Derek Jarman's Caravaggio: "The Screenplay as Book"

Author(s): MIGUEL MOTA

Source: Criticism, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Spring 2005), pp. 215-231
Published by: Wayne State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23127237
Accessed: 29-03-2020 20:23 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Wayne State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Criticism

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:23:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 MIGUEL MOTA

Derek Jarman's
The Screenplay

Though he was known most widel

put was prodigious and eclectic. H
books, poetry, memoirs, autobio
1996 introduction to Up in the Air,
Michael O'Pray rightly points out
means to ends. They were always
strong beliefs and emotions. When
not shelved and forgotten. They
They always seemed to have a life f
was painful for him to leave them
to the works published in Up in t
reverting to the conventional vie
elsewhere for their consummatio
minedly in this case to the belief
cipally on his finished films. But
was not compartmentalized: he p
him."2 And as Tony Peake suggests
from being a novice with the pen.
rate him more highly as a writer th
self in his private papers reveals a
sional author.3 Given his consider
may be useful to see Jarman's pu
sors deferring by definition and
texts that at times, as in Derekjar
play to the film Caravaggio, make
textual documents, Jarman's "an
tion,4 enunciating the uniquely pec
century print culture while sim

Criticism, Spring 2005, Vol. 47, No. 2, p

Copyright © Detroit,
2006 MI 48201
Wayne State University

215

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:23:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
216 Miguel Mota

discursive practices that are inherent bu

consumption of the material book.
At a time when cultural and media stu
relationships among many and varied tech
tion, and history of the published screenp
tively, even perversely, unexamined. At st
screenplay and the category (both aesthetic
that such a relationship plays in interroga
The increasing marketability of the publis
its cultural status; it remains, for the most
ature and film scholars, a barely tolerate
often is perceived as crassly commercial. E
profess screenwriting as a noble occupat
the text of the stage play5 Certainly it has
the familiar narrative of the screenwriter
become increasingly circulating commo
within literary culture continues to be pe
hack, an inherently inferior craftsman tha
best a kind of prostitute performing a n
gain. The critical assumption when dealing
is that such activity constitutes dabbling i
work. This is a response often shared by t
case of Larry McMurtry: "The screenplay
an elaborate notion, a kind of codified visu
not require the writer to wrestle overly m
quickly and, fortunately, rewritten quickly
Such dismissals of both the screenplay
lack of historical and critical interest i
uniquely negotiates. Even the most recen
tionship between literature and film has t
adaptations of novels.7 In such studies, it
ary" medium; the screenplay functions a
any apparent cultural or aesthetic catego
canonical literary author are addressed, as
Pinter, the critical and scholarly emphasis,
instance, is on the work of the writer as
than on the screenplay as a print genre.8
of The Screenplay as Literature concentrat
between novels and their film adaptation
A notable exception is Claudia Sternber
the screenplay as a literary text. Sternberg
oretical and critical attention to the scree

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:23:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Screenplay as Book 217

