JARMAN ON THE ANGELIC CONVERSATION

The World Film Festival of Bangkok 2008 will show THE ANGELIC CONVERSATION (1985, Derek Jarman). So I think I should post some information about this film here.

--This is what Jarman said in his interview with Paul Wells:

“Ultimately, I think it is important to make films that are about love and it is certainly important for me to make films which express love between men. I don’t really make films as a film director. I’m not really interested in ‘film’ but I am interested in sexual politics and the ways in which different media can express these ideas. ANGELIC CONVERSATION, for example, is a film about love between two young men, and I think it is late night viewing and very much like poems. Very few people read poems and although I think it is probably a spurious analogy, films like ANGELIC CONVERSATION or THE GARDEN are poetry as opposed to prose; most cinema I see is just prose.”


--The information below comes from the book DEREK JARMAN: A BIOGRAPHY by Tony Peake

This is a part of Jarman’s notes for PSYCHIC BILLY’S ANGELIC CONVERSATION

“Various concepts: The cinema of noise, a film which does not dictate the audience, allows the mind to wander and draw its own conclusions

reclaiming small gestures
the passion of a head turning
transforming a landscape
the connections are with painting and not the novel
the doors of perception, perhaps quote this is an ‘ideal’ manual on Film – the harpies of advertising, the method of Filming akin to a heartbeat...the whole problem with the so called gay cinema of realism presented to ghettoise a whole section of the population, social realism, the enemy of ‘the people’.


This is what Jarman explained about THE ANGELIC CONVERSATION.

“I came to the ideas after I made the film, as we cut it together...The beginning had symbols of industrialism — the burning car. The cross (or yoke) related to industrialism — a sort of Bunuel moment. The weight of received thought. The fog and night journey is the idea of a journey which is so important to Jung. ..the caves were places where analysis began...The place where the world might be put to right... The descent into darkness — that is like Rimbaud — the descent into the other side is necessary. Then I saw the swimming sections as absolution, the ritual washing of the world... and the sunlight comes out and one is in the fresh air. I saw the section with the emperor as service for others. It’s based on the first poetic elements of our culture – the wanderer, the giver of dreams -- The psychotic wrestling match is with oneself ... and there is a sort of restitution, a sort of homoerotic scene... The signal — the radar thing — which at first is so menacing... is eradicated by the flowers. This is almost back to the beginning and this time the sunlight is there“


For more information about THE ANGELIC CONVERSATION, you can read:
http://jclarkmedia.com/jarman/jarman04.html
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews27/angelic_conversation.htm
http://www.flickr.com/photos/opal_krusch/tags/theangelicconversation/