| Overview: | The Art of the Shadow and the Mirror. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the different Super 8s that Jarman made over a span of fifteen years. This may be explained by the fact that the substandard cinema of the British painter-filmmaker was a melting pot in which to continuously delve for new fusions. These sparked in their turn other films, just as transmutations that might have been produced centuries before in an alchemist's laboratory. Actually, single images, or entire sequences, transmigrate from one work to another, they change and are re-coloured, re-photographed, superimposed, one over the other, thus affirming the logic of an "expanded" cinema in all ways. This parallel with the alchemical process is not just a metaphor. The film In the Shadow of the Sun - as O'Pray explained so well - alludes to the philosophers' stone and is based on a book by William Gratacolle written in 1652, as well as Jungian Symbolisms. Yet beyond the references to magic and symbolism in this type of production Jarman's freest and purest also with respect to his narrative feature films composition is inseparable with technique. In other words, the true subject of the film is precisely the process adopted, the medium being the technique itself. Apart from Journey to Avebury (the only film that consists almost exclusively of static shots characterized by a yellow filter) the films we present are based on overprinting, an element Jarman used for the first time in The Garden of Luxor (1972).
It goes almost without saying that super-8s represent a territory of passage from painting to cinema. The transfer of motifs, subjects and processes from one medium to another is demonstrated by the above mentioned film on Avebury which could be associated, if we refer to the ambit of British experimental film of the early 70s, to the so-called landscape films by Raban, Welsby, Sercombe, etc. from which Jarman had taken a series of photographs during that same period. In super-8s, the reduction in speed of the filming/projection device makes the cinematic image resemble the pictorial one. Colour coagulates in the framing, solidifies, becomes a material that is modelled by light and duration. The artist, however, was not satisfied with simple slow motion, his aim was to totally re-think the temporal nature of cinema. Jarman forces the viewer to adopt a certain perceptive attitude when watching his shorts, thus stimulating a reflection on the relationship between stasis and movement. By slowing down the scanning speed of the frames, Jarman retransformed cinema back into photography again, his primordial medium. From another point of view therefore, Jarman's super-8s generated a moment of reflection on the binomial cinema/photography: Stolen Apples for Karen Blixen was in this way, an even more explicit experiment since the director created double exposures of images in movement on two photos taken of the novelist. Something similar occurred in his lunar Ashden's Walk on Møn, in which Jarman left the photo of a nebula as a backdrop upon which to "embed" other images.
Overprinting implies instability of vision, the pleasure of having images co-exist simultaneously and from which new associations, meanings, perceptions are triggered. Technically, superimposition closely resembles the vision of dream. Superimposition is like a shadow, a special shadow that only cinema (together with photography) can create. The other element that allows for the co-existence of multiple images within the same frame is the mirror. But in The Art of Mirrors Jarman does not show us the reflected image but rather uses this tool to stage a magical surreal ritual: a man in a tuxedo crosses the screen holding a mirror that sends reflections towards the camera's lens. The mirror then passes into the hands of a woman in an evening gown and black feathered hat who little by little approaches the viewer, as if hypnotizing us. This twenties-style scene takes us back to the Dadaism of artists such as Man Ray and the slightly mythic surrealism of Cocteau. The shadow and the mirror as Victor Stoichita wrote are two elements whose importance should not be underestimated in the history of western painting. And this, Jarman knew very well.
Other more complex rituals may be found in what was perhaps Jarman's substandard masterpiece of the entire period: In the Shadow of the Sun. The keys of a typewriter; a man takes some photos; a fire that burns and is superimposed upon human figures seen from the back, faces, and filtered landscapes; a man with a candelabrum walks, then claps his hands; a person with a white hood meanders through sand dunes; the silhouette of a plant; a gentleman with a top hat; finally, here comes death, a startling skull on a wide white dress. These are some figurative fragments, ghostly presences that emerge from a texture in constant transformation. Jarman's suggestive alchemical symphony is dominated above all by fire, the key element upon which all the others converge: from the water sparkles that seem like snow, to the gaseous clouds in the film's final part. All accompanied by Throbbing Gristle's extraordinary music, made of metallic reverberations and sonorous undulations - a liquid hypnotic music that perfectly underscores the ancient and modern, classical and experimental echoes which nourish Jarman's kinetic art.
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