Actualités

Fire figures prominently in the passionate, furious films of Derek Jarman: the conflagrations that consume London streets in Jubilee (1978), the flares and torches held aloft in The Angelic Conversation (1985), the infernos that roar in The Last of England (1987), the flame-colored tresses of Tilda Swinton, who made her screen debut in Caravaggio (1986) and remained an indispensable collaborator until the director's death, at age 52, in 1994. BAMcinématek's complete Jarman retrospective — featuring all 11 of his features, several short- and medium-length works (many shot on Super 8), and music videos — provides a welcome, too-rare opportunity to marvel at the director's burning talent and inextinguishable energy. A pioneering force i...

BFI to show 78-minute film Will You Dance With Me? – shot by director in 1984 with video camera in gay club in east London

Almost exactly 20 years after his death, a previously unseen film by Derek Jarman has come to light, shot inside a gay nightclub in east London, and will be premiered next month.

At 78 minutes in length, the film is unedited, experimental footage that the avant garde director shot in 1984 at Benjy's, a former nightclub in Mile End to a soundtrack of, among other artists, Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

Jarman, inspired at the time by his newly purchased video camera, was exploring ideas for his film-maker friend Ron Peck, experimenting in how to capture dancing for Peck's feature film Empire State, made around three years later.

Peck decided to release the tape, entitled Will You Dance with Me?, to coincide with other events this year celebrating Jarman – a retrospective...

To kick off year-long celebrations of the life and work of film director Derek Jarman on the 20th anniversary of his death, Neil Bartlett explains why he will be holding an all-night party-vigil in King's College London's chapel

Anniversaries are strange things. They are meant to fix time in its proper place, but sometimes they seem to do just the opposite, bending and distorting it instead. Although I know for a fact that it is now a full 20 years since Derek Jarman died, I'm still finding this particular anniversary hard to credit. Is it really possible that somebody so productive and disruptive, so loquaciously and outrageously alive, can now be that distant?

Jarman's films – and later, his activism – were crucial points of reference in my generation's struggles to endure and enjoy life. Even before I had the good fortune to meet him in person, I intuited that here was a true ally,...

Maddening, sexy, disorientating – the work of the late Derek Jarman is as breathtaking and relevant as it ever was

This year's Edinburgh film festival may have been discussed in tones usually reserved for particularly gloomy wakes, but in the name of karma it only seems fair to note what it's done right. So consider this a compliment on the decision to invite guest curator Gus Van Sant to programme a short season devoted to the late Derek Jarman. Because while there's a steady stream of interest in Jarman's work via the DVD arm of the British Film Institute, there's also the vague but unshakable feeling that his name now enters the world's conversations as much in connection with his wondrous Dungeness garden as his films.

Not to mention his posthumous place in the landscape of British cinema. As with so much of the eternal debate around Jarman, I can't escape...

By Michael Atkinson

To each fiery cinema individualist his own honorial DVD box set: here we have a reacquaintance . or initiation, for the babies of the Reagan/Thatcher era . with the unique howl of Derek Jarman, dead in 1994 from AIDS at the age of 52, a career attenuated by the very same fate that ended up giving it such amperage. You'd never know it, but there was a time when British filmmakers, emboldened by punk culture, fueled by hatred for Thatcherite conservatism, and funded by the BFI and the new Channel Four, made outrageous, experimental, high culture vs. low culture collision movies, doped on structuralism and gender-bending and period-picture mockery. Jarman was the moment's jester prince; he never made a film you'd mistake for the work of another, or a film that doesn't manifest on the screen as an unpredictably impish riff on serious matters, Art-making and Sex and Death. Not to mention,...