Derek Jarman: A Biography

18. Movietown

18 Movietown Now I am sailing on this rocking chair to where tomorrow washes the pavilions of today along a still straight treeless road.1 As a token of his friendship with Jarman, Michael Pinney of Bettiscombe Press had used a photograph of a gathering at Bankside on the front cover of Nota Bene, his most recent collection of poetry. On the back, in Jarman’s own handwriting, was Jarman’s phrase ‘Thru the Billboard promised land’. Pinney now offered to publish a matching volume of the somewhat portentous poems Jarman had written in his early twenties. Like Nota Bene, A Finger in the Fishes Mouth would have a silver cover and feature Jarman’s handwritten phrase on the back. On the front would be a Wilhelm von Gloeden photograph of a young boy with his finger in the mouth of a flying fish. To plan the edition, Jarman and Pinney met at Bianchi’s, one of Jarman’s favourite Soho restaurants, where they decided which of Jarman’s poems were worthy of print: a total of thirty-two poems, each illustrated by a reproduction of a postcard from Jarman’s own collection. Unfortunately, the printers chosen to print the collection were Christian and baulked at the postcard selected for ‘Christmas 1964’: that of a priest being pleasured by a nun. The offending image had to be put inside an envelope and inserted afterwards. Despite the opportunities thus offered for notoriety, the collection received no publicity. After a poorly attended reading and a valiant but doomed attempt by Pinney’s niece to subscribe it in university bookshops up and down the country, it joined Savage Messiah in more or less vanishing from view. The ‘still straight treeless’ road into tomorrow was proving anything but straight – although, to borrow from Jarman’s most recent attempt at writing, neither was it without promise: Movietown marked the frontier of the Billboard Promised Land, and as the Begum and her two guests drove along the super highway, it gradually grew darker, and the lights stretched out on all sides. Now everywhere were huge neon signs which winked messages at the traveller . . . In between the boards were great screens, held by fine silver wires, which showed movies for which, explained the Begum, shouting over the music, the City was famed, and from which it got its name.2 As soon as Savage Messiah was in the can Jarman, with Patrik Steede as driver, set off on a trip to Italy in a second-hand timberframed Tudor Austin they nicknamed ‘Hilton’. In Italy Steede’s interest in all things masochistic was engaged by the many images he and Jarman saw of St Sebastian, the painfully martyred saint. Within days, he had ‘dreamed up the idea of writing a film’3 about Sebastian’s life. While never going so far as to commit much to paper, he nevertheless began talking up a storm – and since homelessness had reduced him to living in a tent at Bankside, Jarman was the principal recipient of his enthusiasm. Another enthusiast was Marc Balet, an American architectural student who owned and was adept at using a super-8 home-movie 178 Derek Jarman camera. Balet, in London for the summer, visited the ‘Andy Warhol of London’ at the suggestion of a mutual friend. As the two men sat talking in the summer sun, feet dangling out of the studio window to catch the breeze coming off the river, Balet described his camera to a spellbound Jarman. Depending on the model, the super-8 camera of the seventies could vary considerably in terms of sophistication, but what all models had in common and what appealed to the penurious and technophobic Jarman was that, because the camera had been designed for home use by amateurs – super-8mm was a special amateur gauge which superseded the standard 8mm gauge – it was easy to deploy, portable and cheap to run. To make a film, you had simply to point the loaded camera in the right direction and press the button. As you moved from shot to shot, you would automatically build up a film that was effectively being edited in the camera, although you could also edit the film afterwards in the conventional manner if you wanted to alter the order of your shots. The film could be cranked through the camera at one of five speeds and, once processed, played back at any...