The Angelic Conversation

Judi Dench recites 14 poems by William Shakespeare: what might sound like a highly serious BBC radio production becomes, in Derek Jarman’s cinematic realization, “the purest and most magnificent of his experimental works.”

A non-narrative exploration of desire, translated into distorted, heightened imagery (originally shot on Super 8). Accompanied by an ethereal electronic soundtrack produced by the band Coil, combining music and field recordings, young men wander through rugged landscapes in a series of elliptical episodes, performing mysterious rituals.

Sensually overlapping images—sometimes in stop-motion or single frames, often with mythological references—accumulate into a quiet frenzy of abstraction. Fights and embraces, unrestrained physicality, passionate tributes to the male form—all are united by Dame Judi’s recitation of the sonnets, which may still be the most beautiful love poems ever written by one man to another. (Neil Young)