Derek Jarman | Art of Mirrors / 1973

three queer types

by Douglas Messerli

 

Derek Jarman (director) Art of Mirrors / 1973

 

Derek Jarman’s almost 6-minute film with 3 basically black and brown human figures presented in silhouette against a pea-green background and shot in super 8 mm, has been mentioned and praised by numerous commentators. And Jarman himself has argued that “This is only something that could only be done on a Super 8 camera, with its built-in meters and effects.” In fact, many critics have focused on the short film’s use of the specific super 8 camera loaded with Kodachrome (see, for example “brotherdeacon’s” short comment on Letterboxd).

     The same observer also argued for its allegorical elements, as well as its concerns with light and space, however, without elaborating just what the director’s use allegorical subject consisted of.  

     Other critics such as Swapnil Dhruv Bose in the British on-line site Far Out comments on the importance of the autobiographical elements of the work, quoting Jarman himself: “I suppose ostrich-like filmmakers often ignore their own lives, but I was brought up with a different set of aesthetics to filmmaking, those of the painter. Presumably, the painter would paint his immediate surroundings, and if he was going to paint a vase of flowers, it would be one at home. For a painter to concentrate on his own life or any other form of art is actually considered to be a raison d’être.”

     That essay continues with Jarman’s comparison with the standard expectations of art and film: “If a painter started to operate in the way a film director did, everyone would say the paintings were valueless. Witness the astronomical sums of money that are paid for van Gogh at the moment when someone is painting their own life. It seems very strange that in cinema this doesn’t really happen.”

      Bose closes with a quite powerful statement that “Art of Mirrors is a meditative work by Jarman which uses its abstractions to slowly pull us into a world where conventional systems of symbols and meanings lose their preassigned values,” without bothering to explain what those symbols and meanings might be or how their values might have been diverted.

      Brian Hoyle, writing in Senses of Cinema, describes the short as one of several, influenced by Kenneth Anger and others, that were staged and designed, relating to the queer tradition of Jean Cocteau and Pier Paolo Pasolini, too radical for some and yet too conventional for others.

     Even that imitative, unthinking chatterbox AI, at least upon one occasion in which I deigned to read its comments, somehow stumbled on to the idea that this short work was related to his queer concerns that have made him a central figure to the international “Queer New Wave.”

      But not one of these writers, repositories, and others I read have bothered to attempt to explain how this short film works as an allegory and still performs an autobiographical role in Jarman’s overall queer filmmaking.

      Everyone agrees that these figures, one by one, take up a mirror in an attempt to catch the light and flash it into the lens of the camera, a metaphor for film itself. Indeed, the power of the light, mirror, and lens is what begins this work, as Jarman shows us the embers of burnt wood that can result when light directed upon an object creates an intense enough heat to bring it into a conflagration, the final end, unfortunately, of many of the early nitrate movies. 

    The first figure, performed by Gerald Incandela, with a sad-faced clown-like decoration on a paperback placed over his head, holds the mirror in a position that portrays his prize somewhat as an orb, a powerful ball of light that he holds close to his head. The mirror here reminds us of its role as both the object of a Narcissus, something into which he seems to be staring or with which he is at least intensely engaged, but also as a dangerous treasure, somewhat like the wicked queen in Snow White, of which the possessor has no intention of surrendering.

       And, in that sense, the first figure is a kind of self-destructive fool, unwilling to share the mirror or what some might metaphorically describe as the “limelight.” As a queer figure, a Narcissus, he is involved with both the power and the beauty of what he observes; that is until the rather foppishly dressed male figure (Kevin Whitney) strolls horizontally into the balletic gathering holding a candle. He walks by Narcissus without even acknowledging his existence.

     Inexplicably he also holds a mirror, flashing it momentarily at the camera. But unlike the first figure, this dandy holds the mirror more like a flashlight at shoulder level, sharing it with both the camera and with us as the film’s audience. If Whitney also serves as a trope of a gay man, he is less a Narcissus than he is a kind of dapper self-promoter, a Wildean figure shining his light and image caught in the mirror into others to gain their attention as he gracefully strolls and stands his ground, devastating the Pierrot-like first figure while seemingly being ignored by the female diva in a feathered hat. The longer he strolls back and forth on his grand parade, the more our paper-bag Pierrot now pasted to the wall, begins to quite literally crumble until he falls to the floor, symbolically dead just as Narcissus ended up. He is no match to the sociable decadent who happily hands his mirror over to the patiently waiting queen (Luciana Martínez).

     Once it is in her hands, however, she holds it out like a dazzling trinket, or a blazing piece of jewelry, pulling it back closer to her face as she moves laterally and vertically to the camera, the light shining in our faces as if it were a signal or sign as opposed to a treasure. Her action is not at all diffident as the second figure appeared to be, but a tool she uses in a dance of seduction. As she slowly slithers to the camera, one might compare her dance with Nazimova’s or even Rita Hayworth’s Salomé, her face as she approaches growing larger and larger until, like an elderly movie star of the ilk of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard she suddenly disappears into the red frame/flame at film’s end.

     In relation to the two queer men, this female figure might as well be a transvestite queen using all the charms she holds to wow her audience as she slinks behind the bright reflection of the camera’s light into our lives.

     In the way in which I interpret this early work, produced just three years, however, before Jarman’s masterful Sebastiane, we can quite easily perceive how his short film is somewhat autobiographical and most certainly queer in its allegorical depiction of these three queer figures fascinated by and fixated on the reflection of the mirror and camera, the various visualizations of the self realized as a thing of beauty, power, influence, and finally a method of the cinematic transmutation of the real into an image larger than life.

 

Los Angeles, August 20, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).