Thoughts
on a film: Jubilee (1978)
Queen Elizabeth I, transported
back in time by the spirit-guide Ariel, conjured from the pages of
Shakespeare's The Tempest by the oracle, mathematician, astronomer and occult
philosopher John Dee, bears witness to an England in decline. Their year of
arrival is 1977; that of the later Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee
celebrations, and - perhaps as-notably - the year punk broke the mainstream; however,
it could just as easily have been later than that. Forty years into the future
in fact. In the present day...
Had these characters
arrived in the year 2017 - a year, which from the timeline of the film itself
would've seemed like the stuff of science-fiction; as divorced from the reality
of the everyday as Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey must have seemed to
audiences in 1968; or the setting of Blade Runner 2049 (2017) still seems to us
- they would've found a landscape even more ravaged by economic hardship, mass
unemployment, divides of multiculturalism, class exploitation, uneasy political
frustrations, violence and criminality; making the film less a product of its
time than a prescient future-shock; a vision of the future from the perspective
of this imaginary Queen Elizabeth I that is also a vision of our own present, drifting
beyond the brink.
Jubilee [Derek Jarman,
1978]:
Returning to Derek
Jarman's second feature-length work in the context of the world as it exists
today is revelatory, but also depressing. It's a film that I first saw as a
young teenager; caught as part of a late-night screening on the now-defunct UK subscription
channel Film Four Extreme. I hated it! I was new to Jarman's work and was yet
to be thrilled by his later achievements with Caravaggio (1986), War Requiem
(1989) and Edward II (1991); passionate, painterly, poetic films that benefited
from their gorgeous cinematography, imaginative production designs, eclectic soundtracks
and diverse performances. These were films that mixed the personal with the prophetic;
the political with the profane.
Jubilee seemed like none
of these things. From the perspective of someone then unversed in the
avant-garde or the legacy of Andy Warhol, this was a coarse, vulgar film, both
thematically and aesthetically. I was shocked, not just by its content, but by its
method of delivery; the unashamed, low-budget nature of the thing. As a child
weaned on Hollywood decadence, Jarman's frugal ingenuity, his gleeful borrowing
of high and low-brow institutions, the garish, post John Waters' impropriety of
the thing, was lost on me. However, looking at the film anew, with a much
broader appreciation of Jarman's other achievements, and in the context of
recent events, it's now clear that despite the low-budget nature of the film,
this is a work of great insight and lasting ideas.
Jubilee [Derek Jarman,
1978]:
In Jubilee, Jarman depicts
an alternate 1977 that seems ravaged by a third world war. Hitler is alive and
well, and with him the spirit of fascism still reigns supreme. A multimillionaire
media tycoon has bought and privatised the press, the entertainment industries,
the government and even the church. The character of Amyl Nitrite - one of the
nihilist punk protagonists at the centre of the film - rewrites history and
presents her findings to her followers. They become like news reports from some
imaginary present; the foundation of what we now call alternative facts; or literally
'fake-news.'
Amyl's reports are delivered
straight-faced and direct to camera. They appear like conventional news
bulletins from the BBC or similar channels, although the modern-day association
to this might be closer to the kind of populist vloggers that thrive on social
media platforms, such as YouTube and Twitter; presenting to their audience a
veneer of officious professionalism, faux-pathos and concern for the state of
the nation, while simply distorting the facts to vent their own highly
personalised, heavily biased opinion as truth.
Jubilee [Derek Jarman,
1978]:
Latest Atrocities in
Modern Art [Paul Joseph Watson/YouTube, 2017]:
In keeping with the
narrative of today, the future of Jubilee is a future where women have seemingly
taken control; where the men are either brutal enforcers or neutered servants.
Homosexuality is freely embraced; there is a sense of collective engagement
between the gang; a sense of trying to move towards something greater, even if
it's only destruction. These things are wonderful, but in the modern-day context
they become the nightmare of the alt-right/alt-left fear-mongering that now
exists in relation to things like the rise of fourth-wave feminism, cultural emasculation
(a scene of actual castration occurs), identity politics, the disintegration of
traditional gender roles, as well as feeding into the more deeply held
conservative attitudes about young people being debauched, depraved, lawless
and radicalised. Of course Jarman contradicts these things on many levels,
creating a much richer satirical commentary.
As with the society as it
exists today, the presentation of these things offers only a single narrative
that is always worth scrutiny. While the charismatic but brutal punk matriarch
Bod seems to run the gangs - commanding a level of respect from her female
associates while the men are reduced to the level of sexualised decoration -
Jarman shows us that the real power still rests with those that have always
wielded it; specifically rich, privately-educated men. His progressive
microcosm of the gang and their liberated way of life is contrasted by the way
the media, the government, etc is manipulated by the wealthy mogul Borgia Ginz,
or by the police who roam the streets carrying out wanton acts of violence
against anyone unwilling to pay-up.
