Jubilee (1977)
I wonder if Derek Jarman would have reached the audience he did without the invention of Channel 4? Certainly a whole generation would never have had that first chance to see Jarman’s work had it not been for that famous early UK TV Channel. In a recent piece for Beige magazine, Mike Nicholls said that Jubilee should be compulsory viewing for all British 14 year olds, and just as it was in 1977, it is relevant today. Nicholls is right.
Jarman’s films were always big events but if you think of how many British teenagers were introduced to them through Channel 4, basically anybody outside of London who would not have access to a radical and independent cinema, and television these days wouldn’t deign to show something so homemade and iconoclastic.
When 4 was launched in 1982 it was quickly obvious that it wasn’t going to be a hit just for Countdown – because there were something in those early days that you could only get there, and nowhere else, and one of those things was Derek Jarman.
The film had its critics and was obviously despised by the right; but even Vivienne Westwood printed a t-shirt with a critical letter to Jarman on it, denouncing what she called his misrepresentations of punk, which seem quite off, and calling the film boring and disgusting.
While clearly punk influenced there is so much more going on in Jubilee than just punk, so maybe that bugged her, and a lot of the subtlety can be easy to miss amid the iconoclasm, such as the fact that the film perfectly displays Jarman’s talent for fable.
Punk after all, wasn’t entirely about having a go at the Queen, and in retrospect, even Vivienne Westwood would have to admit that there is a huge amount of Thatcher-era aesthetic in Jubilee, not bad for a film made in 1977, two years before she even came to power.
The cast list for Jubilee is the best thing about it by miles. Every one of the cast is there by dint of their being true artists, and by which I mean multi-disciplined people that can do nearly anything. Every one of the collaborators who made the almighty Jubilee, were and are many-talented, as well as being artists of personality and vision.
Jenny Runacre, who plays Elizabeth I and Bod and is already 100% post-punk, looks great, is mean, and somehow brings a separate menace to the UK style anarchy. Jenny Runacre has a Master's in Fine Art Practice from Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design, and made a good selection of acting appearances after her being cast in John Cassavetes’ Husbands in 1970. We have been enjoying her showreel on YouTube and there are a few other bits and pieces there too.
Adam Ant, whose very image is high Thatcher era, carries out a solid bit of acting in Jubilee, as well as striking a few iconic poses. He plays what he was then, a pop hopeful. For all the history and social commentary in Jubilee, the film’s truest subject matter is the entertainment industry, and the youths are all either pop performers or nihilists. Adam Ant poses with a bottle of milk on the Albert Memorial, and steps into the dream factory thinking he can handle it.
In Jubilee the music industry is presided over by Borgia Ginz, played by the second star of the film, Jack Birkett, trading here under the name Orlando. Jack Birkett, or The Incredible Orlando, was a legendary performer and artist, primarily a dancer, and a member of the Lindsay Kemp dance troupe, a mime artist, singer and of course, actor. He was also blind, although you would certainly never know this to watch him act.
Jack Birkett, who appears in a good few Derek Jarman films, brought a confident and full-on performance to Jubilee, but he always stands out head and shoulders above all others, contorting his face so beautifully. He was an energetic and unique performer, and Lindsay Kemp remembered him as follows:
"Jack was Judy to my Mr Punch, Harlequin to my Pierrot, Titania to my Puck, Herodias to my Salomé, Queen of Hearts to my Lewis Carroll. We shared flats, dressing rooms, boyfriends, bills, good times and bad times, success and failure; a couple of extravagant young dreamers, a couple of aching elders, always entertainers."
Birkett’s character Borgia is the one that’s going to mystify you and intrigue you the most in Jubilee. It is pop music and the media industry that is benefitting in the postmodern the-Queen-is-dead Britain. The pop industry is lucrative, fast and destructive; the philosophy is sound: ‘as long as the music's loud enough you won't hear the world falling apart.’
In the world of Jubilee, Lounge Lizard is one of the greatest selling artists of the moment and Jack Birkett as Borgia announces that 50 million copies of her album were sold in Russia in three days. To top this, Lounge Lizard is murdered live on television during a song, her big hit Paranoia Paradise . It’s Jenny Runacre as Bod who does the murder, saying: ‘the world won't miss his missing chromosome.’
The glorious Lounge Lizard is played by Jayne County, a one-time actress at Andy Warhol's The Factory. It is an epic and memorable performance and can be watched over and over again. County is an American male-to-female transsexual performer, musician and actress who was definitely rock's first transsexual singer, with a sure influence on the likes of David Bowie, The Ramones, Patti Smith, and Lou Reed. Great songs, with great titles include: Are You Man Enough To Be A Woman, Fuck Off and Stuck On You. And he’s giving one of several great musical performances in Jubilee.
