The Garden & A Piece of My Sky is Missing reviews
Review by on 23 Sep 2008
Love them both !
Love them both !
Review by on 23 Sep 2008
Depicting episodes in the life of Christ seen through a gay man’s sensibilities THE GARDEN is one of Jarman’s most personal statements on his own HIV positive status. Filmed in part as a response to the homophobic backlash of the eighties, THE GARDEN contains scenes of sadism that surpass JUBILEE (1978). In a scene that owes much to THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP (1943), the male lovers are leered at in a bathhouse by ‘ageing queens’, mocked by skinheads dressed as sadistic Santas, before being bound, gagged and subjected to ‘Tarantino style torture’ in a police canteen
Framed by a dream and the process of making the film itself THE GARDEN exquisitely renders contemporary and traditional iconography into an unsettling vision of complex different atmospheres. “Wet shingle glistens like pearls of Vermeer”, while the three wise men, hideously transformed into terrifying paparazzi, attempt to rape the Madonna during a photo opportunity. Judas dangles from a noose shuffling credit cards instead of thirty pieces of silver, Mary Magdalene is a male transvestite and Christ, a passive victim of circumstance, wanders around a desolate windswept landscape dominated by the shadow of the nuclear power station and the buzzing of electricity pylons, as the world passes him by.
Jarman’s unconventional non-linear editing of a montage of super-8 footage, time-lapse photography, back projections combined with improvised sets and amateurs in leading roles, is both a bold, radical departure and conscious return to an earlier more experimental ‘home movie’ style of British filmmaking.
Sarah Pottle, Festival Daily
Depicting episodes in the life of Christ seen through a gay man’s sensibilities THE GARDEN is one of Jarman’s most personal statements on his own HIV positive status. Filmed in part as a response to the homophobic backlash of the eighties, THE GARDEN contains scenes of sadism that surpass JUBILEE (1978). In a scene that owes much to THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP (1943), the male lovers are leered at in a bathhouse by ‘ageing queens’, mocked by skinheads dressed as sadistic Santas, before being bound, gagged and subjected to ‘Tarantino style torture’ in a police canteenFramed by a dream and the process of making the film itself THE GARDEN exquisitely renders contemporary and traditional iconography into an unsettling vision of complex different atmospheres. “Wet shingle glistens like pearls of Vermeer”, while the three wise men, hideously transformed into terrifying paparazzi, attempt to rape the Madonna during a photo opportunity. Judas dangles from a noose shuffling credit cards instead of thirty pieces of silver, Mary Magdalene is a male transvestite and Christ, a passive victim of circumstance, wanders around a desolate windswept landscape dominated by the shadow of the nuclear power station and the buzzing of electricity pylons, as the world passes him by.
Jarman’s unconventional non-linear editing of a montage of super-8 footage, time-lapse photography, back projections combined with improvised sets and amateurs in leading roles, is both a bold, radical departure and conscious return to an earlier more experimental ‘home movie’ style of British filmmaking.
Sarah Pottle, Festival Daily
Film details
The Garden & A Piece of My Sky is Missing
DEREK JARMAN: REMEMBERED
Director: Derek Jarman
Director: Davide Pepe
Actor: Tilda Swinton
Actor: Kevin Collins
Director: Davide Pepe
Actor: Tilda Swinton
Actor: Kevin Collins
Germany, 1990.
92 mins. English.
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