Focus on DEREK JARMAN: Caravaggio (1986)

I can only presume that up until the release of Caravaggio, Derek Jarman was rather a niche concern in the British film industry. Too arty, too political, too queer to be considered viable as a film maker to be peddled with too much enthusiasm. Caravaggio was a surprise hit. Reading Jarman's reaction to the success of this film, it seems that he had exactly nil interest in being peddled, enthusiastically or not. The process of delivering a film as structured and as polished as Caravaggio was not to Jarman's liking. It basically wreaked havoc with his artistic output over the seven years it took to complete, something that didn't sit well with the director's profligate need to create.

So, while Caravaggio (I've heard) will stand as his most accomplished film by industry standards (and by box office and reputation-forging standards) it is an outlier in his oeuvre. I'd like to say I'll take arty queer politics over polish any day but Caravaggio's look is so magnificent that it's difficult not to yearn for more of the same.

That is not to say that Jarman's considerations here are any less virulent. He ensures the film's iconic subject retains (and reclaims) his provocative existence. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, played in his youth by a wirey Dexter Fletcher and in maturity by Nigel Terry, is presented here in all his predatory, thieving, murderous, cardinal-flattering glory. Jarman doesn't so much juxtapose his art against his lifestyle as present the art as a practical afterthought - a means for the man to mint coin to allow him to continue his primal existence. In Jarman's eyes, Caravaggio's life is to be celebrated; the art is part logical extension, part a lucky by-product.

Jarman's reclamation of Caravaggio as history's pre-eminent badboyartqueer isn’t without agenda. With Jarman heavily entrenched in queer politics at the time, and as one of the few artists putting out explicitly queer, explicitly "arty" artworks, I don't doubt he felt some affinity to his chosen subject. He certainly doesn’t hold back in his attempt to shake the artist of his museum wall stuffiness.

To capture this, Jarman uses remarkable tableau recreations of Caravaggio’s hyper-chiaroscuro tenebrism to recreate the works in progress. Jarman situates us within the paintings, blurring the lines between the creative process and the finished product and stripping back the varnish of hundreds of years of tight-collared art criticism. The tableaux are only the brilliantly lit starting point. From the robe-draped posing in the artist’s studio, Jarman expands on the inherent eroticism by fleshing out the lives of the models he is working from. These young men, often bored, often petulant, bring as much apathy to the studio as they do sex.

Caravaggio's sexual conquests (turned models) aren't presented as muses, per se, but as kindred spirits, albeit ones that can't quite hold their candles to his excess. Tangling themselves up in the artist's dangerous world proves damaging to their health (and it should be noted that for Sean Bean, who plays feisty-sexy boxer, Ranuccio, Jarman set an upsetting precedent in his acting career). In Michelangelo's other love interest, Ranuccio's girlfriend Lena, Jarman introduced the world to the electric intensity of Tilda Swinton, who I believe is to feature heavily in his work from hereon in (no complaints here). The beauty of this pair, along with Caravaggio’s other devotee, the mute assistant Jerusaleme (Spencer Leigh), and the art tableaux themselves, add weight to the aesthetic counterpoint the brilliance of the artist’s art and the duskier aspects of his life.

Caravaggio’s contradictions clearly fascinate Jarman as still-relevant concerns in the act of being an artist, something he himself was performing. This relevance leaks into Jarman’s bare sets. Anachronistic typewriters, calculators and car horns link Caravaggio’s experiences to our own. By proxy, identity politics follow. With the British queer movement mobilising on Section 28 and HIV about to hit in full force, Caravaggio’s unapologetic queerness was a very visible firebrand. Jarman, of course, was a vocal activist and was about to get louder. Caravaggio’s welcoming reception in the British film world, only gave his political voice further legitimacy.

Next up: The Last of England.

This post contributes to Director Focus: Derek Jarman.