Derek Jarman: A Biography

16. The Devils

16 The Devils In helping to introduce Jarman to the writings of Carl Jung, Anthony Harwood had doubtless noticed the extent to which his protégé could seem to live in psychic rather than physical time; how, on occasion, Jarman’s life could embody the more mystical precepts of the Swiss psychoanalyst. There can be few more striking examples of synchronicity – in this case combined with serendipity – than Jarman’s return trip from Paris in January 1970. It was an example, too, of the way work would frequently come looking for Jarman rather than the other way around. To borrow his own account: On the train waiting to return home, I noticed a girl carrying two heavy suitcases. Something about the way she was dressed and her long hair told me she was English, so I shouted out of the window that there was a spare seat in our carriage, and she clambered in. Throughout the eight hour journey we chatted about the theatre and painting. Janet Deuter was teaching at Hornsey in the experimental light and sound department. She was a friend of Ken and Shirley Russell so she told me of their new film project, The Devils. When we parted company she told me that she’d tell Ken about me, as she was convinced we would get along. I soon forgot about this. But a day later the phone rang and Ken asked me if he could come over – ‘tomorrow.’ OK I said. ‘I’ll be there at eight in the morning,’ and at eight he arrived in the freezing empty warehouse at Upper Ground. He was bowled over by the building, and while we huddled over mugs of tea I pulled out the odd drawing from Jazz Calendar and the Don, plus various other projects I had worked on. After looking at them briefly he asked me to design The Devils. I was quite taken aback by the suddenness of this offer, as I’d promised myself that after Don Giovanni I would never design again.1 I asked him if I could think it over, and he gave me twenty four hours. ‘In the meantime can Shirley come to tea to meet you?’ In the evening I rushed out to see Women in Love. On the strength of that, and conversations with a few friends, I decided to plunge in.2 For the Ken Russell of 1970, the tag enfant terrible is one that fits with peculiar neatness. In Russell, a baby-faced freshness and fondness for smocks were startlingly yoked to a mop of grey-white hair and true terribleness of reputation. That February, The Dance of the Seven Veils, his documentary on Richard Strauss, which featured, among other things, a symphony orchestra in the composer’s bedroom playing in time to the composer’s orgasms, would signal the end of a long association with the BBC and utterly horrify the era’s self-proclaimed defender of decency, Mary Whitehouse. Russell’s cinematic version of the D.H. Lawrence novel that Jarman had dashed to see was proving equally controversial, as would The Music Lovers, his soon-to-be-released take on the tortured Tchaikovsky. Russell’s new project, based on an Aldous Huxley book and a John Whiting play,3 was the true story of the religious and sexual hysteria which, in the early seventeenth century, gripped the Ursuline nuns of Loudun and led not only to the burning at the stake of the unfortunate Father Grandier, the libertarian priest on whom Sister Jeanne of the Angels had become fixated, but the demolition of the walls of Loudun by a wily Cardinal Richelieu thus presented 154 Derek Jarman with a pretext for wresting power from a city that had become too independent; a story, to quote Russell, of the ‘self-destruction of a citadel from within’.4 To design this citadel, the director was looking for someone as iconoclastic as himself. Though he liked what he saw of the drawings Jarman spread on his table with rather more care than the artlessness of his own account would suggest, it was probably Upper Ground that clinched the matter. To someone like Russell, who gloried in the most theatrical of images, the theatricality of the capes lining the walls of Jarman’s studio indicated that here was a kindred spirit. The admiration was mutual, and although Russell was markedly the older and more...