Robert Mills. Derek Jarman’s Medieval Modern.
Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2018.
Reviewed by Mark
Turner (mark.2.turner@kcl.ac.uk)
Since his death
in 1994, Derek Jarman has tended to remain an uncertain figure in the culture
landscape of contemporary British art and film. Still mostly known as a leading
avant-garde, artist’s filmmaker, he was also a painter, writer, set designer
for theatre and music video, gardener and activist. Part of the same generation
as David Hockney, he never attained anything like that other queer artist’s
acclaim or fortune, and he worked usually beyond the influence of major
cultural institutions, not under the radar exactly, but certainly in his own
terms. Because he ranged across media, Jarman can be difficult to pin down and
locate in a tidy narrative of contemporary culture, and it is precisely the
challenge of that untidiness that is the focus of Robert Mills’s brilliant book
on the artist.
As explained in
the compelling and succinct Introduction, Derek
Jarman’s Medieval Modern is about many things. It is a book about Jarman,
but one that differs from all others in its attempt to range across the
artist’s multidisciplinary oeuvre. It
is also a book about the “medieval,” how we understand this word today and the
uses to which it is put. The coinage that Mills uses to such good effect is the
“medieval modern,” a multifaceted use of “medievalism” that “disrupts or
dissolves the boundaries of art, medium, time and discipline” (1). Mills draws
on the idea of the “medieval” as “a fluid and floating category of otherness,
one that operates spatially and morally as well as temporally” (1). Thus, Mills
partly learns from Jarman that the “medieval” is not bounded by period, rather
it is a concept that opens up the many ways of encountering the past that also
speak to us in and about the present while pointing to the future, too. As he
writes:
The
‘medieval modern’ of my title harnesses the temporal asynchrony that such
dialogues between past and present potentially engender. As a thought
experiment, it asks what happens when (with Derek Jarman, but also more
broadly) we think these categories together. It forces a reflection on the
mutually reinforcing differences that separate the medieval from the modern,
even as it highlights their potential for overlap and continuity. Medieval with modern; medieval before modern; medieval as modern; medieval not modern – my contention is that all these permutations can be
discovered in Jarman’s art. (2)
There is no
singular or easy relationship between the “medieval” and the “modern” and Mills
resists thinking about them through, for example, a dialectical model. These
two signifiers – which are at once ideas, historical periods, artistic modes,
adjectives – rub up against each other all the time, but often in disruptive or
even contradictory ways. Jarman’s work helps us to see those disruptions but
without a need to sort them out.
The book is
organized in four chapters, which cover the breadth of Jarman’s work. Chapter 1,
worth discussing a bit more at length here, explores the many ways the medieval
comes into view in his films, writing and art. In part, Mills follows Carolyn Dinshaw
in thinking about the ways the present “touches” the Middle Ages, and Jarman
provides an excellent case study in ways of touching the past. Mills begins
with a fascinating discussion of Jarman’s attitudes to religion, specifically
medieval Christianity. On the one hand Jarman rails against the sexual
repression, homophobia and violent, “‘murderous tradition which still
contributes to legislate against us’,” but, on the other hand, medieval
religion provided a deep reservoir for his imagination – saints’ lives, for
example – often explored for its queer subtexts. What comes across strongly in
this chapter is the sheer extent of Jarman’s engagement with the medieval, from
reading primary texts (Langland, Chaucer, etc.) to academic criticism (history,
art and architectural history, literary criticism), and the many, varied ways
the medieval enters his work. Mills is excellent at unpicking the knotty ways
the medieval threads throughout Jarman’s work. To take just one constellation
of works: a music video for the Pet Shop Boys’ “It’s A Sin” references Carl
Theodor Dreyer’s silent film from 1928, La
Passion de Jeanne d’Arc; an unrealized script, Bob-Up-a-Down, about sexual repression; his own “Miss Crepe
Suzette” drag costume for the 1975 Alternative Miss World; and numerous passing
references in the diaries – each of these draws on the history and iconography
of Joan of Arc specifically, using her life and story and its reimagining by
others to various ends, not always with the same idea in mind.
Towards the end
of Chapter 1, Mills explores recent thinking about “queer time,” what Elizabeth
Freeman has described as “a visceral sense of the past stubbornly lingering in
the present” (29), a refusal for the past simply to go away, or be replaced, in
the way linear understandings of time might suggest. According to Mills, Jarman
made films that can “usefully be understood as ‘medieval’ when it comes to
imagining alternatives to linear or sequential concepts of time” (37). The Garden (1990), Jarman’s exploration
of Christ’s Passion, filmed in and around his cottage and garden at Dungeness
on the coast of Kent (aka, “Garden of England”), highlights our “sense of estrangement
from measured time,” with a soundtrack that at one point highlights the relentless
monotony and tyranny of clockwork and its rhythms (35). The story of Christ is
interrupted by the measured ticking of the passing of time. Such temporal
disruption is also found in Edward II
(1991) when a set-piece music-video style scene interrupts Marlowe’s plot (Annie
Lennox memorably singing “Every Time We Say Goodbye”). By the end of the film,
Mills suggests, there is a feeling of the “medieval” being co-present with the
“modern,” without a distinct sense of “then” and “now.”