It's as if Jarman was able
to look into the future and sees how these fears could at first take root
before manifesting into something far more insidious. It's an example of
Jarman's tremendous insight into the nature of the human condition; his ability
recognise that history repeats itself; that movements occur in waves, cyclical,
always recurring.
The England that Jarman
depicts may have been an exaggeration at the time of the film's production, but
it's taken on greater resonance when we see it in the context of the world as
it exists today. How organisations and institutions have hijacked issues to
further their own (often financial) agenda. How young people betrayed their
principles for fame and fortune. How fascism (which the early punk and new wave
music often flirted with, in iconography if not ideology) was able to regain
popularity, as people out of work and out of hope were coerced by the media into
find a new enemy. How the divide and conquer mentality has worked to pit us
against our neighbours, against our own communities, through envy, suspicion
and distrust. For the media the goal is to have us point the finger of blame at
those that are different, rather than to blame the bankers and the economists
and the politicians and the media itself. All of this finds a kind of
expression in Jarman's film.
This is a world of police
brutality, intimidation, corruption; violence for the sake of it; a world where
celebrity is the thing to aspire to; the cult of celebrity that builds on the post-Warholian
prediction that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, and
finding something of a precursor to the reality TV/social media fixation of 'status'
through popularity. Now imagine someone from the era of Queen Elizabeth I
seeing this landscape for the first time, without having watched our society
evolve to this particular point. The sense of shock that is felt by the
audience is intended.
Jubilee [Derek Jarman,
1978]:
Hate Crime Surged... [Alan
Travis/The Guardian, 2017]:
Jordan's Dance [Derek
Jarman, 1977]:
If the polemic here feels
like it straying into the realms of the Daily Mail and its tabloid-level outrage, then it's important to add
that Jarman's projection of a future England in decline is not intended as a
piece of fear-mongering, but merely as a hypothetical. He doesn't point the
finger of blame at his violent punks, but merely observes their interactions.
As in A Clockwork Orange - both the 1962 novella by Anthony Burgess and the 1971
film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick - which seems something of an influence, it
is the system that is the real villain, not the violent individuals caught up
in it.
A Clockwork Orange
[Stanley Kubrick, 1971]:
Jubilee [Derek Jarman,
1978]:
While the film depicts a
level of violence and brutality, there's always a sense of contrast found in
Jarman's work; a push/pull between oppression and liberation, between ugliness
and beauty, between conservatism and decadence. Politically Jarman appropriates
punk because it was current; because it was part of the then-tapestry of modern
Britain; but he stands apart from it. His depiction of the record industry is
brutal and depressing; his view of pop stars is cynical and perhaps even
condescending. And while the filmmaker creates a work that is every bit as
provocative, violent and aggressive as his punk subjects, there seems to be an
underlining yearning for something of the old England. An ongoing nostalgia for
Jarman for the England of his childhood; a romanticising of the Queen, as a
figurehead, of the Union Jack, or green fields and the post-war years. The
iconography that he returns to again and again, in films such as The Queen is
Dead (1986), The Last of England (1987) and the aforementioned War Requiem.
In Jubilee's most
beautiful sequence, Jarman takes the footage of a short film he produced a year
earlier called Jordan's Dance (1977).
Here, the titular actress (who here portrays the character of Amyl
Nitrate) performs a ballet recital among the rubble of the ruined dockyards.
Masked spectators, one naked, wearing the head of Michelangelo's David, watch
as she performs. The shutter and shake of the 8mm footage flattens the
perspective of the artist and the flames that surround her, creating the
impression of a graceful white swan - perhaps the swan of Avon; the
Shakespearian avatar as eulogised in the opening narration of The Last of
England, which died a syncopated death - performing within this raging inferno.
It's a moment that feels open to interpretation, and like Jubilee as a whole, seems
to burn with sadness and the promise of things that could never be.
Jordan's Dance [Derek
Jarman, 1977]:
The Last of England [Derek
Jarman, 1987]:
A decade after Jubilee,
Jarman would return to the same subject matter with his avant-garde masterwork
The Last of England. The first film project that Jarman undertook after being
diagnosed as HIV positive, The Last of England would strip away the narrative
necessities of the film in question to create a work that subjectively expresses
his own feeling of rage, concern and disappointment. Tearing away the mask of cinematic
convention, Jarman translates the still relevant themes of Jubilee into a kind of
audio-visual onslaught. Creating a mixed-media montage of contrasting
sounds and images, which allow the audience to feel something akin to the
artist's own perception of the world, as opposed to standing away from it and
studying it with an ironic eye.
Taken as a kind of
cinematic diptych, Jubilee and The Last of England have remained, in both
commentary and artistic approach, significant, necessary and singular creative
works.
