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Jubilee (1978) is a wildly beautiful film which strikes a precarious, and compelling, balance between sheer anarchy and genuine tenderness. Since first viewing it a week ago – I have since watched it three times – I have found myself frequently talking and writing to friends about it. Yet it remains an elusive film; and after every viewing, it tantalizes with new connections and still more layers of meaning. The Criterion Collection has created a superb DVD release, and included a wealth of archival and original supplements described below.

ImageWhat is Jubilee about? It begins when Queen Elizabeth I (played with quiet power by Jenny Runacre, who also portrays Bod, whom we will meet in a moment) has her court alchemist, the historical John Dee, summon Ariel. The sloe-eyed spirit with huge hands (whom Jarman describes as having “a glitter punk scintilla”) transports all of them 400 years into the future – just beyond our own time – to a dystopic London, which has become a literal wasteland, overrun with violence and decay. Let Jarman summarize Jubilee for you in his own words (culled from various supplements on the DVD):

Law and order has finally been abolished and do-your-own-thing is the order of the day. The church is a strip club [and Buckingham Palace a recording studio]…. Open war between all factions of society. A gang of bike girls centered at H.Q. in Southwark, rape and kill all adversaries, led by the Queen of Punk, Bod [Bodicea]…. The music of groups like The Slits, Sex Pistols plays incessantly to rapturous reception. The film is anarchic and very beautiful.

ImageJarman has nailed Jubilee: It is simultaneously “anarchic and very beautiful.” But perhaps the reasons why this film is so obsession-inducing (at least in me) is because both its “anarchy” and its “beauty” are fascinatingly complex, and merge into each other in so many original and striking ways.

The film has misleadingly been called a “Punk movie.” It is much more than that, although the then-nascent movement informs the film in many ways, from music to casting to tone. Punk’s heyday was 1975–80, with its two key albums – The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks and The Clash’s The Clash – both appearing in 1977, the year Jubilee was filmed (coinciding with Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee). Punk provided a clarion voice for alienated teenagers in its mix of hard-driving rock, socially aware but simple lyrics – that crystalized the mood of anger, powerlessness, and rebellion in the face of a severe economic recession – and a confrontational style which extended from the songs to the fashions of its devotees. Jubilee provides a virtual catalog of the Punk Look, from Mad’s (Toyah Willcox in a stunning performance) close-cropped hair dyed Day-Glo orange to angsty graffiti which covers almost every wall to the scrawled quotation from Psycho (which ends “…wouldn’t even harm a fly”) which fills the back of the jackets worn by the female biker gang. You may recall Hitchcock’s final scene, when the strait-jacketed Norman Bates, “possessed” by his dead mother, tells us how harmless he now is (yeah, right): Even a small detail like this resonates, since the tangled connection between gender identity and violence is one of Jarman’s key themes.

On a more overtly Punk note, Jarman includes songs by several popular groups, including Siouxsie and the Banshees, Maneaters, Chelsea, Amilcar, and Suzi Pinns – whose high-pitched vocal of “Rule Britannia,” together with actress “Jordan’s” goose-stepping performance as Amyl Nitrate, provides the film’s musical high point (see the first frame at the top of this review). He also puts several Punk icons onscreen, from the group The Slits (who play a street gang), to transgender star Wayne County (who portrays Lounge Lizard, the world’s biggest star: We’re told he’s just sold “50 million copies” in Russian alone of his hit “Paranoia Paradise”) to, most importantly, Adam Ant.

ImageDespite its Punk trappings, ultimately the film seems more about Punk than of it. How Jarman uses then-rising star Adam Ant reveals much about the film and filmmaker. When Crabs meets, and instantly tries to pick up, Kid (Adam Ant’s character), she coos that he is “gorgeous.” With his sweetly boyish persona – made just a bit wild by the black leather and painted-on lower sideburns (see the frame to the left) – it is no wonder that Jarman, as reported by a friend on the DVD’s documentary, fell “madly in love with him.” But how Jarman uses Kid in the film may reveal at least as much about his sociopolitical insights as his romantic frustration. When Kid is asked what he does, he replies, “Nothing… Music.” And throughout he is as passive offstage as he is frenzied onstage. His performance with his group, Adam and the Ants, is one of only two or three full musical numbers in the film; and it strikingly reveals Jarman’s gifts as one of the originators of music videos.

