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.

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.

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.

Derek Jarman's "War Requiem" is not a movie in the general sense of the term. The only dialogue is at the beginning. From there it's all images of soldiers, set to the tune of Benjamin Britten's* requiem of the same title. I'd say that the movie works as a look at the horrors of war. The focus is World War I, but it includes footage of later wars. The music offers a good contrast to the war, but at the same time it distracts.

This is the first Jarman movie that I've ever seen. It has its merits and its weaknesses. It turned out to be one of Jarman's final movies (he died of an AIDS-related illness in 1994). What the movie should do is force us to take a serious look at WWI. Not only did it senselessly kill millions and create a lost generation, but Versailles Negotiations set the stages for Hitler's rise to power, the Vietnam War, and the current bloodshed in the Middle East.

So the movie does a good job showing the horrors of the war, although I doubt that it's possible to portray to the full extent. It's not clear if Jarman meant for the emphasis to be on the war, or on the operatic soundtrack accompanying the scenes. The result is an OK, not great effort.

PS: Jarman, an openly gay man, fought Thatcher's proposed anti-gay laws in the '80s. I wonder what he would think now that the UK has marriage equality.

*Benjamin Britten's music more recently appeared in Wes Anderson's "Moonrise Kingdom".