approach is largely too narrowly formalist, focusing on the ways in which the
screenplay must represent literary conventions such as plot, narrative, character,
setting, and so on.10 In this, she falls somewhere between the work of those who
approach the subject through discourse analysis and narratology and the count
less primers on how to write a screenplay that approach it from a purely profes
sional perspective.11
Nathaniel Kohn comes closer to my own position when he calls screenplays
unstable, "many-sited spaces"; but he imagines the screenplay as "a tiny pitless
and pitiful acorn from which, oftentimes, nothing grows. A thin, slippery crea
ture, three holes, two brads, impossible to read in the tub"12—that is, strictly as
the unpublished shooting script looking for its completion elsewhere, rather
than as the published screenplay compelled to negotiate its way through a network
of discursive practices. In fact, in both the popular marketplace and the academy,
the published screenplay positions itself within and complicates such cultural
categories as canon, author, authority, and property. Produced, disseminated,
and consumed under discursive practices that are largely designated by the acad
emy and the cultural capital it produces,13 the published screenplay when intro
duced into literary discourse unsettles conventional categories and assumptions,
raising questions about how these are constituted and regulated.
Historically, the published screenplay has been seen largely as an inferior
print form, in the service of another medium. Whereas the published edition of
a play might be considered necessary as a way of stabilizing the text, in the case
of the screenplay, a "published," "finished" work almost always already exists in
the form of the film that purportedly it is meant to serve. But the published
screenplay may be more than merely a "blueprint" for another text; it may be
viewed more productively instead as a separate material and cultural entity, a
fluid, hybrid text that stands ambivalently but suggestively poised between print
and film technologies.
The published screenplay has a unique relationship with technology; among
print genres, it most obviously wears its machinery on its sleeve. In many
instances, it necessarily foregrounds its use of and dialogue with technology, in
its references within its pages to camera angles, cuts, dissolves, and so on. Some
published scripts—like the many produced and marketed by Faber and Faber,
for instance—downplay such references, and in their decision to divert attention
away from the technologies that mediate them come to resemble the conven
tionally literary play-text. Others, like those published out of Flollywood by
Script City, flaunt their connection to technology, breaking down the dialogue
into distinct shot sequences and continually calling attention to the cinematic
apparatus on every page, in effect reproducing the published screenplay as a sim
ulation of the shooting script.14
Even when such references are omitted or minimized, the screenplay, in its
very form, positions the reader figuratively behind the camera, situating us as

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:23:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
218 Miguel Mota

simultaneously reading and viewing subjects. Such material constitutes a crucial

aspect of the published screenplay, reminding us of the ways in which technology
informs and shapes the subject.15 In addition, the direct and indirect references to
film technology in these texts foreground the collaboration and mediation inher
ent but suppressed in most print technology. To the extent that it calls attention
within its pages to the cinematic apparatus, the screenplay not only alerts us to the
increasingly central role that technology plays in the construction of the modern
subject, but reminds us too of the material (the paratext, to use Gerard Genette's
term) that mediates the production and consumption of all published texts.16 The
published screenplay thus lays bare the collaboration and mediation other literary
forms conventionally and sometimes stubbornly suppress, destabilizing and inter
rogating traditional notions of authorial autonomy and textual authenticity.

Derekjarman's print text companion to his 1986 film Caravaggio serves as a com
pelling model lor the published screenplay as discussed above, exploiting to fasci
nating effect many of the formal and cultural characteristics that are historically
intrinsic to the screenplay form. As a published book, Derek Jarman's Caravaggio,
notwithstanding the claim of authorship and ownership implicit in its title, happily
complicates the idea of the conventional, original, autonomous text. Published edi
tions of screenplays often include a variety of paratextual material—photographs
and stills, for example, or interviews with the writers themselves. Thus Jarman's
contemporary Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette and Other Writings (pub
lished by Faber) includes alongside Kureishi's 1985 screenplay a number of the
author's essays on 1980s and '90s Britain, situating the screenplay within a broader
cultural and political context; and his Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (also by Faber) is
published with a diary detailing Kureishi's collaboration throughout the composi
tion process with the film's director, Stephen Frears.17
But it isjarman's published work in this form (not only in Derek Jarman's Car
avaggio, but in such screenplays, too, as Queer Edward II and Wittgenstein: The
Terry Eagleton Script/The Derek Jarman Film)18 that most flagrantly flaunts the
conventions of the self-contained text while at the same time most obviously dis
tancing itself from the film script as it will manifest itself on the screen.19 Clearly
owing as much to the history of artists' books as to any conventional definition
or understanding of the screenplay, this is no mere "blueprint" for a film. For
mally identified in the inside pages as Derek Jarman's Caravaggio: The Complete
Film Script and Commentaries by Derek Jarman. Photographs by Gerald Incandela,20
the published book includes photographs taken of production activity outside
the film's frame as well as photographs of some of the film's scenes, reproductions
of paintings by Michelangelo Caravaggio, a running commentary by Jarman on
the making of the film, and interspersed quotations from Caravaggio's contem
poraries or near-contemporaries.

