Derek Jarman | War Requiem / 1989

killing the piano player

by Douglas Messerli

 

Derek Jarman (screenwriter and director, based on Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem) War Requiem / 1989

 

I love British composer Benjamin Britten’s operas and many of his orchestral works, but I have to admit that his 1963 War Requiem, composed for the opening the new Coventry Cathedral, is not among my favorites—despite the fact that Dmitri Shostakovich told conductor and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich the he believed it to be the greatest work of the 20th Century.

     The work includes a Latin mass along with chorale renditions of six poems of the poet Wilfred Owen, who fought and died the World War I, during which he became perhaps the most outspoken anti-war poet of England. The choice was a significant since Britten himself along with his lover Peter Pears had left England in 1939, for, among other reasons, for the difficult position of pacifists, which he and Pears attested to being, leaving behind a Europe when everyone believed it their patriotic duty to join the war efforts.

      Along with the recent exodus of his friends W. H. Auden, and Christopher Isherwood, the attacks in the British press of Britten’s music, as well as he and Pears having finally consummated their relationship as a gay couple in a time when it against British law, Britten saw fit to remain in the US as a government-identified “artistic ambassador” throughout much of the war.

     Owen was also most likely gay or certainly moving in that direction. He had enlisted in the Artists Rifles in 1916, and for the seven months trained at Hare Hall Camp in Essex. In June of 1916 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment. A number of terrible incidents followed, beginning with in his falling into a shell hole where he suffered a concussion, and soon after being caught in the blast of a mortar shell which left him for several days unconscious lying on an embankment among the bodies of dead soldiers. After, Owen was diagnosed with neurasthenia (shell shock) and sent to the Craighlockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh.

     It was while he was there that he met and became good friends with the poet Siegfried Sassoon, not yet openly gay, who maintained close friendships with other significant figures, several of them being gay. Sassoon introduced Owen to Robbie Ross, Robert Graves, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennet, Osbert Sitwell, and C. K. Scott Moncrieff. Ross had been a close friend to Oscar Wilde and Moncrieff was the British translator of Marcel Proust. Certainly, Robert Graves and Sacheverell Sitwell were convinced that Owen was gay; and he may have had a brief affair in 1918 with Moncrieff. There are a great many homoerotic elements in his poetry, one of the poems, “Shadwell Stair,” for many years seen as a mysterious work, being later identified as a quite straightforward elegy to the homosexual soliciting in the area of the London docks once famous for such behavior.*

      Sassoon, who obviously had grown quite close to Owen, forbade him to return to the front, and even threatened to shoot him in the leg if he attempted to. But upon their parting in 1917, Owen having been discharged from the hospital, secretly returned to duty without telling his influential friend. Owen was killed in action on November 4, 1918, exactly one week before the signing of the Armistice which ended the war.

    The confluence of two British homosexual pacificists, in turn, almost inevitably became an immediate attraction for yet another anti-war gay man who himself had been traumatized as a child when he was forced to spend a few days alongside recovering victims of World War II in a military hospital.

     All of these experiences and images were brought together, accordingly, in Jarman’s 1989 film containing no dialogue except the score of Britten’s work. The entire War Requiem is performed with the accompaniment of Jarman’s images almost as if it were a music video akin to those Jarman made for The Smiths and Marianne Faithfull.

      Like such works as The Angelic Conversation of the year before and The Garden (1990), although there are many hints of story, there is no general narrative coherence.

     Several characters are also employed: an old soldier (Laurence Olivier in his last screen role), a mother (Patricia Hayes), Wilfred Owen (Nathaniel Parker), a nurse (Tilda Swinton, who also plays a grieving woman and other roles), the unknown soldier (Owen Teale, who plays as well Owen’s best friend and perhaps lover in the film), a German soldier (Sean Bean), and figures such the Biblical Abraham (Nigel Terry), as well as business men, numerous other soldiers, and a young boy playing a tin drum (representing perhaps Jarman himself as a child).

      Except for Owen and the nurse, these figures float in an out of the landscape of the World War I trenches where Owen is stationed and writing his poems, reread by his close friend. Moreover, time is not presented chronologically since we begin with the nurse/griever painfully attending to Owen’s coffin and ends with his death was well.

