Journal Article

Jarman's Renaissance Cinema

MacCabe, Colin

2011

Overview

This article traces the development of Derek Jarman's interest in the Renaissance and its articulation in five of his films:  Jubilee (1977),  The Tempest  (1980),  The Angelic Conversation  (1985), Caravaggio  (1986), and  Edward II  (1991). It considers the impact of his formative education at King's College, London, on his later cinematic work, emphasising his long-held contemporary, rather than antiquarian, fascination with the Renaissance and its relation to art and sexuality in the modern world. The article's analysis of the continuous and complex links between past and present in Jarman's oeuvre focuses largely on his overriding concerns with the treatment of homosexuality, and the extent to which these are centralised in  Edward II  in particular, where Marlowe's text is significantly distorted to further the director's political agenda. In his continued interest in the transition from the medieval to the modern, Jarman, the article argues, remains central to the project of screening Elizabethan drama, even twenty years after his death.

• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press,Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subject: Bean, Sean / Dench, Judi / Jarman, Derek (1942-1994) / Motion pictures / Movies / Renaissance art / Swinton, Tilda