About

"In dream allegory the poet wakes in a visionary landscape where he encounters personifications of psychic states. Through these encounters he is healed… In Jubilee the past dreamed the future present. The Last of England is in the same form, though this time I have put myself into the centre of the picture. Here the present dreams the past future." - Derek Jarman, Kicking the Pricks (1996)

"The Last of England has changed the face of my cinema. It's grown into itself, I know that I can stand by this film even if the critics form a firing squad. What comes next hardly matters. I'm happy with it, and all its flaws. I love the flaws, they are the flaws that the Japanese master potter puts into his work. The arbitrary gesture to spoil a perfect shape. I love the moments which are out of focus. 'I've fallen in love with the dust and scratches.'"
Derek Jarman, Kicking the Pricks (1996)

The Last of England is a powerful allegory of Thatcherite Britain, lamenting the decline of British culture during the 1980s and imagining an even bleaker future under totalitarian rule. In Jarman's world in ruin, the once idyllic English landscapes have become industrial wastelands, overtaken with pollution and brutality. Balaclava-clad soldiers round up disenfranchised civilians and a mourning bride tears at her wedding dress with a large pair of scissors. As Nigel Terry narrates at the film's opening: "Spring lapped the fields in arsenic green. The oaks died this year. On every green hill mourners stand and weep for the Last of England." Jarman borrows the title from an 1855 painting by Pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Maddox Brown that depicts a family leaving Dover for the New World, symbolic of the decline of the British Empire. Throughout the production, the film bore a range of different titles, including Victorian Values and 3 Minutes to Midnight, the latter a reference to the Doomsday Clock from 1984-87 that postulated the imminent possibility of nuclear disaster.

The Last of England was filmed in the spirit of a home movie – spontaneous and arbitrary scenes filmed in an episodic way, held together by the emotional and psychological character of the footage. Filmed on Super-8 at a reduced frame rate, the footage was transferred to VHS for editing before being printed to 35mm. The result is a hypnotic dream allegory; the surreal quality heightened by the pace of the footage and it's grainy, soft and oversaturated finish. Jarman's frenetic editing creates a dense and crucial impression that draws from the approaches he developed in his work with music videos. Jarman also mixes in 8mm home movies that documented his childhood in British India with his sister Gaye and footage his father Lancelot Jarman shot while serving as a pilot during WWII. The spoken narration in lieu of any traditional narrative is a bricolage of apocalyptic literary references, from T.S. Eliot to James Joyce, William S Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. The soundtrack is likewise a mix of musical offerings, from Diamanda Galás's AIDS-inspired opera to Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance", Marianne Faithful and Simon Turner's ambient score.

Jarman was diagnosed as HIV positive in December 1986 as he began the editing process for The Last of England. At the same time he began writing his memoir The Last of England (republished as Kicking the Pricks) – and like the film, both would use montage as a device to give the works structure and meaning. Of his seroconversion and the way it fuelled the political dimension of his later work, Jarman wrote: "On 22 December 1986, finding I was body positive, I set myself a target: I would disclose my secret and survive Margaret Thatcher. I did. Now I have my sights set on the millennium and a world where we are all equal before the law."