      In between, we see the injury and death of countless soldiers, at first simply those of World War I, but later from the documentary footage of soldiers of World War II, the Vietnam War, the war in Angola, and in the Congo as well as other world locations.

       As death becomes an everyday occurrence, the soldiers grow closer together, Owen, in particular, coming to depend on his friend’s sharing of his life; but in other tableaux vivants, Jarman shows the love between the regular soldiers as well. At one point the camp engages in a rollicking performance of three drag queens singing and dancing around the physical symbol of Britannia, while outside the boy with the drum looks in (hinting at Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum), and eventually brought inside by soldiers, the boy drummer becomes part of the onstage comic celebrations.

      At one point, in a horrific playing out of God’s demand that Abraham sacrifice the life of his son Isaac, Abraham, bankers, and other cynical citizens looking on, are dressed like cabaret figures. In this version, Abraham does not relent, despite the attempted interference of an angelic puti, as Abraham slits his son’s throat, clearly symbolic of what the parents of the millions of young soldiers who had been bullied into battle had done to their children, a myth relevant as well to Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.**

       One of the most shocking moments takes place in an interim space surrounded by barbed wire, where Owen’s friend, soon to be the unknown soldier, sits playing a piano that appears ridiculously out of nowhere. A German soldier also enters the space, the piano player not even noticing him. The intruder bends down and picks up some snow, rolling it into a snowball and throwing it at the British soldier. Becoming aware of the other, he too makes a snowball and lobs it back to the German, the two almost innocently playing until suddenly the German takes out a knife and attacks the British man, killing him as he falls back upon the barbed fence.

      It is at that moment that Owen enters and, seeing what has happened, takes up his bayonet and stabs the German again and again until he dies. Owen turns back to his best friend only to find him dead. Slowly bursting into tears, the poet falls to the ground, coming to only a day later when officers discover the bodies, bringing Owen back to life.

      Throughout much of the end of the work, we see the ghost of the German soldier carrying the body of the friend, now the unknown soldier, across the fields, by the end of the work, the unknown  soldier himself appearing with a barbed-wire crown, appearing as a Christ, held in the position of the pietà of Piero della Francesca, the homoerotic symbol that we first encountered in this context in Kenneth Anger’s 1947 film Fireworks, and which would appear regularly as a symbol in the “A” version of gay ”coming out” movies into the 1960s.

      Oddly, Britten did not use one of Owen’s most beloved poems, and certainly one that contains a great many homoerotic images and even the color blue which would become the title of Jarman’s final feature film before his death. I include here as a sort of summary of Owen’s work in relationship to both Britten’s War Requiem and Jarman’s music video, with images of the “bayonet-blade,” so crucial of Jarman’s film, as well as the teeth and curls of Owen’s young lover.

 

Arms and the Boy

 

Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade

How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;

Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash;

And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.

 

Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads,

Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads,

Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth

Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death.

 

For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.

There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;

And God will grow no talons at his heels,

Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.

 

____

*That poem, with his statements of “firm and cool flesh,” the purple street-arc,” and the blare of sirens and ghost with whom he lays, certainly sounds very gay to me as well. Here’s the poem:

 

Shadwell Stair

 

I am the ghost of Shadwell Stair.

       Along the wharves by the water-house,

       And through the cavernous slaughter-house,

I am the shadow that walks there.

 

Yet I have flesh both firm and cool,

       And eyes tumultuous as the gems

       Of moons and lamps in the full Thames

When dusk sails wavering down the pool.

 

Shuddering the purple street-arc burns

       Where I watch always; from the banks

       Dolorously the shipping clanks

And after me a strange tide turns.

 

I walk till the stars of London wane

       And dawn creeps up the Shadwell Stair.

       But when the crowing syrens blare

I with another ghost am lain.

 

The poem seems to have been drafted in 1918, the last year of his life.

 

**One of the poems included in War Requiem was Owen’s “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young,” his version of the Abraham and Isaac story:

 

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

 

 So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,

And took the fire with him, and a knife.

And as they sojourned both of them together,

Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,

Behold the preparations, fire and iron,

But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?

Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,

And builded parapets and trenches there,

And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.

When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,

Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,

Neither do anything to him. Behold,

A ram caught in a thicket by its horns;

Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

 

But the old man would not so, but slew his son

And half the seed of Europe, one by one

 

Los Angeles, July 28, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).