Derek Jarman: Modern Nature on Film

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Derek Jarman: Modern Nature on Film

This special season focuses on the work of Derek Jarman (1942-1994), one of the most original and influential filmmakers of the past 50 years. It has been programmed in collaboration with The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, which is currently presenting an exhibition focused on Jarman’s work in painting, film, queer activism and writing. Digging in Another Time: Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature (Hunterian Art Gallery, until 4 May 2025), centres on the period c. 1987-1994, an intense and prolific phase of the artist’s life. During this time Jarman made several feature-length films, wrote a number of much-loved books (including the journals Modern Nature and Smiling in Slow Motion, as well as Chroma, a poetic study of colour), and exhibited his artwork at major exhibitions, including in Manchester and Glasgow.

Through March and April there are rare chances to see some of the most significant moving image works of this period in one-off screenings at GFT. The Last of England (1987), The Garden (1990) and Blue (1993) all reveal how Jarman’s experimental approach to film, steeped in his work with Super 8mm and in painting, yielded unique cinematic visions. Although very different in tone and formal approach, these three films share an impulse to address the contemporary world in which Jarman found himself in the late 1980s and early 1990s, shaped by neoconservative politics and the AIDS crisis. A double bill of In the Shadow of the Sun (1981) and Imagining October (1984) shows something of Jarman’s experimental approach to short films in particular and his affinities with avant-garde practice ranging from Sergei Eisenstein to Throbbing Gristle.

Derek Jarman’s 1986 film Caravaggio is also showing at GFT alongside this programme as the Queer Cinema Sundays screening for April.

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