Another favourite is Amyl Nitrate’s Rule Britannia. Musically Jubilee is more sophisticated than purely punk, and Jordan’s synth beat mixup rendering anticipates Trevor Horn and all sorts of other 80s nightmares; it’s just a pure crazy rubbishy disco mix up thing. If Vivienne Westwood was in a pickle about Jubilee, it might really have been down to the presence and profile of punk model Jordan, who plays Amyl.
Jordan (Pamela Rooke)‘s style was legendary: bleached platinum-blonde bouffant with dark raccoon-like eye make-up. Rooke served as an early manager for Adam and the Ants about the time of Jubilee, and performed live with them up to May 1978 when she left the band. She was however the person, along with Soo Catwoman who created the W10 London punk look, and she was I think a Westwood model. The Slits are also in the film and here is a clip of Rooke introducing them, a screen test for Jubilee, it looks like. I love it.
The version of Rule Britannia in Jubilee contains some wilful Jarman icon breaking in the form of a goose step mid song, but the Union Jack bin-liner and black underwear look is hysterically good. Jordan also serves as the film’s Jean Luc Godard figure, reading and writing history as she goes, taking history apart as the film constructs it.
Derek Jarman makes Jubilee into a series of fables, cast in the perfect dramatic form of a time-travelling Queen Elizabeth, played by Jenny Runacre and assisted by Richard O’Brien in the role of John Dee, and David Haughton, more often known as David Brandon, playing Ariel.
David Brandon is a super-striking Ariel, and he seems to have made Jubilee and moved to Italy where he continues to work today. The characters of John Dee and Ariel were of interest to Derek Jarman and of course, Arial appeared in his next film, The Tempest.
In Jubilee, Karl Johnson who plays Ariel in the Tempest, plays one of two lovers, Sphinx and Angel. These boys are the calmest influence in a film in which heterosexual acts end in murder, quite normally, suggesting the queers should and will inherit the earth.
Angel is played by Ian Charleson the Edinburgh born actor who died from AIDS at the age of 40 in 1990. Most remember Charlseon as Eric Liddel in Chariots of Fire, but there many good things to see him in. His name is used posthumously for the Ian Charleson Awards, which have been presented annually since 1991 to reward the best classical stage performances by actors aged under 30. Sir Ian McKellen said that Charleson played Hamlet so well it was as if he had rehearsed the role all his life; and Charleson’s presence is still sorely missed.
Spotters will also be interested to see Little Nell, or Nell Campbell in Jubilee. Campbell decided to use the name "Little Nell" as a stage name after her arrival in Britain in the early 1970s with her family, and she had previously sold clothes at Kensington Market where her stall was next to Freddie Mercury's. She also worked as a busker and her tap dancing is often noted as the reason why she was cast as Columbia in the original production of The Rocky Horror Show.
Having listed just some of the cast of Jubilee, and I haven’t even got to the showstopper herself, Toyah. If this was Toyah’s calling card, it was a good one, and she made some great acting appearances back in those days: Jubilee (1977), Quadrophenia and The Tempest in 1979; then a bit of Minder, Tales of the Unexpected, before a quiet spell and a discovery of a talent for children’s programming.
Toyah’s character Mad does a couple of amazing dances in Jubilee, pogoeseque and wobbly; and she likes spitting and pressing her face up against glass, stuff like that. Toyah also acts really well, so much so that she does really tie everything up; she is definitely the new Queen since the old one got mugged to death.
The girls’ names in Jubilee suggested punk all right, just as they match the state of terror that Jarman saw in what he called his ‘shadow of this time.’ Compare the girls names Amyl, Chaos, Mad, Bod and Crabs to the boys, Sphinx and Angel. What I love about Jarman and artists like him, is the complete unambiguity in their message.
We have been through Jubilee, and I cannot at present find a greater assembled cast of artists and talent; and barely talked about Jarman. Maybe that another day. It’s Jubilee time again this year, but we have no Derek Jarman, and that is a shame. It would be impossible for anyone to speculate on what Derke Jarman would offer concerning this current Jubilee (2012 = sixty glory filled years), but the shadow of this time I would argue is bleaker for the lack of an early Channel 4.
The days when national television would show a controversial art-house style of polemical film such as Jubilee are well gone. Television is more anodyne, pop music more controlled and duller than ever. It’s easy to overlook in the excitement and energy of the punk, but Jarman was also passionate about the loss of so-called high-culture, as you can see from Amyl Nitrate’s Super-8 ballet dance around the bonfire of burning books; all symptoms of a culture in which ‘success has taken the place of talent.’
Nothing has really replaced that early Channel 4 spirit, not because of all the great things that were on (some were dreadful) but because it is an exciting thing to know that these productions are taking place when they are nationally profiled. It made being out better, and it made people take notice of gay issues, and as a result public tension about lgbt spilled into public discussion, a good thing.
Well now we have the internet now, it’s true, so we can all see things we never would have before, but when Jubilee was first broadcast in 1982, to every corner of the British Isles, recall that we only had four television channels that all stopped around midnight, and no internet with which to amuse and educate ourselves. I miss it sometimes.