Program Notes for Caravaggio (Jarman, UK, 1986)

In one particularly stunning sequence from Derek Jarman’s 1986 film Caravaggio, the screen is split in two: on one side, we see Caravaggio’s 1601 painting Cupid, and, on the other, an actor playing the part of the model. As Caravaggio’s creature is frozen in playful repose, Caravaggio’s model -- and Jarman’s actor -- contorts and flirts, poses for both Caravaggio’s and our pleasure. The very idea of the model and the act of modeling lies at the heart of Caravaggio: When do traditional historical models need renovation or renewal, and how do certain artistic or pioneering individuals serve as alternative models of resistance and difference? Just as Caravaggio used himself as a model for such paintings as Young Sick Bacchus (1593) and Bacchus (1595), so Jarman uses the life and times of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio as a model for himself. By splitting the screen between Caravaggio’s Cupid painting and the film in action, Jarman brings the two artists’ work into close quarters, and not on accident. Although the writer of the film’s story, Nicholas Ward-Jackson, originally envisioned this film to be directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, it would seem that Jarman was fated to stand at the helm of this production.1 Derek Jarman began as a student of painting at the Slade School of Art in London2and insisted on labeling his movies not as such or even as films but rather as “moving pictures.”3 In the publicity push for the film, Caravaggio’s American distributor, Zeitgeist Films, stresses those connections between the two artists by asserting that “[i]n some ways, Jarman’s CARAVAGGIO is as much about the artist Derek Jarman as the early seventeenth century painter who was so influential and yet so scandal[ous]....”4 Jarman’s controversial interventions involved providing “a bracing antidote to the Masterpiece Theaterization of British Cinema”5 while at once pioneering what would become the New Queer Cinema movement. (In 1994, Jarman died of the AIDS virus, but not before documenting his disease and decline in the 1993 film, Blue.) Both Caravaggio and Jarman strained against institutional constraints and used the paintbrush or the camera to “queer” the very straight (or strait-laced) society that offered them protection and patronage. Jarman’s patron came in the form of the British Film Institute, which funded Caravaggio’s original release in the United Kingdom. With the BFI’s investment in such a project so proven, the question becomes for our double features: Where is England in Jarman’s Caravaggio? Some of Jarman’s later films, including The Last King of England (1987) and Edward II (1991), contend more directly with a mythical or idealized English past. In a less explicit way, Caravaggio’s treatment of power, corruption, and hypocritical conservative mores in the 17th century operate as an oblique critique of Thatcherite England. That said, Caravaggio is less invested in the examination of national identity than a historical past that persists into the present, and a timeless modern spirit that can be traced back into the past. Writes Bette Talvacchia:

1

Michael D. Klemm, “Three Films By Derek Jarman”, CinemaQueer.com , February 2009. 2 Dave Calhoun, “The Genius of Derek Jarman, Time Out London . 3 Klemm, “Three Films.” 4 Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio [Press Release]. Retrieved from . 5 Ibid.

Caravaggio[‘s]... inventive dialogue with the past... with the inclusion of contemporary costumes and props in the mise-en-scene of a historical narrative. The choice, though initially stemming from severe financial restrictions, was exploited as a visual means to imaging ideology. The past was concretely shown to be linked to the present...6 It is by Jarman’s purposeful affiliation of past and present through the presence of electric lights or a typewriter illustrates that Jarman not only, as one critic wrote, “br[ings] classicism to pop,”7 but further invites contemporary social criticism into the typically staid genre of the historical biopic of the inspired genius. – Annie Berke

6

Bette Talvacchia, “Historical Phallacy: Derek Jarman’s ‘Edward II’’”, Oxford Art Journal 16.1 (1993), 112128, here 112. 7 Calhoun, “Genius.”