The Garden

THE FILM TAKES PLACE IN AND AROUND the director's home by the English weather-beaten Southeastern coast and brings the viewer on a magic tour. Simple, spectacular scenery with flowers, stones, beaches, the sky and the sea are mixed with images of the director himself in the midst of planting a garden in the shade of a foreboding nuclear plant. The story takes shape,
slowly, through series of dream landscapes and dramatic tableaus. The director falls asleep by his desk and starts dreaming; familiar Biblical episodes are enacted against the back-drop of today's Britain and turns into an investigation of the persecution and oppression of homosexuals throughout history, and a questioning of the church's part in the ongoing Aids epidemic. Finally, it's a meditation on the director's own mortality.
Comment:
THE GARDEN IS NO PARADISE, no Garden of Eden. It's Hell on Earth, where each life is a martyrdom. Both Kenneth Anger and Jean Genet would feel at home with the bloody struggle against conformism and the attempts to sanctify crime: to make pain and dirt holy things.
Like for example Pasolini in Medea and Porcile, Jarman turns to the ritual, to the mystery of the sacrifice. But, whereas Pasolini penetrates many layers of culture in order to find the heathen and archaic prototype, Jarman choses to stay with the Christian martyr myth, with the stigmata as Leit Motif. The Madonna, Calgary and the crucifix are symbols that would become cliche and superficial if Jarman hadn't enriched them with his own fantastic imagery. Women playing on glass against the black sea, transvestites chased through the desert, two love-making men harassed by a lynch mob, fire in the distance and a girl plucking a hen ... They're visual riddles, freed of the conventional - they become frightening and touching icons over man's slavery.
Paradoxically, pleasure can be found here. Jarman, like a Prospero, conjure up a theater that is both full of lust and beauty. The Garden asks through this beauty for the spectator's part in the suffering - it asks for the viewers guilt.
LARS GUSTAF ANDERSSON

Medverkande
Kevin Collins, Roger Cool, Tilda Swinton: Producent
James Mackay: Manus
Derek Jarman: Foto
Christopher Hughes: Musik
Simon Fisher Turner: Talat språk
English