Submitted by
Andrew Kemp
Derek Jarman
An extract from Derek Jarman's diary in
Dancing Ledge
Quartet Books 1984, (ed. Shaun Allen)
...The English remain suspicious; they want prose, socially committed stuff
to bore their pants off so they can leave the cinema and believe they have
seen 'reality'
30 MARCH 1980. PHOENIX HOUSE
There is only one English feature director whose work is in the first rank.
Michael Powell is the only director to make a clear political analysis in
his films, his work is unequalled. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is
the finest English feature, and A Canterbury Tale and A Matter of Life and
Death are not far behind. When he made these films he was heavily criticized
for his treatment of serious themes. Blimp was banned by Churchill and
remained in a savaged version for nearly forty years, a plea for tolerance
and regard for the enemy as human made at the height of the war - there is
no more courageous English film. It is a tragedy he has made so few films in
the last twenty years, none in the last ten, and a lasting condemnation of
all those who make films. He was a major casualty of the spurious social
realism of the sixties, whose practitioners have grown fat and invaded the
media with their well-scrubbed minds. Their films are never seen by the
communities they are made in, but transported via the colour supplements
straight to a land where the consciences of the Conscious are titillated and
prizes for honest are won...
