The Last of England
by Derek Jarman
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: 'Spring' Mark Adley, Gay Gaynor, Gerrard McArthur, Matthew Hawkins, Spencer LeighDirector: Derek Jarman
Brand: Image Entertainment
Cinematographer: Cerith Wyn Evans
Cinematographer: Christopher Hughes
Cinematographer: Derek Jarman
Writer: Derek Jarman
Cinematographer: Richard Heslop
Editor: Angus Cook
Editor: John Maybury
Producer: Don Boyd
Producer: James Mackay
Producer: Mayo Thompson
Producer: Yvonne Little
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 87 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-11-29
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Image Entertainment
Movie Reviews of The Last of England
Movie Review: Camera... sound... revolution...
Summary: 5 Stars
"The last of England" is one of Jarman's collage movies. With that I mean that these films show no straight A to B narrative, no real main characters or meaningful dialogues; it's just an accumulation of stark, surreal and offbeat images, with highly experimental music and soundscapes, and a lot of underlying anger. More about that anger later on.
Jarman made a handful of these speciffic kind of films. Before "The last of England" there was "The Angelic conversation", with mesmerising music by Coil, showing in slow motion young men, lovers perhaps, walking, watching, touching, carressing, ultimately just being together, with well-voiced actress Judy Dench dropping a Shakespeare sonnet every now and then. A one and a half hour long moving painting.
In 1990, after Jarman discovered he had HIV, he made his most notorious collage film: "The Garden". A surreal, homosexual version of the Passion of Christ, with a storm of biting images, often both visual stunning and lyrical, a terriffic soundtrack by long time collaborator Simon Fisher Turner, and the necessary references to the same political prisons Margret Tatcher was so eager to impose on the world.
In between these visual mosaics, Jarman directed videoclips (namely for The Petshop Boys) and low budget films, like the semi-biographies "Wittgenstein", "Carravagio" and the play "Edward II" - although strong in visuals and highly original and creative, they don't quite made history like Jarman's super 8mm collgage cinema, partly because narrative and plot may have gotten a bit in the way of total freedom and boundless means of expression.
Or to put it like this: the wish of kicking against the pricks must have somewhat been tempered by the obligation of logical storytelling.
Besides filmmaker, Jarman was a gifted painter, an art director and an obsessive gardener. The perfect, well dosed combination of all these individual talents leads to such mind startling, subversive cinema that makes up its own rules and lives and wrestles wildly within these confinements.
Maybe Jarman was in a way an autistic artist, working completely in his own world that was turning and raging across the universe, driven by the power of pure anger; Jarman was a homosexual in the oppressive Tatcher-times. And to be homosexual then and there meant to be excluded, and exclusion meant discrimination. Jarmans talents to Create was his means to cause minor revolutions, and whether or not these revolutions only took place on the white screen didn't really seem to matter. As long as he had the chance to express and direct his anger.
It's a kind of mutiny without the oppressors being present themselves.
So here is "The last of England", in my book the quintessential Derek Jarman. Sublime poetica, movie making at its purest on all levels. ART in all capitals. Not to understand rationally but more subconsciously. Perhaps the way real cinema should.
Summary of The Last of England
Studio: Image Entertainment Release Date: 05/01/2007Similar DVD Movies
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