Imagining October

Imagining October (1984) represents the culmination of two periods of transition in Derek Jarman’s work: his movement towards an explicitly political address, begun with his collaboration with Lee Drysdale on the unmade Neutron,¹ and his development of a way of working with Super 8 and video that would enable him to take an experimental film language beyond experimental film spaces. In The Last of England (1987) and The Garden (1990), this would become hybridised with the new norms of music video, surreal nightmare images of persecution and psychic anguish illustrating states expressed in poetic voiceover. In Imagining October, we encounter this approach at its most esoteric, polemically topical and formally confrontational. 

The language of Imagining October and the Super 8-derived films that followed it is not that of Jarman’s Super 8 filmmaking of the ’70s, but a new form, in some ways as much its opposite as its continuation, and not only because it was no longer medium-specific. Here, the tripoded superimpositions, light and noise of the 16mm version of In the Shadow of the Sun (1981) are replaced by handheld camera movements, chiaroscuro, and a composed soundtrack in which there are seldom more than two sounds or instrumental voices present at any one time. Jarman said of In the Shadow of the Sun that “the pleasure of the Super 8s is the pleasure of seeing language put through the magic lantern”,² but now written language itself provides guideposts, fastening the shifting images to an individual chain of thought. The presence of that individual is the second major shift: for the first time in his public work, Jarman appears as himself. 

Kenneth Anger and Jean Cocteau are the obvious precedents for this use of the filmmaker’s own image, but in view of Peter Wollen’s participation and the “HOME THOUGHTS” sequence that follows it, we should also note that in its juxtaposition of stylistically disparate sections interspersed with title cards in pursuit of something like a thesis, Imagining October bears a superficial resemblance to Wollen’s academic “avant-garde” work made in collaboration with Laura Mulvey, in which they also cast themselves. This mode of filmmaking—essentially documentary with Brechtian illustrations—had become the institutionally preferred oppositional form in Britain during Peter Sainsbury’s time at the BFI Production Board. Transforming the elements of this genre, Jarman guides his audience out towards engagement with the visionary register of his “cinema of small gestures.” 

Imagining October begins with the grammar of psychologised narrative. After the title card “SITTING ON EISENSTEIN’S CHAIR MOSCOW 1984 OCTOBER” we cut to Jarman with his eyes closed, the camera tilts up, and the image dissolves to the “perpetual flame” he had found at a Zoroastrian fire-temple in Baku, around which “an ugly museum” had been built.³ Crucially, the museum is not included in the frame. The filmmaker’s appearance precedes the place he is remaking in imagination, and we understand that we have entered his vision. 

The grain, flicker and staccato motion of the Super 8 footage act upon the representation of the scenes in Moscow and Baku without countering it as such techniques do in structural-materialist filmmaking; rather, the fascination induced by their textures intensifies our engagement. Jarman referred to his low-framerate technique as “the method of Filming akin to a heartbeat”;⁴ its lingering quality imbues the movements and gestures it captures with the energy of a gaze simultaneously active and passive, an alchemical union of opposites. Michael O’Pray described this method as “a means of eroticizing not only people and their gestures but also objects themselves”.⁵ In the film’s first sequence, the excitement this generates is coloured with the Thanatos of suspense or horror, as Peter Wollen, cast in the role of a noir detective by the shadows and Jarman’s swooping camera, reveals the blotting-out of Trotsky’s name in Eisenstein’s copy of John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World. 

With the “HOME THOUGHTS” sequence, Jarman breaches both the grammars of silent cinema and of counter-cinema. On the page, this text has an incantatory quality, and we can imagine it being delivered in the same style as the voiceover texts of The Last of England; on screen, its effect is even more confrontational, as each title card fades to black only to be followed by another, for four minutes. 

During the years of this film’s unavailability, the impact of the blacked-out name and the intertitle sequence perhaps distorted our sense of its tone; images of imaginary Imagining Octobers centred on these elements. In fact, the core of the film takes place on video, in the painter’s studio. The lingering of the Super 8 is replaced by a tactile use of the handheld video camera, drifting and lingering on the models’ bodies, or following the paintbrush, at times accompanied only by the direct sound of its scratching. The interplay of looks and silence here anticipates Caravaggio (1986), the pre-production of which had been going on for five years by the time Jarman made Imagining October in six weeks. In the latter film, these scenes reflect his thinking about the personal and economic relationships between patron, artist and model; here, intercut with shadowy Super 8 shots of Moscow, they are inflected by the occult privacy of marginalised expression. In Dancing Ledge, published the same year, Jarman wrote that “[t]oday Michele C. would toss his brushes into the Tiber and pick up Sony’s latest video, as painting has degenerated into an obscure, hermetic practice, performed by initiates behind closed doors.”⁶ Yet concepts of hermeticism and initiation are generally sources of power in Jarman’s work, and as the video transfers he had executed for the ICA with James Mackay’s assistance had provided a means for the hermetic language of the Super 8 filmmaking to find a wider public of new initiates, video now permits the cinema of small gestures to bring its audience into the intimacy of the studio, “behind closed doors.” The heroic imagery of Soviet posters places its homoerotic figures against the sky, in the bright light of the world transfigured by revolution; John Watkiss paints Jarman’s friends as soldiers in Caravaggio-like shadows, facing towards each other.  Observing their rituals of representation, Watkiss and Jarman channel art’s power to cauterise social violence. As a representational artist working in a realistic style, Watkiss represents an example both of marginalised art and the marginalisation of a social aspect of art-making, the encounter between artist and subject, that Jarman had turned to film to regain. 

With the models’ meal, the artist’s completion of the painting and the models’ departure from the studio, the tensions of the painting sequence are resolved into an image of community, and the setting of the Super 8 footage switches from Moscow to Baku. In his account of the film’s making, Jarman reveals that the extraordinary building seen in this sequence is a memorial to the daughter of the sculptor who built it.⁷ This personal significance goes unmentioned in the film; after Red Square and Lenin’s tomb, we need only intuit that it has one, and its legibility as a “private solution” is the point. We have travelled this far to encounter the permanent revolution of the creative impulse, and recognise, in the close-up of the man with gold teeth, the universal language of gazes held and smiles returned. 

Imagining October (1984 United Kingdom 27 minutes)

Prod: James Mackay Dir: Derek Jarman Scr: Shaun Allen, Derek Jarman Phot: Derek Jarman, Richard Heslop, Cerith Wyn-Evans, Carl Johnson, Sally Potter Ed: Cerith Wyn-Evans, Richard Heslop, Derek Jarman, Peter Cartwright Mus: Genesis P-Orridge, David Ball 

Cast: Angus Cook, Peter Doig, Toby Mott, Stephen Thrower, Keir Wahid, John Watkiss, Peter Wollen

Endnotes