War Requiem

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.

Maybe it would have helped to have listened to the music first and more often. At times I would try to follow the poem/lyrics and just get lost.

Other times I would watch Tilda Swinton, and then go back and time her. Six whopping minutes of watching her run through her emotions. Sorry this was a breaking point for me... It reminded me that she does a sleep in a museum exhibit sometimes, and sort of made me dislike all actors.

Snowballs and pianos and soldiers, that was quite a scene, but it's small humanity gone wrong within the framework of war is lost in the bombast of the soundtrack for me.

I did find the use of the gruesome footage towards the finale had an interesting effect. Other footage was used throughout but typically cannons and shots from the trenches paled in comparison to some of those shots towards the end, that many viewers might have a difficult time with. I know I did, on two levels.

First it made me move from disliking actors to disliking humanity. War is failure but never more blatantly so than seeing the anguish and destruction of a single man, no matter what his uniform indicates. But again these images, like so many other lingering scenes, went on long enough to alter their affect from powerful to overpowering. Instead of feeling the loss of the individual, I felt like I was being thrust into a viewing of Faces of the Dead (or whatever that cult film is called which I have no desire to see).

The opera itself was torture enough for me. With time and exposure, I could perhaps appreciate it more, or become a fan of it. Not so with the carnage of war.

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.

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.

Jarman to a T: Brilliant, atmospheric, imagistic, eccentric, and sometimes homo-erotic. An incredible blend of one of the great 20th century musical works on (or rather against) war and the cinematographic art.

I've seen this film twice now. Some of the comments given by other reviewers seem to miss the point of the film- it is dark and sometimes jarring. Jarman uses historic footage, color and colorization as a technique to refocus the viewer's eyes and thoughts. Jarman is not interested in narrative so much as building a series of images that take the poem and music to a new place of understanding.

Perhaps this film is not for everyone- but then I would love to tie every politician to his or her chair and force its viewing.