The Sacred in the Profane: Derek Jarman's Carvaggio (1986)

Possibly England’s most important queer filmmaker, Derek Jarman’s Carvaggio is considered one of his most pronounced works. A re-telling of the story of the Renaissance painter Carvaggio in a industrial post-modern environment full of anachronisms, with heavy doses of camp to boot. The re-telling the painter’s story as a queer artist struggling with himself and work is somewhat parallel the real life of Italian director Passolini who was murdered, an idol of Jarman’s. The film is extremely subversive, not just because it posits Carvaggio as a queer artist, but pretty much every male character in the film is either fabulously queer or at least bi-sexual. Even the pope himself, one of the notorious Borgias, speaks with a lisp and flirts with everyone in the court. The effect is a bizarre retrospective, a look back with modern eyes so to speak, one that isn’t only well told, but full of inner pathos and poetic visual beauty.
But one of the most subversive elements of the film is the structure of the text itself. Renaissance culture is an important pillar in western civilization, used as a benchmark to measure all other achievements. It was seen as a time of not only great learning, but of great art, great people etc. The Renaissance represents the now muted arrogance and quiet belief in the cultural superiority of Europe. Jarman’s revisions of this era dresses up this pivotal era as a decadent one, a decaying one, a hypocritical and repressed one. These transgressions both in gender, time and space are far from being playful for their own sake, but constitute a form of resistance to the cultural legacy of this mono-history. Jarman’s detournement of classical history mirrors a recurring theme or motif in Carravagio’s paintings, that of the profane within the sacred. Fruit and other foods rot on the table as holy figures feast, the look of fear and regret on certain heroes faces betrays their supposed noble intentions, and the use of sex workers and street people as models for Christ, the Virgin and Saints all make their way into Carravagio’s paintings. These little profanities did not go unnoticed in their own time, and his paintings caused quite the controversy. It is this aspect of subversion, that of supplanting profane or visceral elements within a work that is supposed to exclaim sanctity and holiness, which follows so closely the structure of Jarman’s film. So although the rough exterior of the film (and I do mean rough, the film is very minimalist in that it uses stages with jet black backdrops, with characters often occupying space as would figures in a painting, echoing Carravagio’s techniques in his works.) plays the part: People are dressed like they would in the Renaissance period, religion is clearly important to people etc. But the subversions and transgressions, although clearly tuned down in the first part of the film, come glaring through (quite unlike Carravagio’s paintings) quite strongly very quickly. The obvious queerness of most if not all characters, the anachronisms both in dress, language, setting, music technologies etc all form a hyper stylized queer revision of the past.

An anarchist reading of the film presents it in yet another light. Culture and history are manufactured as consumable commodities in what Adorno and Horkheimer called the “culture industry”. And although this idea is very complex and covers large amounts of areas, I want to concentrate on one particular one: that of the creation of a standardized history. States and civilizations are always based on a series of myths, which can be completely fictional or based on real people. Rome had Romulus, America has George Washington etc. Some myths or mythological figures transcendent individual nation-states to become trans-national myths, encompassing the entirety of western civilization. Carravagio is one of these figures, although admittedly only in intellectual circles (by that I mean, he isn’t a popular figure like say Robin Hood, Jesse James or Benjamin Franklin). By defacing the standardized version of Carravagio’s life and his work, Jarman subverts this standardized history, to create a rupture in the narrative of western civilization. It isn’t polemical, it isn’t ragging against civilization in an overt way, advocating the total destruction of all networks of dominance. It more like an individual (in this case Jarman’s) defacement of something sacred, a form of historical graffiti. Within the confines of western civilization itself, he scribbles a message of queerness, of historical chaos, of corruption and decadence. Anarchist can be seem to occupy a similar role in society as a whole. As an individual, the anarchist’s existence is the corrupting influence on civilization, throwing sand in the engine, rotting the structure from the inside. We infiltrate every sector of society, science, the academia, the workplace, the school, the military, the church etc. We plunder bits and parts which are useful to us, either skills or inspiration, and we slowly rot and corrupt the rest. Jarman’s film can be seem in a similar light, as a pillaging of standardized historical narratives in order to create new, personalized narratives. No necessarily counter-narratives, not exactly a critique, but something similar, something closer to that of a refusal. Anarchists and other subversives can find much joy in films like Carravagio for it shows that although Empires seems omnipresent, it is not immortal. We are the rot eating away at the mansion.