Caravaggio

Leo Bersani, Ulysse Dutoit

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839022579
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

Caravaggio (1986), Derek Jarman's portrait of the Italian Baroque artist, shows the painter at work with models drawn from Rome's homeless and prostitutes, and his relationship with two very different lovers: Ranuccio, played by Sean Bean, and Lena, played by Tilda Swinton. It is probably the closest Derek Jarman came to a mainstream film. And yet the film is a uniquely complex and lucid treatment of Jarman's major concerns: violence, history, homosexuality, and the relation between film and painting. In particular, according to Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio is unlike Jarman's other work in avoiding a sentimentalising of gay relationships and in making no neat distinction between the exercise and the suffering of violence. Film-making involves a coercive power which, for Bersani and Dutoit, Jarman may, without admitting it to himself, have found deeply seductive. But in Caravaggio this power is renounced, and the result is Jarman's most profound, unsettling and astonishing reflection on sexuality and identity.

Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio

I

What did Derek Jarman learn from Caravaggio? There is no easy answer to this question (if indeed it can be answered at all), and it is not the same as asking why Jarman was attracted to Caravaggio. Jarman himself helps us to answer that question, and the account of his interest in the Italian painter is straightforward and persuasive. It seems to have been almost entirely a matter of self-recognition. As a painter and film-maker, Jarman saw in Caravaggio his own dominant aesthetic interests. Caravaggio painted, but, Jarman claims in the autobiographical text Dancing Ledge, ‘had Caravaggio been reincarnated in this century it would have been as a film-maker, Pasolini’. Not just any film-maker, but the Italian homosexual painter/film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Pasolini ‘painted very badly’, but that was perhaps a symptom of the times: ‘Painting has degenerated into an obscure, hermetic practice, performed by initiates behind closed doors. There is a remarkable lack of emotional force in modern painting.’ You can’t ‘shed a tear’ for painting now, ‘but you can weep at Pasolini’s Gospel According to Matthew, and Ricotta can make you laugh. In 1600, who knows, painting might have evoked the same immediate response.’³⁸ Today only film has the power that painting may have had in Caravaggio’s time.

The relation between film and power will be a central motif in our discussion of Jarman’s work. For the moment, let’s simply note that Pasolini is at least in part a stand-in for Jarman himself. Since Pasolini’s ‘emotional force’ is something Jarman clearly sought to achieve in his own films, we might say that a reincarnated Caravaggio could just as well be Derek Jarman as Pier Paolo Pasolini. For Jarman, it is even as if Caravaggio were already working in a medium that hadn’t yet been created. He writes that the latter ‘had “invented” cinematic light’ – by which he probably means that the sharply delineated lighting of Caravaggio’s dark interiors creates the same effect as studio (as distinguished from outdoor) lighting in films. Caravaggio’s treatment of Biblical subjects is also congenial to Jarman’s aesthetic use of history and religion. ‘Obsessed by the interpretation of the past’, as he confesses in the notes accompanying the Caravaggio script, Jarman frequently found filmic inspiration in the Elizabethan and Jacobean pasts. We have not only his cinematic version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1979) and Marlowe’s Edward II (1991); there is also the use of fourteen of Shakespeare’s sonnets (read by the actress Judy Dench) on the soundtrack of The Angelic Conversation (1985) and the presence of Elizabeth I, the astrologer-alchemist John Dee, and Ariel as a framing counterpoint to the scenes of contemporary British squalor and violence in Jubilee (1978). None of these films aims for ‘historical accuracy’. The Tempest and Edward II have deliberately jarring reminders of late-twentieth-century culture and politics: Elizabeth Welsh singing ‘Stormy Weather’ in the Shakespeare film, and, among other things, the shots of demonstrations by the gay and lesbian organization OutRage in Edward II. Caravaggio is also replete with anachronistic touches: the critic Baglione’s typewriter, Ranuccio’s motorbike, the gold calculator held by the financier Vincenzo Giustiniani. Jarman saw Caravaggio as a kind of legitimating model for such abrupt intrusions of contemporary life into predominantly period films. ‘For Caravaggio the past was matter of fact – it lived in his own back yard.’ He knew – as Jarman wished to know – ‘how to present the present past’. ‘Caravaggio was a turning point; a mere thirty years after him scientific method was on the ascendant and Poussin was deep in the archaeological portrayal of the antique.’³⁹

