Demons Magician, sorcerer, artist, cursed poet, prophet, demiurge, Derek Jarman knew about the magic of cinema, it seems everything. Each of his few films is the quintessence of new art, an illusion, an alternate world that communicates with reality but is emphatically unreal. The division of his work into modern and historical paintings is conditional, as time and space themselves are relative, compressed in his films into a point taken from the coordinate system of the usual chronotope. At the same time, Jarman’s illness with social and moral problems of the modern world steadily carries out in his paintings tangential to actual reality, and reflection on his place and possibilities in it gives his works a secret character and leads them to the space of the eternal.
The above is true for the conditionally historical film Edward II. It is often called the pinnacle of the director’s work, which is mistaken, because the path and stay of Jarman in the cinema can not be represented in the form of a certain schedule with ups and downs, progressive – ascending or descending – movement. All his films, so often like an art video or clip, are equivalent to understanding Jarman as an artist and a person, each of them is his flesh, blood and spirit.
Taking as the basis of the script the play of Christopher Marlowe and removing from it all the vain, superfluous (escapes, chases, battles), Jarman dissolves the plot of the story in bright, full of aestheticism, eroticism and madness visual scenes in the spirit of the films of Russell and Greenway, mixing together the art of performance, film, theater, painting and poetry. At the same time, he lovingly relates to the linguistic beauty of the source, preserving the poetic form of the heroes’ speech in the film. Taking the events of the play out of historical certainty, he does not transfer them to our days, but, endowing the past with flashy signs of modernity (for example, the battle of the two royal armies at Jarman turns into a conflict of the LGBT community with radical homophobes), takes the action of the film beyond any temporal determinism, as if erasing from the winged O tempora! O mores! time as something unimportant.
Lust for power, malice, greed, cruelty, lust, vanity – these demons are possessed by literally all the characters of Jarmen’s Edward. Elevated to the absolute, they become the main protagonists of the film, and the people, the royal nest, peers, all these Edwards, Elizabeths, Kents, Mortimers, Hevestons - only containers, vessels, bodies. Jarman generally preaches the ancient cult of bodily beauty and admires the beauty of the male body, the snake body, the body of Tilda Swinton. And the more beautiful and perfect, according to Jarman, this shell, the more naked it appears in his film. Dressed in outlandish clothes women and children, half-naked men, pristine nudity of animals. And the dance of demons, meanwhile, rules the ball of history, a snake ball confuses love and political intrigues, overthrowing some and establishing other governments. Vice blinds and drives mad, cruelty is punished with greater cruelty, blood is paid for with blood. Names and shells change, mores remain the same. The change of rulers cannot shake the kingdom of demons. Play, musician! Turn, wheel! In the human world, everything has long been decided. He will never be freed from destructive passions. He'll never be kind.