“The shadow of this time”: Punk, Tradition, and History in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978)

Derek Jarman filmed his visionary, ultra-low-budget dystopian satire Jubilee in London in 1977, during a period which saw both Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee celebrations and the furore around the Sex Pistols’ single “God Save the Queen.” This essay reappraises Jubilee (1978), and its place within Jarman’s film works and thought, through (at least) three intersecting prisms. First, Jubilee remains unrivalled as an ambivalent, both creative and critical, response to the 1970s punk and Jubilee “moment.” Second, in relation to Jarman’s wider oeuvre, it appears more document than invention: a personal (even autobiographical) work whose ethic and mode of production, as much as its textual aesthetics, situate it clearly within his wider practice. Third, Jubilee is exceptional for its provocative, complex use of English history, summoning and (re-)deploying Queen Elizabeth I alongside other historical and Shakespearean figures from the early modern period in a strategy of what one reviewer describes as “disembowelling the present through the memory of the past.” With these perspectives in mind, this essay revisits Jubilee’s past-present relations and rhythms with an emphasis on its late twentieth-century contexts. These reveal Jubilee as a text in which early modern echoes and influences collide with the postmodern, but also double back on themselves to serve a further dialectical interplay–between the dystopic late-1970s “present” of Jubilee’s production and punk context, and the modern recent past of Britain’s 1950s “New Elizabethan” age. The film’s textual doublings further place Elizabeth I in cross-temporal juxtaposition with a wider multiplicity of “queen” figures. Jarman’s approach to history in Jubilee also anticipated his distinctive, non-binary invocation of the values of “tradition” and “history” a decade later during Britain’s politicised culture wars of the Thatcherite 1980s, in which Jarman became a key participant and a crucial oppositional voice.