I love super 8 and its colours: Derek Jarman was a super 8 master and these are his best works.
Derek Jarman - The Super8 Programme vol. 1-2
Journey to Avebury (1971) 10’, super 8, colour
Derek.Jarman.-.Journey.to.Avebury.1971.DVDRip.XviD-CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi 
Garden of Luxor (1972) 9’, super 8, colour
[FILM) - Derek Jarman - Garden Of Luxor (1972).avi Stolen Apples for Karen Blixen (1973) 3’, super 8, colour
Derek.Jarman.-.Stolen.Apples.for.Karen.Blixen.1973.DVDRip.XviD-CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi Ashden's Walk on Møn (1973) 12’, super 8, black and white
Derek.Jarman.-.A.Walk.on.Mon.1973.DVDRip.XviD-CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi The Art of Mirrors (1973) 6’, super 8, colour
Derek.Jarman.-.Art.Of.Mirrors.DVDRip.XviD-CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi In the Shadow of the Sun (1974-81) 54’, super 8 (to 16mm), colour
Derek.Jarman.-.In.The.Shadow.Of.The.Sun.1980.DVDRip.XviD-CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi TG: Psychic Rally In Heaven (1980-81) 8', Super 8mm to 16mm, Colour
Derek.Jarman.-.T.G.-.Psychic.Rally.in.Heaven.1981.DVDRip.XviD-CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi Pirate Tape (W. S. Burroughs Film) (1982) 16', Super 8mm, Colour
Derek.Jarman.-.Pirate.Tape.1983.DVDRip.XviD-CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi Glitterbug (1994) 54', Super 8mm, Black and White and Colour
Derek.Jarman.-.Glitterbug.1994.DVDRip.XviD-CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi Gilles Deleuze has rightly observed with regard to experimental cinema that “if there is a constant in this cinema it is the construction of a gaseous state of perception”. Viewing and reviewing the super8 production of Derek Jarman one immediately senses the instability of the material, the elusiveness of time that flows and of attempts to stop it in the form of fragmentary memories, often through an exasperated and dream-like slow-motion sequence. From a continuous pattern of double exposures, refilming, grainy textures of light and colour, what emerges is a coagulation of a temporal dimension concretely lived on impromptu, casual and improvised sets but definitely the fruit of states of mind, of a predisposition towards the world that Jarman has nearly always represented in the form of myth. Evanescent images that are caught and blown up in the infinite instant of the sunset as in the breathtaking In The Shadow of the Sun (a film that will be released in the second DVD dedicated to the English film-maker), where the human figures break up in the yellow-orange refractions of sun and fire, engulfed by the reverberation and ringing spirals of the electronic score of Throbbing Gristle, subjects of TG Psychic Rally in Heaven. Once again, in this sort of underground video clip with warm tones (red and orange) dominating, the figure is broken up though mixed with images from a version of Dante’s Inferno (still another reference to the element of fire and to myth). Very different to this is the iconography of Pirate Tape, a portrait of Burroughs “shadowed” during one of his London stays: again in this case, Jarman’s super8 provides a sense of diary-like immediacy (impossible not to think of the “nervous” writing of the 16mm films of Mekas) which we find fully realized in Glitterbug within a more complex and variable structure.
In this sort of recapping of Jarman’s artistic and human path – which covers a span of 15 years – moving images alternate with photography, regular speed film makes way for freeze-frame or fast motion sequences, colour follows black and white; the only element that re-groups this chaos of actions and emotions, of pauses during the making of the film (the cheerful atmosphere found on the set of Sebastiane) and of scenes of shared life, is the equally eclectic score by Brian Eno which in some cases follows the frenetic rhythm of the images and in others acts as a counterpoint creating distancing effects that are even greater than those produced by the visual aspect.
Even more than Blue – an elegy on the awareness of death portrayed by means of a total visual resetting – Glitterbug is the true epigraph to Jarman’s cinema: vital, sunny, discontinuous, iconophilic, partly stateless (Jarman’s sense of things and places was much more Mediterranean than British). A cinema which while destined by the mid-Eighties to a large international public, jealously conserved to the very end its aura of being experimental and “amateur” (in the most noble definition of the word, that of Brakhage).
It was thus right for Jarman to conclude his life with this collage of super 8 materials leaving as a final testament an existential and even meta-filmic reflection: it is not by chance that the opening image in Glitterbug is Jarman himself filming his reflection in a mirror (a series of his super 8 films is entitled The Art of Mirrors) while the final shots are a return to the past, to the beginning of his adventure when the artist-film-maker had his studio in Bankside. This is the “last look” – as the caption says – offered to the world by Jarman and conserved in its purity by the grainy (but eternal) support of his well-loved super 8.
