About

"The home movie is bedrock… In all home movies is a longing for paradise."
Derek Jarman, Kicking The Pricks (1996)

"The only real thing I like about my films is that it is possible to see my dead and dying friends in all the nooks and crannies, and I like that. It's wonderful."
Derek Jarman, Take Ten: Contemporary British Film Directors (1991)

Between 1972 and 1986 Derek Jarman made 62 Super-8 films, accompanied by 12 volumes of a continuous montage called It Happened by Chance 1970-82. Like a series of experimental home movies, these Super-8 films were shot with no intention of being exhibited publicly. They were made with friends and lovers drawn from London's gay milieu and mix aspects of the intimate and every day with arcane and alchemical symbolism. A sense of intimacy is heightened by Jarman shooting and projecting the footage at 3 frames per second, an approach that he maintained would enable the images to be "synchronised with the heartbeat" of viewers.

Glitterbug is a posthumous work that compiles sequences from a vast number of Jarman's Super-8 films. Jarman helped select the material prior to his death and it was edited by Andy Crabb. In Modern Nature (1992), Jarman wrote of the project's conception: "I catalogue my papers for the film archive, and the hundreds of Super 8's from the seventies for James [Mackay]. Maybe we could make a film from all this rubble, Glitterbug. Jon is the only one who sees how clever this title is, Glitterbest, Glitterati, Glitterbugger." Glitterbug captures impression of Derek's studios and living quarters around the London Docklands, social gatherings and events, along with explorations of rural landscapes and derelict structures, and Jarman's experiments with mystical and occult imagery. Brian Eno was commissioned to write the film's score that forms the basis of a later collaboration with Jah Wobble released as Spinner 1995.

Jarman's archive of Super-8 films was bequeathed to James Mackay who is currently overseeing their restoration with the LUMA Foundation, Zürich. Unfortunately at the time of this retrospective the films could not be made available for public screening.

Ages 18+