About

"When it was shown on television I think it had well over half a million viewers; for me that's a large audience. I don't need the whole world. I was exploring a landscape I had never seen on film: areas of psyche that hadn't been projected before. I have seen very few films on male love which are gentle, they usually have a violent subtext – the violence you have to traverse before you make peace with yourself."
Derek Jarman, Kicking the Pricks (1996)

Frustrated by his struggle to finance his biopic of painter Caravaggio, Derek Jarman spent the summer of 1984 shooting footage on his Super-8 Nizo 480 camera at the caves at Winspit, the cliffs near Dancing Ledge, the Isle of Grain and an Elizabethan mansion and garden at Montacute House, Somerset. The result is a complex and poetic study of companionship and love – what Jarman described as "my most austere work, but also the closest to my heart" – that chronicled that summer's affair between the two actors he invited to be part of the project (archaeologist Paul Reynolds and Phillip Williamson that Jarman meet at the disco Heaven).

Shooting without a formal script, Jarman decided during the editing process to structure the film around fourteen of William Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609) that are read by Dame Judi Dench. Shakespeare's great love poems consider romantic partnership from a range of perspectives and have been the subject to homoerotic interpretation since their publication. Jarman goes as far as to proclaim "our greatest love poetry is queer" and uses the Sonnets to frame his erotic and loving footage of the two men swimming, wrestling, caressing and traversing a strange landscape.

During a 1986 retrospective of his work at London's ICA, Jarman used gallery spaces to re-film his Super-8 material that was shot at 3-6 frames per second, experimenting with projecting footage onto different surfaces and recording it to a domestic video camera connected to a U-matic video deck for editing. The process of re-filming and editing would transform his future practice, offering Jarman the confidence and ability to create complex and dense visual narrative with limited resources. The film's haunting soundtrack includes Coil's ambient industrial score 'How to Destroy Angels', counterpointed by Benjamin Britten's 'Sea Interludes' from the opera Peter Grimes (1945).