War Requiem

Derek Jarman was the Enfant Terrible of British cinema in the 1970s with his provocative films Jubilee and Sebastiane. The latter having a costume budget of £20!

In the 1980s thanks to funding from Channel Four Films he flourished by making low budget films of varying quality in rapid succession. By this time he was getting more accepted by critics and some elements of the public but by now he was also diagnosed as HIV+.

War Requiem was partly funded by the BBC, a collaboration of music of Benjamin Britten (War Requiem) with images of war and conflict. Some of the scenes are recreated and dramatised whereas other scenes have been obtained from the Imperial War Museum. There is also poetry of Wilfred Owen who is depicted in this film by the actor Nathaniel Parker.

The film also has Tilda Swinton and Laurence Olivier in the opening scenes. In a sense looking at it now it is the passing of the torch from one acting generation to the next. This was Olivier's final film and it was with a future Oscar winner Swinton.

The film was to have no dialogue but once Olivier agreed to play the 'Old Soldier,' Jarman realised that he might as well give the legend some dialogue and he recites a poem by Wilfred Owen.

How successful the film is depends on your mileage as to whether you are a Jarman fan, like Opera or appreciate art-house cinema. The dramatised scenes are interesting but not wholly successful but they are beautifully lit and demonstrates what Jarman can do on a low budget. It helps that along with Swinton, Parker we have a young Sean Bean playing a German soldier.

However the inclusion of the old documentary footage is less successful as it just makes the film drag. You feel that you are just watching old film with music and some of it is not very interesting although Jarman did also include footage of modern wars as well such as Vietnam, Falklands and the Afghan war with Russia of the 1980s.

Still War Requiem is challenging, provocative, arty and displays the talents of a unique voice in British cinema.

A misguided attempt at a music video for Benjamin Britten's piece of the same name, "War Requiem" falls flat because of this very concept. To their credit, the filmmakers add or subtract nothing to the performance of the Requiem but rather present a montage of images to be seen along with the performance (which thankfully is top-notch). Unfortunately, the end result is a long almost MTV quality production which makes one realize how unbearably pretentious the phenomenon of the music video can be.

War Requiem is a work which invites personal involvement, so I can appreciate the obvious love and need to contribute which the filmmakers have for it, but Britten's music and Wilfred Owen's poetry speak so eloquently for themselves that this pretentious performance art approach merely detracts from them.

Music has been blended with film to incredible effect before: Greenaway's Prospero's Books, Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera and Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi spring to mind and I was naively expecting something of similar quality here. Instead I watched an appalling succession of tasteless, overwrought and prosaic imagery married with hysterical howls emanating from the bony profile of Tilda Swinton. Here the actors only served to detract from the music. The directors of the previous films were virtuosi and I think it requires something of that quality in editing, camera work and imagination: to actually add something to a piece of music rather than just take a ride on its tresses. As a backup plan I decided to concentrate more on the Requiem and found it peppered with sung passages of Wilfred Owen's poetry that do them no justice whatsoever.

I was watching War Requiem which is Derek Jarman's conception of images of the music of Benjamin Britten and the poetry of Wilfrid Owen and I thought this was a work better left to the imagination. Beautiful, but something I might imagine hearing it would be a lot different.

Newsreel footage of World War I and more contemporary conflicts are mixed in with live pantomime like performances of various players and singers including Laurence Olivier in his farewell performance. Olivier plays a wheelchair bound veteran of World War I in whose eyes all the images are seen.

Benjamin Britten's War Requiem was originally composed for the dedication of the new cathedral in Coventry, the old one as well as the town itself pretty much blasted to smithereens by Hitler's Luftwaffe. The words are by Wilfrid Owen, the various verses he wrote are put to Britten's music. Owen was killed almost exactly a week before the Armistice was signed in 1918. Oddly enough both men were as one British friend of mine puts it, 'as gay as green shoes'.

This is Jarman's vision, not necessarily mine, not necessarily your's. I think that art like this is best left to the individual imagination. But Jarman does a vision of terrible beauty as W.B. Yeats put it.

War Requiem is a vital film in Derek Jarman's filmography; seemingly handcuffed by a score with which he could not play around at all, Jarman could not work his sonic wizardry with his usual collaborator Simon Fisher Turner, or any others. However, here Jarman fused many of his passions and obsessions into one of his most personal statements: working with favorite actors, especially the intense and beautiful Tilda Swinton; using the shimmering, glorious Super 8 of home and play; collaging and staging and digging up artifacts to reposition and reexamine them; and composing image and cuts like a composer working on a new symphony. Dziga Vertov and Dovzhenko may have been working in this vein this decades ago, but if Jarman gives it a try today, the comparisons are to "music video"; naturally, no one is really paying attention if they're making comments like this. The intent and effect of works such as War Requiem (or The Last of England and The Garden) are virtually an antithesis of the shallow, splashy, and seizure-ridden style and pace of MTV and company. Jarman has advanced his uniquely cinematic aesthetic - somewhere between the work of a symphonic composer and a painter, working with light and celluloid instead of oils - in this work that treads a tightrope between narrative and poetic verse. So many sequences of this film are powerful and gutsy and utterly moving: the montage of war footage, building in rhythm and intensity with Britten's score; the tear-inducing shot of Tilda swaying to the music; the nurses playing "Blind Man¹s Bluff"; the smoke and flowers. Derek crafted one of his most hearfelt, original, and spontaneously lyrical movies in War Requiem; now it only needs a top-notch release on DVD.