over the coals" for it-something which caused him to redirect any sexual energy he had into painting and collecting into his twenties, and later persisted in the vacuum-sealed air of solitary fixation in which his films seemed to play out.
It goes without saying that sexuality is never far from the surface of Derek Jarman’s films, something he himself is clear enough accounting for in the lengthy 1990 interview which forms the back bone of Isaac Julien’s documentary portrait Derek. The World of 'Derek' at Frameline32 Max Goldberg June 25, 2008
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