Promoting Intellectual Film Culture Since 1973
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Glitterbox: 4 x Derek Jarman
Caravaggio (1986)
Wittgenstein (1993)
The Angelic Conversation (1985)
Blue (1993)
Born into the repressed era of post WWII England, Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman dove into the world of art, the world of painting, to try and make sense of the things around him and inside him. It was this very art that would eventually bring the twenty-eight year old to the attention of filmmaker Ken Russell, who would ask the young artist to design his new film The Devils (1971) and thus, a filmmaker was born.
An artistic successor to Cocteau, Anger and Pasolini and one of the fathers of “New Queer Cinema”, Jarman would create eleven features, ranging from narrative biopic to experimental doodling, and a seemingly infinite number of 8mm shorts – or “home movies” as he has so often called them in interviews – over a career that would come to such a tragic end in 1994, when the director would finally succumb to the AIDS that had ravaged his body and soul for the last eight years of his life.
Wholly a much-marginalized figure in cinema – too experimental to be considered mainstream yet too artistically conservative to be welcomed with open arms into the avant-garde – Jarman has not often received the respect due to such a creative personality as he. His films, merely a minor glitch on the overall map of world cinema and film history as a whole. Perhaps Glitterbox, a beautifully mastered collection of four of the director’s diversely succulent works (plus one posthumously compiled retrospective using the aforementioned “home movies” and the music of Brian Eno) produced and distributed by Zeitgeist Video will do something, however little, to remedy such a garishly undeserved oversight.
Glitterbox consists of two of Jarman’s more narrative arthouse films, Caravaggio (1986) and Wittgenstein (1993), and two of his more experimental works, The Angelic Conversation (1985) and his final film, the sad yet sublime Blue (1993). It is through this quartet of out-of-the-ordinary films, as well as a slew of historical interviews with not just Jarman himself but with all those who made up his cinematic family, that we can find what made up the most essential – and the most existential – of the filmmaker’s peculiar and intimate oeuvre. It is where we can find what longtime muse Tilda Swinton calls (in one of her special feature interviews) the “infectiously delightful” Derek Jarman.
Surely the most accessible of these four films is Caravaggio, the telling of the life of Renaissance artist Michelangelo Caravaggio. Set in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century Italy, and starring Nigel Terry as the titular artist and Sean Bean & Tilda Swinton as a peasant couple seduced by the master, Caravaggio may well be one of the most, for lack of a better term, mainstream of Jarman&rsquemains ambivalent. After threatening the Golden Gate Bridge, one of the monuments often listed as imperiled by foreign terrorist groups, The Hulk latches onto a military jet out of control to save this symbol of Americana. The image is reminiscent of King Kong harassed by planes atop the Empire State Building. However, in Hulk, unlike King Kong (1933, 1976), the symbol of American technological mastery is saved by the creature not the American planes—redeeming another image of airplanes penetrating another American icon, the World Trade Center in New York, on September 11. Again, the Hulk ’s allegiance vacillates and his sympathies remain unclear. Over-determined ideologically as a disgruntled worker, an angry minority professional outraged by the glass ceiling, a displaced child of the KMT, an Asian American targeted by racial profiling, and as a rebellious son unable to cope with the patriarchy, The Hulk can never represent a clear political position. Although Wen Ho Lee happened under Clinton, for example, General Ross reports to a young African American woman, resembling Condoleezza Rice, and she, in turn, reports to a president off on a fishing trip, resembling George Bush II. Just as the specific political administrations remain difficult to pin down in Hulk, the Hulk himself remains a figure of general frustration, as much in tune with the dilemma of teenage nerds who cannot get a date on Saturday night as with Wen Ho Lee, Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, or any other real or imagined threat to the U.S. government and the American nation. The Hulk is also something “more,” as David Banner enjoys reminding his son, since Hulk, additionally, concretizes the cutting edge of CGI. In many respects, he is less a character and more an “image,” computer generated, subject to the abilities and limitations of digital technology at Industrial Light and Magic.viii As a product, Hulk circulates as much as psychological drama, comic nostalgia, action adventure, and digital virtuosity as it does as any sort of ideological critique or political intervention.
Against the Hollywood Grain Perhaps asking Hulk to carry the burden of the complex interconnections between Taiwan and America within global film culture demands too much of the big green guy. In fact, other filmmakers operating somewhere between Taiwan and America have looked at this relationship more critically. Shu Lea Cheang’s Fresh Kill (1994) provides just one example of a film that resonates with Hulk in certain key respects. Filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang actually has quite a lot in common with Ang Lee. They have known each other for many years, and both spent a good portion of their careers in New York City. Because of the strong political, economic, military and cultural ties between Taiwan and the United States during the Cold War era, many in Lee’s and Cheang’s generation chose an American education either as a path to advancement in Taiwan or as an escape from the constraints of martial law, the rule of the KMT (Guomindang), and a conservative, Confucian, patriarchal cultural environment. In New York, both Lee and Cheang found a fecund environment for artistic exploration in film and video. In the feature film Fresh Kill,ix Cheang creates a science-fiction vision that links the cavalier treatment of nuclear waste and industrial pollution to global politics stretching from Taiwan’s Orchid Island to New York’s Staten Island. As in Hulk, Taiwan is imaginatively linked to the American military, corporate greed, and Western technology out of control. Arguably the most remote point under the jurisdiction of the Republic of China on Taiwan, Orchid Island is home to the smallest minority group, the Yami.x Because of its strategic importance, the island became an important military site under the KMT (Kuomintang) after 1949. In the early 1980s, controversy arose surrounding the dumping of nuclear waste on the remote island. The Yami successfully stopped the dumping and have been agitating for increased autonomy from Taipei. However, the development of tourism on the island has undermined some of the force of this movement. Through editing, Fresh Kill connects the urban spaces of Staten Island with the remote rural fishing villages of Orchid Island. However, more than just cleverly matched montage connects these spaces. The squatters' village in New York really does not seem that different from the fishing village on Orchid Island. Ang Lee has made a similar point in an interview: …Although their bodies are not in the United States, they are immigrants psychologically…What is the difference between living in Flushing, New York and Taipei? Except that one knows America better and sees more Americans, there is not much difference.xi Televisions, tee shirts, and tourists penetrate both spaces. Both environments allow for military and corporate dumping, and both suffer the contamination of these excesses of American capitalism. As Seth Silberman has pointed out in his analysis of Fresh Kill,xii Cheang's film fits into the category that Fredric Jameson has termed the "conspiratorial text." An argument can be made that Hulk fits within this category as well. For Jameson, the conspiratorial te |
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