Art at Frisson Gallery exhibition March 1969
"Jarman's paintings are very bare things of a few lines and occasional pathces on a flat ground. The lines suggest landscape...landscape is the lowest common denominator between these paintings and us. That foundation laid, Jarman teases us away from it...he inserts non-landscape hints. The pictures are deep and expansive...we are made to respond creatively...turns out to be an adventure."
Norbot Lynton, Guardian, 12/03/69, p.6

Jubilee
"Jubilee is an original, a piece of photo journalism which fills our heads,stimulates our eyes...and intensifies our senses...it is a film that will churn up everyones emotions and will provoke laughter, anger, revulsion, sorrow and patriotism for a British culture slowly sliding into the sea...(itis) never so offensive or so deeply ugly that one cannot connect with it...when most British films are so piddling, the film is a revelation, full of moral indignation, action, imagination..."
Keith Howes, Gay Times, 23/02/79

Short film showings at ICA in 1981
"The films are not easy to watch in as much as they are often technically primitive, being made on Super8 ... (having) little to do with the standards of and conventions which the commercial cinema demands."

"A cinematic even which, if sometimes difficult to fathom, holds the attention and is mentally stimulating"
"Jarman has made sense of films principally for his own consumption, short visual essays to which he hasnow added music."
Nicholas Wapshott, Times, 16/04/81 (Wapshott was reviewing an ICA screening of Jarman's
Super8's and short films by James Scott.)

Marianne Faithfull's Music Videos, 1980's.
"...took three tracks 'Witches Song, The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, and Broken English and Transformed Marianne Faithfull's historic nihilisminto a black and white west end background full of menace and decay,
intercut with original fascist footage and the familiar Jarman wasteland pyre, around which danced the androgynous 'theatre troop' of the directors own forays into the pantomime of London's gay clubs.Duran Duran it was not.'
1985 (reviewer/publication) unknown

Diaries
"Above all, the journals provide an authoritative literary portrait of gay lifein the second half of the 20th century. In many ways they are the equivalent of Edmund White's autobiographical trilogy, A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, and though possessed of radically different sensibilities, the two writers have much in common. Both hailed from solid middle-class backgrounds, fumbled through adolescence in the Fifties, came of age in the Sixties, partied in the Seventies and watched their world fall apart in the Eighties and Nineties."
Michael Arditti, The Times Metro, 8th. July, 2000, p. 17

"A queer Meldrew, Jarman's totally justifiable bitterness and anger at catching the big disease with the little name add to his naturally waspish nature to produce a catalogue of hatreds that can be quite bracing in small doses. He doesn't seem to like his fellow friends of Dorothy an awful lot. Simon Callow? 'Bumbling old vulgarian.' Rudolf Nureyev? 'A sad little man from Siberia.' Oscar Wilde? 'Infuriating - the life more interesting than the writing'."

"The book can occasionally be fun in the manner of sitting behind a bitchy old queen on the bus, especially when Jarman is spitting blood at Ian McKellen's knighthood or bemoaning, à la Bucket, 'the end of elegance'."

"Only the wonderful Neil Tennant emerges with any glory, asking Jarman, who is about to visit Jimmy Somerville, if he can pass on a message. The message? 'Piss off, Mary, I'm Head Fairy!' The Neil Tennant diaries - now they would be worth reading."
Julie Burchill, The Guardian, 15th.July, 2000,
p. 10


"Hardly anything is revealed about the processes of filming, writing and painting. To judge from the single detailed entry - a passage recalling his teenage painting years - this reserve on Jarman's part is regrettable. Often, comments are so unflective as to be perfunctory. Perhaps there is something reassuring about a determinedly flavourless approach; the artist trusts his art to speak for itself. Still, the result reads more like a log-book than a private journal."

"Sexuality is a recurring theme. Jarman prefers 'queer' to 'gay', the emphasis on non-conformity not jolliness. He responds heatedly to stories in the newspapers, attends meetings of OutRage and goes on demonstrations with Peter Tatchell. 'Sexual preference does not make us a community', he observes, '... it's the assimilationists who are the enemy. ' Members of Stonewall, adjudged soft, are ridiculed."

"The fight against prejudice, which benefited from Jarman's artistic, political and personal efforts for thirty years, is far from over. As he noted after one summer's celebratory Pride march: 'we need this and the anger'."
Hal Jensen, The Times Literary Supplement, 18th. August, 2000, p. 12

"He speaks like an unstoppable waterfall and you
can either choose to be doused in the torrents or
retire bedraggled" Guardian, 17/04/86

"He is dark skinned, a slight loose-limbed figure with an expressive face, black eyebrows and compassionate brown eyes. He had a French Jewish grandmother and considerably further back in the family, a saint - St Germaine. He has a quick darting intelligence and an intense vibrant personality." Observer Magazine, 22/02/87, p.19-20

"Since he has, for all the good opinions of the critics, been so much under attack, it is not surprising that he still seems to lack a listening, responsive voice - his instinct is to ignore or not even to hear well-meaning criticism as if it had to be by its very nature hostile. He is, I believe the most visionary and versatile filmmaker of his generation, with the rarest and most exciting of imaginations. But to fulfil all the promise perhaps he now needs to listen to voices other than his own." Guardian, 22/10/87, p.13