More important than the anachronistic detail in making ‘the present past’ present is a willingness to grant a certain opacity to the materials being used to represent the past, an opacity that makes impossible the illusion of being able to read through those materials and see the past ‘as it was’. In Caravaggio’s case, this meant, as Jarman saw, ‘[burning] away decorum and the ideal, … [knocking] the saints out of the sky and onto the streets’.⁴⁰ As we argue in Caravaggio’s Secrets, there is a politically explosive potential in Caravaggio’s implicit insistence that we recognize the present in the reconstruction of the past. Perhaps most forcefully in the late St. John the Baptist (1609–10; in the Galleria Borghese, Rome), Caravaggio appears to be allowing his model to play his role unpersuasively, to insist that we recognize a Roman boy of the streets instead of St. John devoured by his ascetic passion. The opacity of the model’s deteriorating flesh could be seen as the resistance of a contemporary body to a veritable industry of symbolization.⁴¹ Compared with the insistence, on the part of Caravaggio’s models, that we see them and not merely St. John or the dead Virgin, that we take account of their refusal to be used for representation, Jarman’s jolting anachronisms (the typewriter in Caravaggio, the gay protest in Edward II) seem like rather crude attacks on an audience’s willingness to go along with conventional realistic deceits. Jarman nonetheless saw in Caravaggio – and aimed for in his own work – what we take to be Caravaggio’s rejection of both the claim that knowledge of the past (in art, its successful representation or re-creation) is either possible or useful, and the willingness to use this claim as a pretext for evading our responsibility to the present.

What Jarman principally recognized in Caravaggio, however, was his (presumed) homosexuality. Caravaggio ‘brought the lofty ideals down to earth’, Jarman wrote late in 1982 (during the fifth rewrite of the script for his film), ‘and became the most homosexual of painters, in the way that Pasolini is the most homosexual of film-makers’. Recognizing the difficulty of our knowing exactly ‘how the seventeenth century understood physical homosexuality’, Jarman nonetheless persisted – at least at this stage of his thought – in seeing Caravaggio as a gay hero in a homophobic culture. ‘In a hostile environment [Caravaggio’s] extremes of self-analysis [“he is the most self-conscious of artists”] became self-destruction.’ When he wrote this, Jarman had not yet been diagnosed as HIV-positive, and his critique of Thatcherism in England had not yet become the angry, often powerful attacks on the homophobic insensitivity to those suffering and dying from AIDS which inform both his writing and the films (especially, The Garden [1990] and Edward II) of the late 80s and 90s. British homophobia, however, was obviously not invented for the AIDS epidemic, and, as the early texts on Caravaggio indicate, Jarman’s attraction to the painter had much to do with his perception of Caravaggio as a gay artist, like Pasolini and Jarman himself, having to struggle in a society hostile to ‘the centre of his life’.⁴²

Jarman’s identification with Caravaggio as a homosexual did not always have such historical solemnity; it could also be more intimate, raunchier. Speaking of an avoidance of landscape common to Caravaggio’s paintings and his own films, Jarman gives a sexy twist to this preference for interiors: ‘We’re both nocturnal back-room boys.’ In a similar vein, he proposes an astonishing interpretation of Caravaggio’s self-portrait in a figure to the far left in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew (circa 1599–1600), a man apparently leaving the scene and looking over his shoulder at the young, massive, scantily clad executioner about to strike (or having just struck) with his sword the passive martyred saint lying beneath him:

The Martyrdom of St. Matthew (1599–1600) by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome, Italy/Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

Michele [as Caravaggio is called in the film] gazes wistfully at the hero slaying the saint. It is a look no one can understand unless he has stood till 5 a.m. in a gay bar hoping to be fucked by that hero. The gaze of the passive homosexual at the object of his desire, he waits to be chosen, he cannot make the choice. Later his head will be cut off by a less godlike version of the young assassin; his name is now David and all the weight of society is behind him and he can cut off the head without a trace of pity.

