Derek Jarman • United Kingdom • 1990 • A fierce polemic against discrimination.
Half waking dream and half fiery polemic, The Garden was born of director Derek Jarman’s rage over continued anti-gay discrimination and the delayed response to the AIDS crisis—he had been diagnosed HIV-positive in 1988. Starring Tilda Swinton, this uniquely kaleidoscopic film shows the filmmaker’s genius at its most coruscating, making space in its breadth of vision for an over-the-top Hollywood-style musical number, nightmare images of tar-and-feather queer persecution, and footage of the particularly menacing-looking nuclear power plant that overlooks Jarman’s own garden, the point from which his film begins, and a cherished spot which he must keep tending to even as his body begins to betray him.
Writhing with sorrow and anger, and yet so vividly alive to the loveliness of being, The Garden is a baleful and beautiful epistle from the brink of beyond. The Garden premiered at Stockholm, Moscow, and Berlin, where it won an Honorable Mention.
Up Next in Derek Jarman
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The Tempest
Derek Jarman • United Kingdom • 1979 • Shakespeare, Jarman-style.
Prospero the magician lives on an enchanted island with his nubile daughter, punishing his enemies when they are shipwrecked there. In Jarman's hands, Shakespeare’s final play becomes an original and dazzling spectacle mixing Hol...
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War Requiem
Derek Jarman • United Kingdom • 1989 • A spectacular interpretation of an orchestral masterpiece.
A moving interpretation of composer Benjamin Britten's groundbreaking 1961 orchestral masterpiece. Just as Britten combined the sacred Latin Requiem Mass with the searing unromantic war poetry of B...
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Wittgenstein
Derek Jarman • United Kingdom • 1993 • A modern, theatrical retelling of Wittgenstein.
Born in 1889 to wealthy family, Ludwig Wittgenstein was a prodigy, educated in Vienna and Manchester before settling into a career as a philosopher at Cambridge, where he taught alongside Bertrand Russell and ...