Chapter 2
continues to develop ideas about time and history, while also pointing to
Jarman’s deep engagement with art history. Anachronism becomes a key idea here,
not only the strategic ways Jarman appears to run roughshod over strict
chronology and period authenticity, but also the way anachronism poses a key
challenge to academic thinking and research:
Much
scholarly energy has been dedicated to locating works of art and literature
within the moments in which they were created, but what if the temporality of
the works in question was not simply confined to the horizon of their creation?
What if, in keeping with Jarman’s vision of a temporarily more capacious art
history, we pursued the possibility of a Middle
Ages out of bounds? (47)
In Jarman’s film
Caravaggio (1986), to take one small
example, a scene in which the famous painter contemplates one of his works is
punctuated sonically by the sound of a steam train in the distance and “through
this jarring mix of visual, verbal, and aural signifiers, audiences are
confronted with a collision of different time frames” (59). In Edward II, Jarman’s ideas for the set
invoke the Cloisters Museum in New York, itself a kind of “ersatz historicism,”
and the action of Marlowe’s reimagined play is interrupted by a gay activist
protest. There is temporal layering here which calls into question any stable
notion of a settled, specific, historical moment that can be referenced
directly. Sometimes through collage, sometimes through palimpsest, Jarman’s strategic
unsettling of historical “accuracy” brings the viewer into the films in often
demanding and unexpected ways, designed to interrogate the encounter with the
past rather than smooth it over.
Ruins and
gardens are at the heart of Chapter 3, with illuminating discussions of the way
these two ideas overlap and intersect, in wastelands and other fragmented landscapes.
Old and Middle English poetry inform Jarman’s vision of the garden – Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls, for example,
and the Old English poem The Ruin –
which often speak to feelings of loss, but also of a kind of queer love of the
outcast. Jarman takes this medievally inflected way of seeing and looks at the
scrappy coastal landscape which surrounds his cottage in Dungeness. The sea kale,
for example, seen by others as a weedy nuisance, is recuperated by Jarman in his
own garden and in his films, in a conscious effort not to weed things out and
to make us pay attention to things we too often overlook. In Chapter 4, Mills
links Jarman’s work to the figure of the medieval wanderer. “On the one hand,
wanderers arouse a sense of dread,” Mills writes:
Fear
of difference and the unknown, or anxiety about unstable borders. On the other
hand, they afford a glimpse of alternative worlds and customs, giving rise to
feelings of wonder or fascination. Occasionally those who have been displaced,
whether forcibly or voluntarily, may also awaken in beholders a sense of pity
of demands for charity. (137)
In his poems and
films, Jarman shows that he knew the myths of the wanderer well, from a range
of sources including poems like Chaucer’s ‘Pardoner’s Tale’ and Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner through to
Carl Jung’s psychological archetype. The figure of the displaced wanderer and
the questing knight find their way into his Super8 films from the 1970s. In Corfe Film (1975), a series of long
takes and tableaux, the knight’s quest is deconstructed, “exposing its
structures by highlighting the essential unattainability of the object of
desire – which also includes our own desire, as viewers, to extract meaning
from what we see” (153). A voiceover in The
Garden states: “‘I offer you a journey without direction, uncertainty, and
no sweet conclusion. When the light faded, I went in search of myself. There were
many paths and destinations’” (153).
Mills’s “Afterword”
to the book offers a personal reflection on his thinking about Jarman’s life
and work. “How are my own medievalisms bound up with Derek Jarman’s,” he asks
(176). It is the supposed “errors” in Jarman – his getting historical facts
wrong; his persistent use of anachronism – that Mills notices and that lead him
to think critically about the strategic uses of “errors.” Furthermore, Jarman
helps him to understand that history is a “situated practice” to which we all
come with our own subjective dimensions. Mills first came to Jarman queerly,
that is, as a young queer man and a young queer medievalist. The “queer” and
the “medievalist” are ultimately not separate for Mills; in fact, they may be
one and the same. Certainly, as Jarman shows us, they have much in common. “‘The
Middle Ages have formed the paradise of my imagination’” (1), Jarman once
wrote. That imagination, so richly opened up by Mills’s outstanding book, is
neither one thing nor the other, neither just “medieval” nor “modern,” rather
the more challenging, uncertain, and perhaps generative “medieval modern” that
is shared with us here.
Mark W. Turner
King’s College
London