But Kid is unable to connect with anyone, including Crabs. He seems content to lie on his stomach while Crabs pulls his t-shirt up and strokes his back, and that only because she has promised to introduce him to Borgia Ginz (played by “Orlando,” aka Jack Birkett), the mogul who controls the entire world’s media and hence political, and even religious, power structure. (Ginz shares a palatial mansion in Dorset with an aged Adolf Hitler.) Ginz is, of course, taken with Kid and signs him, immediately rechristening him “Scum. That’s commercial. It’s all they [the audience] deserve.”

Perhaps the most haunting, and disturbing, image of Kid is the close-up shown two paragraphs above: Kid kissing his own image on TV (a moment later, he even licks the screen lasciviously with his tongue), giving a decidedly postmodern twist to the myth of Narcissus. And on still another level, Jarman was showing his foresight into Punk’s future. Just a few years after the release of Jubilee, as the filmmaker wrote in his memoir Dancing Ledge, “the film turned prophetic…. the streets burned in Brixton and Tosteth. Adam [Ant] was on Top of the Pops and signed up with Margaret Thatcher to sing at the Falklands Ball.” Jarman concluded the passage by repeating the chilling words he gave Borgia Ginz at the end of Jubilee: “They all sign up in one way or another.”

Beyond the Punk movement, Jarman turned to film, literature, history, and even ‘club culture’ to flesh out his vision for Jubilee. Although the picture is powerful on its own terms, without any need for “footnoting,” Jarman’s wide-ranging use of sources is fascinating, especially because he was equally at home in so many diverse aesthetic worlds. Also, it is through his unique artistry that Jarman is able to combine, and constantly recombine in endless variations, the dual vision of anarchy and beauty and make the film so engrossing, and moving. He is also one of the most creatively playful of modern filmmakers, and that sense of schoolboyish “let’s put on a show” energy keeps his films, even with their density of themes, buoyant and genuinely entertaining. It is a tough balancing act which few other filmmakers have been able to master.

Jarman draws on several cinematic traditions. On the one hand, he is inspired by the poetic, mythically resonant films of Jean Cocteau (Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus), who, like Jarman, was gay and brilliantly gifted in many areas, including drama, poetry, fiction, and the visual arts. Jubilee’s Ariel, whom we first see holding a mirror which blindingly reflects the sun, could have stepped out of Cocteau’s surreal 1930 first film, The Blood of a Poet (Jarman was also quoting from his own 1973 short, “Art of Mirrors”). He also admired the sumptuous films made collaboratively by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, including such 1940s classics of British cinema as Stairway to Heaven, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes. For instance, Jarman uses the color red, which bursts into the film at several dramatic points, in ways reminiscent of Powell and Pressburger.

ImagePerhaps the most profound influence on Jarman is the political, and visually arresting, early cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, especially the two seminal films he made in 1967. La Chinoise, about a terrorist cell, informed how Jarman depicts the biker gang, while Week End provided a blueprint for creating a trenchant yet cost-effective modern wasteland. More generally, Godard offered Jarman a rich series of techniques to adapt, including ways to employ both visual and verbal cues to highlight how intrinsically absurd, and sometimes fatal, society can be. Both filmmakers also bring additional depth, and irony, by brandishing an extensive range of culture, not only through allusions to other films but with images of books read from, sloganeering posters, and dialogue that is delivered as if the actors were merely reading texts, not to mention fantastic, historically impossible settings. All of those elements are strikingly evident in Jubilee; the punked-out schoolteacher and pseudo-historian Amyl Nitrate (played by “Jordan” with zigzags of greasepaint and towering blond hair spikes – she the frame above) is the most Godardian character in any Jarman film.

