Derek Jarman: A Biography

27. Sod ’Em

27 Sod ’Em Having attended one of its first London performances as a student, and having edited The Last of England to its strains, Jarman had ‘often thought of the possibility of visualizing Britten’s War Requiem without fixing it like a butterfly on a setting board and thereby diminishing it’.1 Thanks to Don Boyd, whose Aria had given the producer access to the powers that be at Decca, this now looked a real possibility – as long as they used the Decca recording of the original performance without tampering in any way with the music, and as long as Jarman’s script met with the approval of the Britten estate. Arriving at an appropriate scenario was not easy. In effect, what Jarman (who worked on his various drafts of the script with, among others, Boyd and Tilda Swinton) was having to do was make a feature -length silent film; either that, or a very long music video. The storyline had to be self-evident, mirroring not only the music, but the eight Wilfred Owen poems which, together with the words of the Latin mass, formed an integral part of the requiem. Deciding to film in a mixture of 35mm, super-8 and video that incorporated ‘found (or documentary) footage’, and to focus on soldiers and nurses, since everyone knows what it is that soldiers and nurses do, Jarman and his cohorts fashioned a ‘loose story’ around ‘Owen, a Nurse, and the Unknown Soldier’.2 The nurse wheels an elderly veteran along a path. The veteran shows the nurse ‘an Edwardian miniature hidden in his wallet of a young nurse whom she resembles’.3 We hear the veteran’s voice reading part of Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’, the poem with which the requiem concludes: the truth untold, The pity of war, the pity of war distilled. What follows is, as it were, the veteran’s memories sieved through Owen’s poetry. In a tableau consciously echoing the composition of Charles Sargeant Jagger’s Royal Artillery memorial at Hyde Park Corner, the nurse grieves over the body of Owen, which lies on a stone altar. Super-8 returns us to the tranquil past. Owen and his mother hang out the washing. The nurse ‘plants a garden by the light of a lantern in the dusk’.4 The film then alternates between further glimpses of simple domesticity enshrined in an Arcadian past and a series of tableaux from the First World War: soldiers being drilled, digging trenches, preparing for battle, returning from battle, sleeping; a vaudeville Britannia beckoning a young, drum-beating Owen to war; a group of nurses playing blind-man’s-buff in an empty hospital ward; a surreal snow-filled room in which a German soldier kills the unknown soldier and Owen the German soldier; the burial of the unknown soldier; a re-enactment of ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’, Owen’s savage retelling of the story of Abraham slaying his son, used by Jarman to symbolise Owen’s own death in the trenches at the hands of all the fathers and overfed captains of industry who send their young sons to do battle on their behalf; the unknown soldier, now in the form of Christ, wearing a crown of thorns and carrying Owen’s body; a recreation of Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection; wreaths of red poppies that become a basket of white poppies in the closing moments of the film. Punctuating these tableaux is found footage of war throughout the century, from 1914 until the present day. Boyd, for his part, was walking the producer’s treadmill. In Sod ’Em 417 conjunction with Liberty Film Sales, a distributor, the BBC, in the guise of their new Independent Planning Unit, whose first feature this would be, were persuaded to put up a budget of £670,000, barely enough to make the film, or so Boyd maintained, unless Jarman agreed to a deferred payment. Against a percentage of eventual profits (never to transpire), the acquiescent director was given a token ten-pound note, which he pasted into a draft of the script, writing alongside it: ‘This is my fee for the script.’5 Meanwhile, in his role as citizen, Jarman was anything but acquiescent in the face of certain developments on the political front. In 1987, the Conservatives enjoyed their third consecutive victory at the polls. A year previously, they had successfully abolished...