The Pain and Glory of Derek Jarman’s “Politically Furious” Masterwork

Theo Rollason’s poignant new film, premiered at Venice, assembles a portrait of the director’s radical activism through behind-the-scenes footage of Edward II – “He made a huge difference to a lot of people’s lives”

In the spring of 1991, British artist and gay rights activist Derek Jarman was working with a close team of collaborators to bring Christopher Marlowe’s 16th-century play Edward II to the screen. It was the midst of the Aids crisis, and Section 28, legislation prohibiting the public “promotion” of homosexuality, had been passed in the UK a few years before. Jarman, who had publicly announced his own HIV diagnosis, mixed the medieval and contemporary eras in his bold reimagining of the play, which turned a historical drama about the love between the king of England and court favourite Piers Gaveston into a radically stylised rallying cry against homophobia.

The atmosphere of creative spontaneity, mischief and spirited defiance on the production was captured by Seamus McGarvey, a young Irish cameraman who would go on to become an Oscar-nominated cinematographer. His footage had lain, largely forgotten, in a cupboard until it ended up in the hands of London-based archivist and filmmaker Theo Rollason, who was alerted to its existence by a friend and has crafted, from the dozens of hours of material, an electrifying vérité, in-the-moment documentary. 

“Edward II was a very personal film to Derek. All of his films were, but that one especially,” says Rollason, the day after Queer Edward II’s enthusiastically received world premiere at Venice Film Festival. Jarman’s postmodern, punk-edged and erotic take on Marlowe (“find a dusty old play and violate it,” he once cheekily described his approach), stars Steven Waddington, Tilda Swinton and Andrew Tiernan, and is staged in a stripped-back concrete bunker. Synth-pop star Annie Lennox serenades the parted lovers, there are naked sailors in the castle bed, and OutRage! protesters play Edward’s loyalists, their placards declaring that desire is not a crime.

In 1994, several years after the production of Edward II, Jarman died, but he “lives on in the protest movement”, says Rollason. While Jarman’s legacy as a maverick filmmaker has often been talked about, they wanted to focus the film primarily on his political life. History turns in cycles, and the struggle against homophobia in Jarman’s time is echoed 35 years on, in resistance to the overturning of hard-won LGBTQ+ rights under authoritarian regimes around the globe today. “What resonates most is that sense of things going backwards, the sense of gains being made that now are being lost, which we have to fight to keep,” they say.

“Derek was one of the first public figures in the UK to say that he was HIV positive, and it made a huge difference to a lot of people’s lives. In my opinion, it was the driving force behind his radicalisation in this period, because he knew he didn’t have a lot of time to live, and he knew that a lot of people were in a similar situation to him, and didn’t have the support or confidence he had gained throughout his life. He became a spokesperson at a time that was really difficult, and put you under a lot of pressure and scrutiny.”

Queer Edward II is remarkable as a time capsule of the solidarity and creative openness on Jarman’s set, borne of a lack of compromise and tough financial limitations. “Watching those rushes felt kind of like an alternative film school,” says Rollason. “It was a big family to some extent. They found a way of working that was closer to repertory theatre than traditional cinema, where they would just start working, it didn’t matter if they had the money yet.”

We see the production’s vulnerability to being shut down by legal action, when OutRage! activists confront pop star Cliff Richard, who was rehearsing for a gospel tour next door, to try to out him, and the tabloid press get wind of it. “I was interested in how high the stakes were for a lot of the activists, and showing a bit of that. There was a lot of humour in the OutRage! protests, but also a lot of anger and pain, and Derek carries all of that with him,” says Rollason.

In one of a number of lively, free-ranging conversations that resurfaces in the documentary, Jarman, a trained painter known for his theatrical flair and experimental sensibility, says that his reason for making films was not simply vanity, but law reform, and to offer solidarity. But, Rollason elaborates, Jarman was not necessarily an activist first and an artist consequently: “What I’ve learned from him about this concept of art before activism or activism before art is that it doesn’t really have to be like that. And when he is saying that law reform is all that really matters, I think he’s being a bit cheeky and polemical. For him the art does matter. But he knew he didn’t have to sacrifice art for politics or politics for art. He knew there was a way he could make something creatively satisfying and politically furious, something instructive and educational and also beautiful and emotional. It doesn’t have to be oppositional.”