Derek Jarman was the most important independent filmmaker in England during the 1980s. Using emblems and symbols in associative contexts, rather than conventional, cause-and-effect narrative, he created films noteworthy for their lyricism and poetic feeling and for their exploration of the gay experience. His style of filmmaking also links Jarman with other prominent directors of lyric film, including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Genet. This pathfinding book places Derek Jarman in the tradition of lyric film and offers incisive readings of all eleven of his feature-length films, from Sebastiane to Blue. Steven Dillon looks at Jarman and other directors working in a similar vein to establish how lyric films are composed through the use of visual imagery and actual poetry. He then traces Jarman’s use of imagery (notably mirrors and the sea) in his films and discusses in detail the relationship between cinematic representations and sexual identity. This insightful reading of Jarman’s work helps us better understand how films such as The Last of England and The Garden can be said to cohere and mean without being reduced to clear messages. Above all, Dillon’s book reveals how truly beautiful and brilliant Jarman’s movies are.

“JARMAN (all this maddening beauty”) and Other Plays is a collection of three radically poetic works for live performance by OBIE Award–winning playwright Caridad Svich. The playtexts includes a lyrical meditation on the legacy of iconic queer artist Derek Jarman, a meditation on displacement and human suffering (Carthage/Cartagena), and an intimately operatic reflection on Penelope and Odysseus (The Orphan Sea). Accompanied by scholarly essays placing the plays in context, this book showcases the beautiful strangeness and profound resistance in Svich’s work.

“Svich is one of the finest poet/playwrights of this generation. . . . She is a playwright whose plays perform like dramatic poems that are wondrous to the ear and moving to the heart.”—Seth Gordon, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis

With all the heated debates around religion and homosexuality today, it might be hard to see the two as anything but antagonistic. But in this book, Dominic Janes reveals the opposite: Catholic forms of Christianity, he explains, played a key role in the evolution of the culture and visual expression of homosexuality and male same-sex desire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He explores this relationship through the idea of queer martyrdom—closeted queer servitude to Christ—a concept that allowed a certain degree of latitude for the development of same-sex desire.
            Janes finds the beginnings of queer martyrdom in the nineteenth-century Church of England and the controversies over Cardinal John Henry Newman’s sexuality. He then considers how liturgical expression of queer desire in the Victorian Eucharist provided inspiration for artists looking to communicate their own feelings of sexual deviance. After looking at Victorian monasteries as queer families, he analyzes how the Biblical story of David and Jonathan could be used to create forms of same-sex partnerships. Finally, he delves into how artists and writers employed ecclesiastical material culture to further queer self-expression, concluding with studies of Oscar Wilde and Derek Jarman that illustrate both the limitations and ongoing significance of Christianity as an inspiration for expressions of homoerotic desire.
Providing historical context to help us reevaluate the current furor over homosexuality in the Church, this fascinating book brings to light the myriad ways that modern churches and openly gay men and women can learn from the wealth of each other’s cultural and spiritual experience.