In the Shadow of the Sun

Derek Jarman, GB 1974/81
Dir., Cinematography, Editing: Derek Jarman
Music: Throbbing Gristle
With: Karl Bowen, Christopher Hobbs, Luciana Martinez, Gerald Incandela, Andrew Logan, et al.
DCP (from Super 8), color, 54 min

PRECEDING:
T. G. Psychic Rally in Heaven – Derek Jarman, GB 1981
Music: Throbbing Gristle
16mm, color, 8 min

Pirate Tape – Derek Jarman, GB 1982
Music: Psychic TV
With: William S. Burroughs, Peter Christopherson, James Grauerholtz, Tim Burke
16mm, color, 16 min

As Jarman wryly noted, “the first audiences of In the Shadow of the Sun racked their brains over the film’s meaning instead of simply surrendering to the pull of a stream of chance images.” He “remixed” three relatively conventional Super 8 films he had shot in the early 1970s into a mysterious, exhilaratingly cosmic new work. The soundtrack was commissioned from the renowned industrial-experimental collective Throbbing Gristle.

Perhaps Jarman’s most intuitive, personal, and primal film, it is a shimmering dream of magic and alchemy, pulsing with a compelling dark energy and revisiting many of the artist’s recurring motifs (flames, masks, mirrors), now placed in an unfamiliar, almost horror-like context. A flirtation with nightmarish imagery from both antiquity (gates of hell) and modernity (nuclear fallout), it becomes quite literally an “apocalyptic” experience: Jarman creates his own cinematic Book of Revelation—written in streaks of fire.

The program is preceded by two later short works, T. G. Psychic Rally in Heaven and Pirate Tape. (Neil Young)