Cult Tip
Super8 Programme Vol 1 (Italian Import) - Jarman, DerekReleasedatum: 5 december 2003
'Glitterbug' is Jarman himself filming his reflection in a mirror (a series of his super 8 films is entitled The Art of Mirrors) while the final shots are a return to the past, to the beginning of his adventure when the artist-film-maker had his studio in Bankside. This is the 'last look' – as the caption says – offered to the world by Jarman and conserved in its purity by the grainy (but eternal) support of his well-loved super 8. Very different to this is the iconography of 'Pirate Tape', a portrait of Burroughs 'shadowed' during one of his London stays: again in this case, Jarman’s super8 provides a sense of diary-like immediacy (impossible not to think of the 'nervous' writing of the 16mm films of Mekas) which we find fully realized in Glitterbug within a more complex and variable structure. 'The Shadow Of The Sun' (a film that will be released in the second DVD dedicated to the English film-maker), where the human figures break up in the yellow-orange refractions of sun and fire, engulfed by the reverberation and ringing spirals of the electronic score of Throbbing Gristle, subjects of 'TG Psychic Rally In Heaven'. Once again, in this sort of underground video clip with warm tones (red and orange) dominating, the figure is broken up though mixed with images from a version of Dante’s 'Inferno' (still another reference to the element of fire and to myth).
DVD Extras
Commentary by Derek Jarman. Biography. Filmography.
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