| Overview: | Gilles Deleuze has rightly observed with regard to experimental cinema that "if there is a constant in this cinema it is the construction of a gaseous state of perception". Viewing and reviewing the super8 production of Derek Jarman one immediately senses the instability of the material, the elusiveness of time that flows and of attempts to stop it in the form of fragmentary memories, often through an exasperated and dream-like slow-motion sequence. From a continuous pattern of double exposures, refilming, grainy textures of light and colour, what emerges is a coagulation of a temporal dimension concretely lived on impromptu, casual and improvised sets but definitely the fruit of states of mind, of a predisposition towards the world that Jarman has nearly always represented in the form of myth. Evanescent images that are caught and blown up in the infinite instant of the sunset as in the breathtaking In The Shadow of the Sun (a film that will be released in the second DVD dedicated to the English film-maker), where the human figures break up in the yellow-orange refractions of sun and fire, engulfed by the reverberation and ringing spirals of the electronic score of Throbbing Gristle, subjects of TG Psychic Rally in Heaven. Once again, in this sort of underground video clip with warm tones (red and orange) dominating, the figure is broken up though mixed with images from a version of Dante's Inferno (still another reference to the element of fire and to myth). Very different to this is the iconography of Pirate Tape, a portrait of Burroughs "shadowed" during one of his London stays: again in this case, Jarman's super8 provides a sense of diary-like immediacy (impossible not to think of the "nervous" writing of the 16mm films of Mekas) which we find fully realized in Glitterbug within a more complex and variable structure.
In this sort of recapping of Jarman's artistic and human path--which covers a span of 15 years--moving images alternate with photography, regular speed film makes way for freeze-frame or fast motion sequences, colour follows black and white; the only element that re-groups this chaos of actions and emotions, of pauses during the making of the film (the cheerful atmosphere found on the set of Sebastiane) and of scenes of shared life, is the equally eclectic score by Brian Eno which in some cases follows the frenetic rhythm of the images and in others acts as a counterpoint creating distancing effects that are even greater than those produced by the visual aspect.
Even more than Blue--an elegy on the awareness of death portrayed by means of a total visual resetting--Glitterbug is the true epigraph to Jarman's cinema: vital, sunny, discontinuous, iconophilic, partly stateless (Jarman's sense of things and places was much more Mediterranean than British). A cinema which while destined by the mid-Eighties to a large international public, jealously conserved to the very end its aura of being experimental and "amateur" (in the most noble definition of the word, that of Brakhage).
It was thus right for Jarman to conclude his life with this collage of super 8 materials leaving as a final testament an existential and even meta-filmic reflection: it is not by chance that the opening image in Glitterbug is Jarman himself filming his reflection in a mirror (a series of his super 8 films is entitled The Art of Mirrors) while the final shots are a return to the past, to the beginning of his adventure when the artist-film-maker had his studio in Bankside. This is the "last look"--as the caption says--offered to the world by Jarman and conserved in its purity by the grainy (but eternal) support of his well-loved super 8.
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