The painting of The Martyrdom of St. Matthew plays an important role in Jarman’s film. Caravaggio, erotically obsessed with Ranuccio

Michele in the left corner of The Martyrdom

Thomasoni, pays the young man to pose as the executioner; during one of the posing sessions there is a shot that imitates the corner of the painting just mentioned. (Elsewhere in the same volume, Jarman re-states his crude fantasy-reading of the painting: ‘a handsome assassin … is cruised by the artist gazing guiltily over his shoulder.’)⁴³ Michele’s relation to Ranuccio is, however – as we shall see – far more complex, and interesting, than the passage just quoted suggests. Indeed, Jarman’s film would not be worth talking about if he treated Caravaggio’s homosexual desires at the level of his critical comments. We could of course also say that since the film is much better than the texts accompanying it would suggest, there’s not much point in giving serious attention to the texts. There are, we feel, two good reasons for citing these passages. First, since the simplified relation they assume between the victimized homosexual and an oppressive society is congenial to certain forms of queer politics, it has been picked up by Jarman’s critics as a reason for praising his work. His films have in large measure been admired as acts of political resistance. In his introduction to a 1996 collection of essays devoted to Jarman’s films, Chris Lippard speaks of Jarman ‘as perhaps the most prominent queer man in Britain over the last decade’. Several of the contributors focus on Jarman as queer hero. Tracy Biga discusses the ‘non-narrative organisation of Jarman’s books and films’, as well as ‘their content and even their mode of production’, as working ‘continually against patriarchal hierarchy, as well as against other forms of hierarchy and authority’. In an essay entitled ‘Perverse Law: Jarman as gay criminal hero’, David Gardner reads Jarman’s ‘dark implication that homosexuality equals crime, love equals murder’, not as complicating our sense of desire and identity in ways that might call for a re-thinking of contemporary queer politics, but rather as ‘equations [that] open the way for struggle if they do not accede to the dominant notions of criminal and homosexual. In a resistant reading, they signal strength and activism: the shock value of a declaration of one’s marginal desire, the insistence on one’s existence, the dramatisation of the struggle itself.’ In another contribution (with an equally confident title: ‘Opposing “Heterosoc”: Derek Jarman’s counter-hegemonic activism’), Martin Quinn-Meyler also manages to see the violence frequently associated with homosexuality in Jarman’s films not as compelling us to acknowledge certain complicities in homosexual desire with the very violence that oppresses us, but rather as ‘always an act of subversion with the potential to destabilize the control of Heterosex’. ‘Militarised queer sex’ is always ‘oppositional’; no matter how nasty it becomes, we can always count on ‘militaristic and physically aggressive’ queer lovemaking to come down on the side of the ‘counter-hegemonic’. It is apparently only by maintaining this oppositional purity that Jarman could continue to be promoted – especially in the few years preceding his death from AIDS in 1994 – as, in Joseph A. Gomez’s terms, ‘Britain’s most up-front and articulate advocate for homosexuality, and probably its most “in your face” critic of Thatcherite values – whether economic, political, social or aesthetic’.⁴⁴

A few hours before the last page was written, we read an account of yet another hate crime in America. In Laramie, Wyoming, a state nearly as fabled for its right-wing politics as for its spectacular mountain views, a 21-year-old gay student was kidnapped by two young men, pistol-whipped and left unconscious tied to a ranch fence for eighteen hours until a passing bicyclist spotted him. He later died. (Wyoming is one of ten states that do not have hate-crime laws; such legislation has repeatedly been voted down on the grounds that it would give homosexuals special rights.) The girlfriend of one of the murderous straights, apparently in an effort to explain the violence, has reported that Matthew Shepard, the gay man, had made passes at one of his two attackers in a local bar, thereby ‘embarrassing’ him ‘in front of all their friends’.⁴⁵ Probably the only morally healthy response to incid...