Film Series | Magic Mirror: A Derek Jarman Retrospective

Beloved by the likes of John Waters, Luca Guadagnino and Tilda Swinton, filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942–94) was a pioneer of music videos, a patron saint of queer cinema, and a giant of 20th-century British culture.

Jarman arrived at film by way of fine arts, studying painting in London in the 1960s, while taking inspiration from The Wizard of Oz, La dolce vita and Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio rising. From the outset, his approach was hand-spun and resourceful, creating early Super 8 films with a cast of friends and lovers in artist studios and his warehouse by the Thames. Blessed with an eye for costuming and set design, Jarman conjured dreamworlds from the most prosaic of materials: mirrors, candles, feathers, kitchen-foil reflectors. He delighted in film’s transformative potential, describing the medium’s union of light and matter as an ‘alchemical conjunction’, a portal to other worlds, a magic mirror.

From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, he made a series of extraordinary feature films exploring history, sexuality, and the politics of the Thatcher era. The cult classic, Jubilee (1978), gave a defiant middle finger to conservative society and the BBC’s slate of historical dramas (Jarman once described Chariots of Fire as a ‘damp, British Triumph of the Will’). With Tilda Swinton as his muse and a tight-knit group of collaborators, including costume designer Sandy Powell, Jarman told stories of exiles and outsiders, highlighting historical figures such as gay icon Saint Sebastian, William Shakespeare, and the great Renaissance painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. From The Tempest (1979) to Edward II (1991), Jarman’s films play as unruly, punk remixes of the period genre, charting a queer path through Western cultural history.

After publicly disclosing his HIV-positive status in 1986, Jarman approached his work with a sense of urgency, acutely aware of his mortality. He wrote, gardened at his cottage in Dungeness, and made music videos for The Smiths and the Pet Shop Boys. Jarman passed away in 1994 aged 52. His stylish, inventive cinema continues to inspire generations of artists. In the words of Tilda Swinton:

‘This is what I miss, now that there are no more Derek Jarman films: the mess, the cant, the poetry, Simon Fisher Turner’s music, the real faces, the intellectualism, the bad-temperedness, the good-temperedness, the cheek, the standards, the anarchy, the romanticism, the classicism, the optimism, the activism, the glee, the bumptiousness, the resistance, the wit, the fight, the colours, the grace, the passion, the beauty.’

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This season runs in conjunction with the exhibition Derek Jarman: Delphinium Days on display at UNSW Galleries from 14 February to 4 May 2025. More information is available on the UNSW website.