ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the soundtrack to Derek Jarman's The Garden. It suggests that a gap is exposed between sound and image. The chapter argues that the gap exposed between sound and image creates a space in which the soundtrack is able to speak its own voice, liberated from slavery to the image. Until relatively recently film theory defiantly maintained a camera-oriented visual bias, theorizing the soundtrack only as a redundant adjunct to the image, which functions in its service but adds little or nothing to it. The chapter suggests that the risk – of threatening the classical film's unity of discourse — is precisely the resource that the soundtrack offers to Jarman in The Garden. It suggests that The Garden presents a damning criticism – embodied in the form of the image and the camera – of the renewed vigour demonstrated by the British tabloid press in their persecution of homosexuals since the AIDS crisis. In this film the soundtrack embodies redemption.
