A New Exhibition Explores Derek Jarman’s Cinematic Heroes

The barren stretch of shingle beach at Dungeness might seem an unlikely place of magic. Under the looming form of a nuclear power station, with weathered remains of old boats the only signs of a once thriving fishing industry, there is little indication of what awaits at Prospect Cottage. Three years on from the massive fundraising appeal that saved it from private ownership, the former home of artist, filmmaker, activist, gardener and writer Derek Jarman last weekend hosted its first public exhibition. The immersive installation, organised by the BFI in collaboration with Creative Folkestone, invited the public across the threshold of one of the UK’s most influential creative minds. 

Powell + Pressburger: In Prospero’s Room forms part of the BFI’s nationwide celebration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who remain among the most enduring filmmaking partnerships in cinema history. From The Red Shoes (1948) to A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and Black Narcissus (1947), their illustrious filmography has impacted successive generations of artists, writers and filmmakers. Jarman, who worked across all of these mediums, not only shared a personal connection to Kent (Powell was born at the opposite end of the county, in Bekesbourne), but like the filmmaking duo, revelled in the unbound and fantastical.

Set over five of the cottage’s cabin-like rooms, all largely unchanged since Jarman’s death in 1994, moving image works explore the influence of Powell and Pressburger on both Jarman and contemporary filmmakers. In the lounge, Powell’s adaptation of the 1918 one-act opera Bluebeard’s Castle demonstrates his unrelenting visual ambition, manifested via the otherworldly set designs from frequent collaborator Hein Heckroth (who won an Oscar for his work on The Red Shoes). This is echoed in the bedroom, where a short film by Nigerian-Canadian video artist Adebukola Bodunrin (even when life is sad, people still have a good time) uses rayograph techniques to transform a partially destroyed fragment of Powell and Pressburger’s 1951 film, The Tales of Hoffmann, into an eerie, disjointed choreography that echoes Jarman’s experimental works on Super 8 film. 

At the heart of the installation is Jarman’s 1979 version of The Tempest, which plays in the workshop, surrounded by props and artefacts from the film’s production. The film embodies Jarman’s connection to Powell and Pressburger, not least because Powell had himself tried in vain to adapt the work for over 15 years, but also for the way Jarman, like Powell, considered the filmmaker and magus as one. In Jarman’s version, Prospero, the magician at the centre of Shakespeare’s play, is believed to have been based on the Elizabethan astrologer and alchemist John Dee. In the cottage’s renovated conservatory, production designs by Ivor Beddoes from Powell’s unrealised vision of the film reveal the inspirations behind Jarman’s approach. In one illustration, Prospero’s island is depicted as an Arcadian idyll, complete with Greco-Roman fort and mystical lagoons. 

In the context of Prospect Cottage, where evidence of Jarman’s affinity for the supernatural abounds, these precious artefacts acquire added resonance. Surrounded by his personal collection of books on John Dee, shamanic driftwood sculptures or glass orbs believed to have belonged to renowned occultist Aleister Crowley, the sense of a man partially rooted in a private world of pure fantasy is a constant throughout the installation. For younger audiences discovering Jarman or Powell and Pressburger for the first time, Prospect Cottage offers an analogue Eden, a cornucopia of ambition and ideas in which their respective geniuses are gloriously, if fleetingly, aligned. 

Powell + Pressburger: In Prospero’s Room at Prospect Cottage ran 2 - 3 December 2023 as part of Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell + Pressburger. The Cinema Unbound season runs until 31 December 2023 at BFI Southbank in London, with the free, major exhibition The Red Shoes: Behind the Mirror also on show at BFI Southbank until 7 January 2024.