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Even if the characters did exist and the behavior and times depicted are true, to what purpose does one exploit a couple of rotten pages in his- tory?-It's like opening up a can of worms.
-Ann Guarino
The Renaissance meant many things to Derek Jarman, not all of them positive. These things included a traditional art-historical celebration of the Renaissance for its renewal and conservation of classical forms (including one of particular interest to Jarman-the male nude), a more "alternative" fascination with the magical thinking which flowered after the rediscovery and translation of Platonic, Hermetic, and Cabbalistic texts in fifteenth-century Florence, and an idealization of Elizabethan England in particular as a "cultural Arcadia." However, he also had a deep suspicion of the Renaissance as the source of the destructive indi- vidualism, commercialism, materialism, and political authoritarianism that together constitute the modern world. To put it crudely, insofar as the Renaissance, as a historical and cultural period, could be thought of as "pre-modern," it was admired by Jarman and was a wellspring of continued artistic inspiration. Insofar as it was "early modern," it repre- sented a version of the Fall, and the seventeenth century was when this Fall became irreversible: "The revival of the male nude ensured that the civilization of the early Renaissance in Italy was dominated by male im- ages, images of homosexual passion, of varying degrees of refinement. The ideological savagery of the seventeenth century marked the loss of this refinement" ( Jarman, Dancing 21).
A number of critics, including me, have placed a good deal of empha- sis on the importance of the Renaissance for Jarman's films, but none of them has looked in detail at the first film with which he was creatively involved, Ken Russell's The Devils (1971).1 In one scene of this film we do indeed witness classical/Renaissance male nudes being destroyed by "the ideological savagery of the seventeenth century" and the film as a whole captures very expressively the complicated collisions between the medieval, the classical, and the "early modern," which characterized the Renaissance and to which Jarman was highly responsive. I want to give the fullest account so far of Jarman's creative contribution to the film and make clearer how much it influenced him, its deeply unsettling...