There are so many different Derek Jarmans that it feels strange to focus on just one aspect of the man," writes pop culture historian Jon Savage in one of the many essays-cum- recollections threaded though the beautifully produced Derek Jarman's Sketchbooks. And yet the ideas mapped out in the 31 private sketchbooks the controversial filmmaker, artist and gay activist produced throughout his working life are like blueprints for his many and varied projects, and show off a restless creative temperament that roamed far and wide for its inspiration.
Jarman, who died aged 52 in 1994, was one of the last of the great underground filmmakers, merging myth, queer politics and often outrageous fantasy in feature films like Sebastiane, Jubilee, The Tempest, War Requiem and the determinedly abstract Blue, which was his defiant swan song. It was shown on Channel 4 in 1993: 75 minutes of luminous, glowing blue accompanied by a live Radio 3 broadcast of the voices of Tilda Swinton, Jarman and various of his friends speaking his final valedictory script. Swinton later described her first meeting with him in 1985: "He opened the door with a camera on me and never turned it off."
From the notebooks that contain germs of his early experimental Super 8 films through to the sketches for the famous garden he created on Dungeness Beach, the book will delight Jarman's still-growing faithful, for whom he remains a unique and irreplaceable artist and provocateur. There is mischief and radical politics aplenty here, too, and one is reminded again of Jarman's determinedly anti-Thatcherite spirit – which, as Savage puts it, provided "a standard for those whose every fibre revolted against the power politics of the early to mid-1980s".
In her foreword to Sketchbooks, Swinton describes them as "the seedbed, the source. The germinator of the garden. They were generators for his work, the guardians of his inner eye, handmade and heart-started." As such, they are a valuable guide to anyone interested in his art and films, but also, as this volume suggests, beautiful works of art in themselves. Another fitting memorial to a singular, and singularly uncontainable, artist who once said: "I've been running all my life, playing truant."
