ABSTRACT
Derek Jarman questioned the modernist eradication of history but as a film-maker had little concern for architectural modernism. His relevance to my theme depends on his attitude to the environment. Affirming the tradition that associates a people and a place with its landscape, Derek Jarman identified with the picturesque and romanticism in English art and poetry, as well as the pastoral films of the 1940s and 1950s, when a burgeoning neo-romanticism celebrated national identity. Jarman chose to live in a location that combined blissful childhood memories with the sublime threat of contemporary weather, which as an ever more complex hybrid recurred as a metaphor for time.
