Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman

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a b c d e Schneider, Martin (3 December 2013). "Derek Jarman's Videos for the Smith and Pet Shop Boys". 12 March 2013. dangerousminds.net . Retrieved 20 August 2018. John Hansard Gallery is pleased to present Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, curated with author Philip Hoare. Modern Nature is both a diary of the garden, and a meditation by Jarman on his own life: his childhood, his time as a young gay man in the 1960s, and his renowned career as an artist, writer and film-maker. It is at once a lament for a lost generation, an unabashed celebration of sexuality, and a devotion to all that is living. Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature draws on Derek Jarman’s extraordinary legacy as a radical artist, filmmaker, writer, gardener, and activist. At the end of his life, he found love with HB, but his younger days had been a succession of encounters and lovers, often mentioned in detail in the diaries, as well as the trip he made to his studio flat in London and the 3 am walks out onto Hampstead Heath, and the police raids that he managed to avoid. There are lots of nostalgic entries about his life working in film and his support of the arts as well as moments spent in the garden alone and with visitors. The later part of the book is about his illness and time spent in hospital as TB in conjunction with the AIDS-ravaged his health.

For both Jarman and Klein, the color blue connotes spirituality, water, the sky, calmness, and escape. Jarman explained that "The monochrome is an alchemy, effective liberation from personality. It articulates silence. It is a fragment of an immense work without limit. The blue of the landscape of liberty." The blue screen is accompanied by music and voiceovers that discuss Jarman's disease and final years in a poetic, sometimes heart-wrenching tone. In addition to Jarman, his long-time collaborators Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry and John Quentin also provided voiceovers. Patti Smith – "Memorial tribute" ". mvdbase.com. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016 . Retrieved 15 July 2012.

I am reminded of the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s insight about film, Jarman’s primary creative medium — that its raw material and its gift to the viewer is time: “time lost or spent or not yet had.” I am reminded, too, of Seneca, writing two millennia earlier about mastering the existential math of time spent, saved, and wasted— I have found few that better clarify the difference between the three than the quiet lessons of gardening. Illustration by Emily Hughes from Little Gardener. in any other mood i think i'd probably have read this in an afternoon, near a window maybe, but mostly still & attentive. instead, i listened to julian sands read it in fits & starts, distractedly pausing to flip through gardening catalogues, or losing tail ends of sentences while i clattered baking dishes around, and that was lovely in its own way, my attention ebbing and flowing and sometimes catching on especially Good sentences. Read this meditative and inspiring diary of Derek Jarman's famous garden at Dungeness, which is also a powerful account of his life as an HIV positive man in the 1980s. Jarman, (Michael) Derek Elworthy (1942–1994), film-maker, painter, and campaigner for homosexual rights". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (onlineed.). Oxford University Press. 2004. doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/55051 . Retrieved 28 September 2019. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)

Derek Jarman was born in Northwood, England three years prior to the end of World War II. His father served in the UK's Royal Air Force, an occupation that called for various domestic and international postings. For the last year of the war, Jarman's father was stationed in Italy, where the young artist and his mother eventually joined him in 1946. In Italy young Jarman was enthralled by the Borghese Gardens, the paintings of the Yugoslavian refugee who shared the Jarmans' flat, and his first experience at a cinema. Another formative place was Somerset, England, where the RAF had a base. There the beautiful manor house Curry Mallet would come to stand for an idyllic England to Jarman, "a garden unsullied by repression," writes British film scholar Colin Maccabe. Much of his life centered around those three pursuits - film, painting, and gardening. Niall Richardson, 'The Queer Cinema of Derek Jarman: Critical and Cultural Readings' (I.B. Tauris, 2009)Film was a more intransigent beloved. “I had foolishly wished film to be home, to contain all the intimacies,” Jarman writes. But bringing his vision necessitated endless compromise and frustration. It was the giddy delight of the shoot he loved – the improvised, gorgeously costumed chaos, flying by the seat of his boiler suit, restaging images snatched from dreams. The diary ends in hospital, the opening litanies of plant names replaced by those of the drugs keeping him alive

Other notable published works include film scripts ( Up in the Air, Blue, War Requiem, Caravaggio, Queer Edward II and Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script/The Derek Jarman Film), a study of his garden at Dungeness Derek Jarman's Garden, and At Your Own Risk, a defiant celebration of gay sexuality.

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Modern Nature is both a diary of the garden and a meditation by Jarman on his own life: his childhood, his time as a young gay man in the 1960s and his renowned career as an artist, writer and film-maker. He feared his announcement would threaten the viability of his films, since he could no longer be insured. He knew, too, he’d be the subject of tabloid hate, a visible target of Aids panic. It wasn’t paranoia. In his 2017 diary for the London Review of Books, Alan Bennett recalled sitting behind Jarman at the 1992 premiere of Angels in America. Bennett had slightly grazed his hand on the way to the theatre and was “desperate lest Jarman turn round and shake hands. So I shamefully kept mum.” In the interval he raced upstairs and got a plaster, after which he felt able to say hello. Bennett relayed the story, he explained, “as a reminder of the hysteria of the time, to which I was not immune”. All this activity came to an abrupt halt in the spring of 1990, when he found himself on the Victoria Ward of St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, battling TB of the liver while the poll tax riots raged nearby. His hospital diaries are remarkable for their cheer, despite what was plainly agony and terror. Dressed in “Prussian blue and carmine jimjams”, he logged the torments of sight loss and drenching night sweats with curiosity and good humour. Returned to a state of absolute physical dependency, flooded by memories of his unhappy infancy, he discovered to his abiding joy that he was surrounded by love.