Focus on DEREK JARMAN: Sebastiane (1976)

Sebastiane is Derek Jarman's first feature film but it is not a great place to start a discussion of his work. He came to film relatively late in his truncate artistic life. He was a visual artist long before he took up with a camera. He was a set designer (most impressively taking star billing on Ken Russell's The Devils), then a short form film maker. He had almost 20 experimental short films under his belt before he even got to where I'm picking up.

Sebastiane is not the place I started with Jarman. That honour goes to Edward II, which I have very faint memories of seeing in the cinema but was probably just on SBS late one night.

Sebastiane is one of the only Jarman films I have seen before, though, and I have to say my reaction to it on second viewing is pretty much the same as the first:

PHWOARRR!!!

Way to get infantile with art. Actually, my first words on the matter (back in 2006) were:

Um, well... I couldn't really get over the suspicion that all the film was going to amount to was well-shot soft-core with English schoolboys, all grown up, showing off their Latin skills. 

I was first aroused (suspicion-wise) during the slow motion sequence where Leonardo Treviglio spent six minutes pouring water over his naked body.  

So yes, Jarman proved the existence of God!

The comments came in a post adorned with fleshy pictures, which is not surprising. Sebastiane is an overtly visual film and one intensely focused on composition. In this, Jarman executed a debut feature that spoke to all his artistic proclivities. Narrative, it appears, wasn't one of them. He and co-director Paul Humfress work in broad brushstrokes using the Sardinian landscape and the invariably naked bodies of their comely cast to intimate the eponymous saint's banishment and eventual martyrdom by target practice.

Jarman here would seem less concerned with history than with general historical eroticism. His religious persecution isn't an super pressing issue either; Sebastiane, played with coquettish piety by Leonardo Treviglio doesn't spout much in the way of Christian dogma or Sun God paganism (the two beliefs he manages to straddle); instead, Jarman sets the saintly Sebastiane up as a pacifist, thereby casting him (in the eyes of his squadron) as less than masculine. What counts as masculine in this deserted outpost, though, is not all that straightforward. There's a lot of manly slap and tickle going on. There are many very "tactile" friendships. There's a lot of mutual physical appreciation.

Not for Sebastiane though. His disregard of the corporeal extends to his approach to sexual gratification. He's a lover but not a sexer, which sets him up for a fall when it comes to his commanding officer, Severus (played with gruff '70s pretty boy splendour by Barney James - not my bag btw). A less carnal passion is put out there by Sebastiane's bestie, with whom he shares long, pining, stare-filled moments down by the water. Out and about, other soldiers are going the whole way (quite explicitly for 1976 - apparently Sebastiane was the first non-porn film to feature a fully erect penis, something that requires extended fact checking, I'm sure). Suffice to say, Jarman's film is super-queer. Unapologetically so. And in the scheme of things, given how matter-of-factly he puts it out there, and how forcibly he de-centres homosexuality as the sole cause of the hero's demise, it is also groundbreaking in the history of queer film.

This situates the film's antagonist in an interesting position. Amongst all this pinging testosterone Neil Kennedy's a bullish, copper-nosed Claudius, still reads as a prototypical homophobe, too incensed by his own thwarted desires to be able to function as a human being. But in a landscape where homosexuality (or at least manly man on man sexuality) is accepted, even welcomed, it is the thwarting that is important, not the desire. Jarman basically calls him out as a douche and it his insecurity that is dangerous. Claudius' power is his ability to drag others into the externalisation of this incapacity to be a decent human being. Others play along either through fear or for their own ends.

The increasingly violent social pressure (paired with Sebastiane's refusal to put out to his Sun God stand-in) end in the story's iconic conclusion, something Jarman pulls off with exceptional (disturbingly) erotic grace. The tableau-esque framing, with each arrow being notched in a frozen moment of time, gives the climax an horrific tranquility, punctured only by Sebastiane's understated,  yet somehow ecstatic, writhing. It is one of the moments (of many) that transcends the film's budget and augurs artful, sexually-expressive greatness that is to come.

Next up: Jubilee.

This post contributes to Director Focus: Derek Jarman.