Derek Jarman: Protest! review – ‘Coherence is overrated’
A film of nothing but a static blue, haunted by voices and a tale of a man going blind, and thinking of buying shoes he will never get a chance to wear – his own will see him through. Self-portraits of a young man, anxious but done with the lightness of Matisse, and another, sullen and glowering, seeing himself as Wyndham Lewis. While you look, Pet Shop Boys are singing It’s a Sin, staged for a decadent pop video over the wall, vying with the industrial electronic noise of Throbbing Gristle leaking from another room.
Creativity is not a fashionable word. But you can’t think about Derek Jarman, painter, sometime theatre designer, film-maker, gay activist, writer and gardener, without