Jarman was also an admirer of one of Godard’s most astonishing disciples, the openly gay political filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose early films in particular may have influenced Jubilee. One possible connection is Fassbinder’s 1970 experimental picture, The Niklashauasen Journey, which conflates political unrest in Germany’s Middle Ages and the late 1960s.

A link between the poetic and political traditions, and one of Jarman’s favorite filmmakers, was Pier Paolo Pasolini, yet another gay director/author/artist. He was the major influence on Jarman’s first film, Sebastiane (1976); and his lyrical/political/mythic sensibility can be felt in all of Jarman’s work. Yet one work stands out as the primary influence on Jubilee: Stanley Kubrick’s landmark 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange.

ImageIn some ways, Jubilee feels like an even bleaker extension of A Clockwork Orange, not only in its depiction of a near-future London of decay and explosive violence, but in how Jarman shoots the three or four attack scenes which punctuate his film. He reminds us of Kubrick in the way he balances close-ups and medium shots, employs oblique compositions, sometimes uses harsh key light (note the frame to the right), and in how he unflinchingly holds the shot until the emotion becomes unbearable – making us aware of his own horror at the violence. Yet the style of those scenes feels more like the brief cinéma vérité clips of staged atrocities, which Alex is forced to watch during the Ludovico Treatment, than the bulk of A Clockwork Orange.

The source of Kubrick’s film – Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel – also reminds us of the literary roots of Jubilee, including William S. Burroughs’s The Wild Boys (1971), which uses an experimental form to depict the exploits of a band of wild gay ‘freedom fighters’ in a near-future dystopia, not to mention such earlier landmark works in this tradition, both from Britain, as Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932; Jarman even has the phrase scrawled on a wall at the gang’s headquarters).

Of course, Huxley made ironic use of the phrase from The Tempest (in fact, it would be Jarman’s next feature, and one of the great Shakespeare film adaptations). The spirit, and sometimes even the language, of Shakespeare, plays a fascinating part in Jubilee. One of the most beautiful pastiches of Shakespearean style I know comes in John Dee’s monologue in the first scene of Jubilee, when he invokes Ariel. Dee is portrayed with spellbinding restraint by Richard O’Brien (best known as the creator of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and for playing Riff Raff in the film version – interestingly, Jarman uses several visual and performance cues from Riff Raff for his character Borgia Ginz). Here is an excerpt from Dee’s monologue (transcribed directly from the film), delivered impeccably by O’Brien:

I cast for Ariel, pearl of fire, my only star. God’s moonbeam send forth my flower. The smoke and ashes of ages past which hangs like morning mist in veils across the universe, parts in swirls and eddies, and through them, the shooting star, my angel Ariel, flies with mirrored eyes, leaving a sparkling phosphorescent trail across the universe. Down. Down he plummets towards Earth, through the great vacuum on the curve of infinity. And like a fiery rose, he descends to Mortlake.

(NOTE: Mortlake, where Jubilee’s Elizabethan scenes are set, was Dee’s estate near London, where he had both a laboratory and the largest private library in England, with over 4,000 volumes.)

Jarman draws still more from the Elizabethan era, while giving it a decidedly Punk inflection. His characters’ names recall the allegorical figures in Edmund Spenser’s epic-length poem – with characters such as Errour and Braggadocchio – The Faerie Queene (the title refers to Queen Elizabeth; Spenser was also one of Jarman’s favorite poets). I found Jarman’s own descriptions of his characters suggestive. They reveal not only the scope of his themes but his wonderfully quirky and playful side too. Cheek by jowl with historical and mythical allusions are such artefacts of ’70s (and later) dance club culture as “Amyl Nitrate” and “Crabs.”

keep reading this review here: http://jclarkmedia.com/jarman/jarman02jubilee.html