Modern Nature.

Director Derek Jarman began writing his autobiography in 1982, while sitting out the renaissance of British cinema. The first of an eventual three books, Dancing Ledge is as inspiring as that revisionist waltz was tedious. Britain was then in the dull throes of Thatcherism. While British screens were filled with the imperial reminiscing of Chariots of Fire and A Passage to India (as well as the sallow, digestible homosexualities of Brideshead Revisited), state funding for more adventurous work like Jarman's, more accessible during the '70s, had dried up. Yet Jarman emerged from hibernation to become one of Britain's most important filmmakers. Dancing Ledge is filled with the kind of provocative stamina that informs Jarman's refusal to be relegated to the margins. In both his early Super-8 films and his later, more "commercial" 35-mm. features, he places his desire at the center of the narrative.

The pages of Dancing Ledge bristle with accounts of Jarman's sexual exploits as a young man on the beach of Porto Ercole (where Caravaggio died); caught up in the bacchanalian swirl of New York "before the hangover"; across the vicar's bed. Jarman's descriptions of these exchanges remain nearly English in their propriety, sentimental in their promise. They acknowledge the dynamics of power in his own life, even as they seek to undermine them. "Sexuality colours my politics," he writes. "I distrust all figures of authority, including the artist. Homosexuals have such a struggle to define themselves against the order of things, an equivocal process involving the desire to be both 'inside' and 'outside'--a source of that disease in the work of Caravaggio and Pasolini. I distrust those with blueprints for our salvation."

This doubt informs Jarman's first feature film, Sebastiane, 1975. One of the first independently made gay features to get a commercial release in Britain, Sebastiane explores the eroticism of the Catholic saint's iconography. Dancing Ledge sheds light on the genesis of the project: the producer wanted an "oil and vanilla" movie, the editor, a "slow and ponderous" art flick. The hybrid result is a muscle film with brains. The film is based on the legend of Saint Sebastian, a favorite guard of the Roman emperor Diocletian. Sebastian, a Christian, was banished to a remote outpost where he was eventually martyred. Jarman writes Sebastiane's love of Christ as sexual, but impossibly fixed on an already historical love object. Sebastiane is unable to realize loving carnality, which is embodied in the film by two of his fellow guardsmen.

Jarman's later features, drawing on narrative approaches he explored more fully in his early Super-8 work, would continue to play with the objectiveness of historical representations. In The Tempest, 1979, and, later, Angelic Conversation, 1984, he would reclaim for himself the libidinal territory of Shakespeare's sonnets, setting them to images of men loving men and camp divas. In Caravaggio, 1986, perhaps Jarman's first commercial-break-through film, he would cast the painter working in a milieu of rough trade, with his love-interest/murder-victim polishing a prized motorcycle. This is characteristic of the way Jarman shifts these cultural artifacts to transform perceptions of history.

In Dancing Ledge, Jarman describes a lineage of British cinema, a heritage of theatricality that descends from Michael Powell to Ken Russell (for whom he designed sets) to himself. Often, his reclamation of the past converges with a heady nostalgia that submerges narratives dealing with race and empire. He weaves memories of his grandmother Mimosa and his childhood in colonial Pakistan among descriptions of his script meetings for Caravaggio and his first visit to a gay pub, abandoning linear progression for a more elegant web of thought.

Dancing Ledge also underscores Jarman's roots as a painter, and how they intersect with a screenwriter's restless quest for depth. In Caravaggio, the narrative hinges on the master's tableaux themselves, but Jarman probes the painting's surfaces for motivation. Describing the wistful stare of one of the figures in Caravaggio's The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, he writes, "It is a look no one can understand unless he has stood till 5 A.M. in a gay bar hoping to be fucked by the hero."

Like Michele Caravaggio, the fags of Jarman's movies are not victims but murderers, irrepressible and without redemption. Even a film like Jubilee, 1977 (which Jarman once described as "an interesting failure"), begins to critique the oppositional notions of hero and antihero, as an acute political consciousness bubbles under the seductive veneer of punk nihilism. Jarman's films have opened up the possibilities of articulating new ideas about representation by making representation itself problematic. At the same time, Jarman imagines a utopian space for his desires: even amidst the Molotov cocktail bombs of Jubilee there are the gestures of romantic love.

The daily realities of filmmaking are the meat of Dancing Ledge. There is a do-it-yourself infectiousness to Jarman's descriptions of the meetings, the script revisions, the shooting schedules, and even the budgets. The 1973 In the Shadow of the Sun, a full-length Super-8 film, was filmed largely for the price of the stock, except, Jarman notes, for some elaborate sequences, like a maze of fire: "costumes |pounds~5, sawdust, |pounds~4, paraffin |pounds~2, roses |pounds~10, candles |pounds~4.50, notebook |pounds~1, taxis |pounds~5."

In 1986, Jarman found he was HIV positive, and set out to create a garden of lavender and red-hot poker at his cottage on a bleak stretch of the British coast. His closest neighbor was the Dungeness nuclear power station. Modern Nature chronicles his time there, in '89 and '90, at the onset of his own renaissance. In 1991 his Edward II would be hailed as a cornerstone of the queer new wave. But parts of Modern Nature are as forbidding as the English landscape around Dungeness. After receiving a distressed letter from Ron Peck, the director of Nighthawks, Jarman writes, "Film has brought nothing but sadness into our lives. The moments when the sun came out were brief, and the further we tried to wander from the straight and narrow of British cinema the less we received."

The pace of Jarman's life as chronicled in Modern Nature is unpredictable. In more energetic moments, Jarman cruises the public parks, makes a film without a script (The Last of England, 1987), and attempts to get Matt Dillon's heartbeat for a project called Blueprint. He plants saxifrage and sea kale. He starts taking AZT. When Jarman discovered he was seropositive, he set himself a goal: to disclose his status and survive Margaret Thatcher. These he has done with aplomb. Now, ever the utopian, he is looking far ahead toward the millennium and "a world where we are all equal before the law."

Lawrence Chua is managing editor of Bomb magazine, and a dj for Radio Bandung, a national weekly radio news magazine.