Irish Film Institute -THE FILMS OF DEREK JARMAN AT THE IFI THIS DECEMBER

THE FILMS OF DEREK JARMAN AT THE IFI THIS DECEMBER

November 11th 2019: The Irish Film Institute (IFI) presents a season of films by director Derek Jarman, running this December from Tuesday 3rd to Sunday 15th. Presented in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) to coincide with its Jarman exhibition, PROTEST!, the season will feature the filmmaker’s most significant films.

Tickets are on sale now at www.ifi.ie/derek-jarman. A multi-film pass, 5 films for €50, is available directly from the IFI Box Office.

Jarman is regarded as one of the most influential figures in 20th century British culture, having produced work in a variety of mediums throughout the late 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. Jarman was a poet, painter, scriptwriter, director, cinematographer, set designer, and author of autobiographical journals. The films screening at the IFI demonstrate engagement with art, society, and sexuality, and a playfulness with traditional literature, while IMMA’s PROTEST! highlights his further practices as a political activist and gardener. This is the first time that the diverse aspects of his craft will be brought together in over 20 years.

Jarman’s provocative and anti-establishment work frequently features condemnation of British politics and oppressive religious conservatism. His feature debut Sebastiane (1976), which screens on Tuesday 3rd, is a distinctly queer interpretation of the martyrdom of St Sebastian; Jarman’s queer filmmaking was a practice that ran alongside his tireless advocacy for gay rights.

Cultivating a powerful voice for marginalised communities in the contemporary art world, Jarman combined activism with radical aesthetic form. Such experimentation is evident in 1978’s Jubilee (Thursday 5th) and 1987’s The Last of England (Tuesday 10th).

Throughout his career, Jarman worked with Super 8mm film. The Angelic Conversation (Saturday 7th), is an example of Jarman’s 1980s style, using this analogue format. The poetic montage depicts a diegesis of male gay desire, and Jarman himself described the film as ‘a dream world, a world of magic and ritual’.

He made no secret of his HIV diagnosis in 1986 and continued to work as his health declined, creating some of the most formally daring films of his career. He realised his fictionalised biopic of the Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio in Caravaggio (1986), which screens on Sunday 8th. The Garden (1990), screening Thursday 12th, turns inward to his interior world, and offers a contemplative, self-reflexive reverie on repression and mortality.

Later works in the 1990s saw Jarman bring a modern twist to the traditional. Showing on Saturday 14th, Edward II (1991), an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan drama, is often cited as a key film of the New Queer Cinema cycle of the early 1990s. For his penultimate film (and final narrative feature) in 1994, he made Wittgenstein, an imaginative biopic of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, based on a screenplay by literary theorist Terry Eagleton; the film closes the season on Sunday 15th.

Tickets are available from the IFI Box Office on 01-6793477 and from www.ifi.ie/derek-jarman. Individual screening tickets cost €11.50. A multi-film pass is available directly from the IFI Box Office, offering 5 films for €50.

For further information, interview availability, and high-res images, please contact Frances Wilde (fwilde@irishfilm.ie) at the IFI Press Office – (01) 6795744.

IFI is principally funded by the Arts Council.

ENDS

FULL SEASON SCHEDULE
Tuesday 3rd: Sebastiane (18.30)
Thursday 5th: Jubilee (18.30)
Saturday 7th: The Angelic Conversation (13.30)
Sunday 8th: Caravaggio (13.30)
Tuesday 10th: The Last of England (18.30)
Thursday 12th: The Garden (18.30)
Saturday 14th: Edward II (13.30)
Sunday 15th: Wittgenstein (13.30)

IFI CINEMAS TODAY


The IFI is supported
by The Arts Council

Arts Council of Ireland