by Douglas Messerli
Derek Jarman (director), David Lewis and Andy Crabb (editors) Glitterbug
/ 1994
The antithesis of Blue, Derek Jarman’s
one-hour collation of home movies which he worked on with David Lewis and Andy
Crabb during the last full year of his life, Glitterbug almost literally
takes one’s breath away in its fast-motion scenes of Jarman’s London life.
Boys literally leap in and out of his London apartment couch, gay boys
get up in drag and perform in various manners, including Jarman. He and his
friends speed through (one suspects with that drug’s help) party after party.
At
other moments the Felliniesque costumed and half naked beautiful boys of Jarman’s 1976
film Sebastiane stand smoking and chatting in English presumably instead
of their on-film’s Latin. Fiction writer William S. Burroughs reads from his
work. Andrew Logan celebrates his alternative Miss World contest. And singer
Adam Ant, occultist sculptor Dave Baby, abstract artist Duggie Fields, dancer
Michael Clark, and musician/artist Genesis P-Orridge all dive in and out of the
film accompanied by the rhythmic and often lyrical score by Brian Eno.
One of the most quiet and relaxed moments reveals Jarman and his actor
muse Tilda Swinton visiting her family estate, weaving through the small maze
of trimmed hedges and boxwood trees.
While Blue is all talk and no images, its companion work, the
very last of Jarman’s oeuvre, is all image without a word. Perhaps there are no
words for the swinging, adventuresome pre-AIDS gay world that Jarman and his
friend inhabited, unafraid in a world of closeted fear until disease, fear, and
the British Thatcherites suddenly attempted to push even their world back into
the British cuddy, pretending that they had never even existed.
Los Angeles, August 1, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August
2023).
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