Derek Jarman - SlowMotionAngel

1977
Jubilee
In the year 1578, Queen Elizabeth I asks her court magician, Dr. John Dee, to give her a vision of "the shadow of her time." Dee invokes the angel Ariel, who transports the Queen and Dee to the England of the future--a post-punk post Thatcherian wasteland where civilization has come to a halt. Bands of teenage girl punks roam the streets. Equally dangerous are the fascistic police. Buckingham Palace is a recording studio, the center of an entertainment empire controlled by media czar Borgia Ginz, who owns everything from the C of E to the BBC. The anti-heros of the film are led by Elizabeth's mirror image Bod, the murderous leader of a mad household that includes the historian Amyl Nitrate, the pyromaniac Mad, the sex-obsessed actress Crabs, loving brothers Sphinx and Angel, the artist Viv and their French au pair, Chaos.
Jordan on Jubilee. "Jubilee pushed me to the limits mentally and physically. I had to dance on points on concrete - no ballerina has to do that they've got supple wooden floors. My toes bled.." She had learned ballet from aged four to eighteen.

In the NME interview of 15/4/78 Jordan says Derek Jarman is " very, very clever" pointing out it was he that wrote her screen monologue on the merits of Myra Hindley . Jordan believed in the interview that Myra should be freed.
She also has a different opinion of the film in that she thinks "Its a laugh...that's the point everyone misses. I've seen really straight people literally crying with laughter at it. ..Any other director would have done a...sensationalist sex and violence quicky..." Which is weird because it certainly has all the sex and violence elements !! "We actually got arrested that day 'cause Derek insisted on using real guns and the police took us away. We tried to explain that the guns had no firing pins but I don't think they even knew what they were."

In Jubilee all the positives are negated, turned on their heads. Its dream imagery drifts uncomfortably on the edge of reality. Its amazons make men uncomfortable, ridicule their male pursuits. Its men are all victims." Made in 1977, Jubilee stands as arguably the only Punk film that still holds water: Jarman transports Elizabeth I through time to a kingdom in the throes of disintegration, gangs of women roam the streets of this junky, ravaged urban landscape, law and order has broken down, violence is endemic, and the soundtrack is that of angry youth, most noticeably the then fledgling Adam Ant.

The film was released in February 1978 to, "uniformly hostile reviews" relates Jon Savage in his captivating epic England's Dreaming, but is stronger in hindsight. It suffers from the over-enthusiasms of youth, succumbing on occasion to juvenile shock-tactics, but had the vision to look beyond the surface of Punk and foster a self-consuming Ballardian landscape of internal-analysis and decay, where the energies of the music are sucked up into a corporate 'rebellion' machine: "For an audience who expected a punk music film, full of 'anarchy' and laughs at the end of the King's Road, it was difficult to swallow," wrote Jarman later. "They wanted action, not analysis; and most of the music lay on the cutting room floor." But not Jordan's pouting, camp reading of 'Rule Britannia' which acts as the summation of the film. "It all began with William the Conqueror, who screwed the Anglo-Saxons into the ground," her Amyl Nitrate says at one point, "carving the land into Theirs and Ours. There were two languages in the land, and the seeds of war were sown."

Working to no formal script, Jubilee was built on autobiographical elements and in the streets and warehouses of the director's early life, with a diverse cast from a youthful Toyah, to a young Ian Charleson, who would later find fame in the more conventional Chariots of Fire and largely dissociate himself from Jarman's film, later dying of AIDS related complications.

Shocking and ridiculous, hysterical and authentic, Jubilee is perfect Punk celluloid, far outstripping the 'look at me' sentiments of The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle (which actually features footage shot by Jarman) and the crass political posturing of Rude Boy. "Afterwards, the film turned prophetic," wrote Jarman. "Dr Dee's vision came true - the streets burned in Brixton and Toxteth, Adam was Top of the Pops and signed up with Margaret Thatcher to sing at the Falklands Ball. They all sign up one way or another."

Stills