It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the different Super 8s that Jarman made over a span of fifteen years. This may be explained by the fact that the substandard cinema of the British painter-filmmaker was a melting pot in which to continuously delve for new fusions. These sparked in their turn other films, just as transmutations that might have been produced centuries before in an alchemist’s laboratory. Actually, single images, or entire sequences, transmigrate from one work to another, they change and are re-coloured, re-photographed, superimposed, one over the other, thus affirming the logic of an “expanded” cinema in all ways. This parallel with the alchemical process is not just a metaphor. The film In the Shadow of the Sun - as O'Pray explained so well - alludes to the philosophers' stone and is based on a book by William Gratacolle written in 1652, as well as Jungian Symbolisms. Yet beyond the references to magic and symbolism in this type of production – Jarman’s freest and purest also with respect to his narrative feature films – composition is inseparable with technique. In other words, the true subject of the film is precisely the process adopted, the medium being the technique itself. Apart from Journey to Avebury (the only film that consists almost exclusively of static shots characterized by a yellow filter) the films we present are based on overprinting, an element Jarman used for the first time in The Garden of Luxor (1972).
It goes almost without saying that super-8s represent a territory of passage from painting to cinema. The transfer of motifs, subjects and processes from one medium to another is demonstrated by the above mentioned film on Avebury – which could be associated, if we refer to the ambit of British experimental film of the early 70s, to the so-called landscape films by Raban, Welsby, Sercombe, etc. – from which Jarman had taken a series of photographs during that same period. In super-8s, the reduction in speed of the filming/projection device makes the cinematic image resemble the pictorial one. Colour coagulates in the framing, solidifies, becomes a material that is modelled by light and duration. The artist, however, was not satisfied with simple slow motion, his aim was to totally re-think the temporal nature of cinema. Jarman forces the viewer to adopt a certain perceptive attitude when watching his shorts, thus stimulating a reflection on the relationship between stasis and movement. By slowing down the scanning speed of the frames, Jarman retransformed cinema back into photography again, his primordial medium. From another point of view therefore, Jarman’s super-8s generated a moment of reflection on the binomial cinema/photography: Stolen Apples for Karen Blixen was in this way, an even more explicit experiment since the director created double exposures of images in movement on two photos taken of the novelist. Something similar occurred in his lunar Ashden's Walk on Møn, in which Jarman left the photo of a nebula as a backdrop upon which to “embed” other images.
Overprinting implies instability of vision, the pleasure of having images co-exist simultaneously and from which new associations, meanings, perceptions are triggered. Technically, superimposition closely resembles the vision of dream. Superimposition is like a shadow, a special shadow that only cinema (together with photography) can create. The other element that allows for the co-existence of multiple images within the same frame is the mirror. But in The Art of Mirrors Jarman does not show us the reflected image but rather uses this tool to stage a magical surreal ritual: a man in a tuxedo crosses the screen holding a mirror that sends reflections towards the camera’s lens. The mirror then passes into the hands of a woman in an evening gown and black feathered hat who little by little approaches the viewer, as if hypnotizing us. This twenties-style scene takes us back to the Dadaism of artists such as Man Ray and the slightly mythic surrealism of Cocteau. The shadow and the mirror – as Victor Stoichita wrote – are two elements whose importance should not be underestimated in the history of western painting. And this, Jarman knew very well.
Other more complex rituals may be found in what was perhaps Jarman’s substandard masterpiece of the entire period: In the Shadow of the Sun. The keys of a typewriter; a man takes some photos; a fire that burns and is superimposed upon human figures seen from the back, faces, and filtered landscapes; a man with a candelabrum walks, then claps his hands; a person with a white hood meanders through sand dunes; the silhouette of a plant; a gentleman with a top hat; finally, here comes death, a startling skull on a wide white dress. These are some figurative fragments, ghostly presences that emerge from a texture in constant transformation. Jarman’s suggestive alchemical symphony is dominated above all by fire, the key element upon which all the others converge: from the water sparkles that seem like snow, to the gaseous clouds in the film’s final part. All accompanied by Throbbing Gristle’s extraordinary music, made of metallic reverberations and sonorous undulations - a liquid hypnotic music that perfectly underscores the ancient and modern, classical and experimental echoes which nourish Jarman’s kinetic art.
Bruno Di Marino
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