About

"It is vital to underline yet again that art is the spark between private lives and the public… In my heart, I dedicate my film of War Requiem to all those cast out, like myself, from Christendom. To my friends who are dying in a moral climate created by a church with no compassion."
Derek Jarman, War Requiem (1989)

War Requiem is a cinematic adaptation of Benjamin Britten's 1962 requiem mass composed in response to the horrors of World War II. Commissioned to commemorate the consecration of the recently constructed Coventry Cathedral in the West Midlands (the prior Cathedral in Coventry having been destroyed by the Nazis in 1940), Britten's oratorio combines the elements of Latin Mass with a cycle of poems by the 25-year-old English poet-soldier Wilfred Owen, who died a week before Armistice Day. For Britten, a pacifist and homosexual, Owen's modernist poetry (published posthumously) captured the experience of war with unheroic realism, and Jarman's film operates from a similar position. Jarman noted in his production diary: "There are no heroes in [Wilfred] Owen's poems, and no room for them in this film. No explosions. No charges across no man's land. Little fighting… Instead we have faces, small intimate gestures, a few carefully chosen props, one location."

Filmed in a decommissioned hospital in Darenth Park, Kent, Jarman's narrative compliments the score and tells of an old soldier's painful memories, the death of an unknown soldier and a nurse treating the injured, interwoven with archival footage capturing the horrors of wars throughout history. Jarman's film uses the seminal 1963 recording conducted by Britten with the singers for whom he had written it: soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, tenor Peter Pears and baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. The only spoken words come from Sir Laurence Olivier (in his last appearance onscreen) who reads from Owen's poem "Strange Meeting" (1918) about a British and German soldier meeting in hell and finding it a relief from war: "I am the enemy you killed, my friend... Let us sleep now."

Made for £680,000, War Requiem was the first BBC film to be given a theatrical release in Britain. Jarman would announce that his total fee for directing the film was £10.