the Jarmans are coming

Funny: I woke up this morning thinking about Derek Jarman, for some reason. Then on the way to work, in the Metro, I read an interview with the filmmaker Isaac Julien, who is curating a Jarman exhibition at the Serpentine, featuring a film he has made over the past - I think - 18 years. He credits Jarman with inspiring him with his vision of film as a kind of poetry, rather than as a kind of narrative structure.* (Julien has filmed a version of Derek Walcott's epic Homer-based poem Omeros, but I haven't seen it. He clearly really is interested in poetry; and perhaps also in people called Derek...)

I tried to look all this up on the Metro's website so I could get the actual quote, but it is an appalling Heat!-style fiasco, bearing no resemblance at all to the paper. Lots of celebrities and football and, natch, no Jarman.

Unfortunately the film is also full of Tilda Swinton, and I don't know. Something about her always makes me want to pinch her, to see if she can move her facial muscles spontaneously.

* i.e., an extension of the novel. This is interesting in another way: I remember at the time, it was all Jarman/painting, all about the visuals. The Caravaggio one obviously accentuated this association. Was Jarman irredeemably a creature of the eighties, like Peter Greenaway (don't make me), or would his films still stand as interesting art? And would it shed a light on the film-as-poetry thing? Ideas and responses welcome.

I know: he has come to stand for something else, so that the films are now almost beside the point, but I'm not sure what that thing is. Human courage, maybe. Aliveness: he certainly had that. He was writing to the Times the week before he died. I've read parts of his journals, he was a terrible misogynist.