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:23:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Screenplay as Book 219

The work in many ways takes to an imaginative and m

view of the published screenplay as the hybrid, fluid, amb
been proposed.21 And it attempts to analyze in the culture a
plex interplay of discourses that it displays in its material f
too, the struggle to construct and articulate a particular id
society shaped by the moral populism and masculinist cult
culture that would define that identity and desire as deviant
work, combining avant-garde stylistics with passionately
serves as a direct attack on the antieroticism and insidiou
Thatcher administration, while in its idiosyncratic use of
that regime's unitary, nostalgic vision of England and of Br
It is as a literary document with broad cultural reson
approach Derek Jarman's Caravaggio. In its copyright pa
announces itself as having been conceived and marketed as
published on the occasion of the release of the British Film In
Caravaggio." Given the screenplay's traditionally coy reluctan
separate material and cultural entity, this gesture is significa
thermore, that foregrounds its status as a formally hybrid t
contesting cultural practices. This is most apparent in the
explicit by the full title of the screenplay. The inclusion in t
dela, a Tunisian-bom, American-based art photographer wh
since 1973, when the two had been briefly lovers, and who h
of his films, complicates presumptions of authority and origi
different definitions of textual attribution and ownership
rectly of the paratextual material—the unacknowledged r
lisher in the physical composition of the published text
definitions of authority may be commonplace in the world
there, auteur theorists and critics still haunt the corridors),
course, and the public marketplace generally, still often pri
duction and originality, not least in the all-too-common reif
theorists who question such assumptions.
In addition, the title of the screenplay implicitly calls atte
which the book will juxtapose text and image as these mig
ventionally (a point to which I will return). But this interplay o
is present also at the level of the writing, of the words prin
themselves must be seen as both text and image. As Jay
us, all words began as images first, their material, graph
transparent only over time.22 The more recent return to a r
as visible, initiated by the early-twentieth-century mani
futurism and foregrounded over the last fifteen to twenty y
WJ.T. Mitchell, D. E McKenzie, Jerome McGann, and Joha

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:23:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
220 Miguel Mota

again, in Bolter's words, "made the word immediate and sensually apprehensible
by insisting on its visual form rather than its symbolic signification."23
As Drucker argues in Figuring the Word, "in every era of human history artists,
poets, and professional and amateur scribes have been sensitive to the visual prop
erties of written forms. Consequently there is no shortage of material evidence
supporting the idea that writing is a visual medium."24 Given the transformations
of production and reproduction technologies in the last hundred years, we need
to be aware, too, as Drucker points out, that "not all written language is produced
directly by hand, but whether marks, strokes, signs, glyphs, letters, or characters,
writing's visual forms possess an irresolvable dual identity in their material exis
tence as images and in their function as elements of language."25 As a social and
cultural practice, writing partakes of and is subject to the semiotic conditions of
the production of meaning within the constraints of the conventional system of
language, what D. E McKenzie has called "letterforms as cultural witnesses."26
If writing both reflects and is subject to a system of language, writing that is
produced by mechanical or technical means enacts a unique relationship with
the discursive practices it reproduces and to which it is bound. Written language
mediated by mechanical or technical modes of production "often embodies the
standardized conventions of letterforms, page formats, and other literary forms
in a way which is most closely related to language as a cultural form."27 Print as
it materially appears on the page may reflect a variety of cultural and discursive
networks, and in DerekJarman's Caravaggio it is the attention paid to the material
nature of print that calls into question a number of cultural assumptions and rela
tionships. The basic components of the alphabet as they are reproduced in the
book function in precisely the way Drucker suggests material texts negotiate their
way through the culture at large: "both as seemingly neutral bearers of meaning
and as self-consciously self-referential signs of production fraught with value in
their own right."28 The published screenplay's position as a culturally liminal and
ambivalent text provides us with unique opportunities to determine precisely
how these self-referential signs of production reflect and interrogate discursive
practices and assumptions within literary culture specifically. A closer look at
scenes 19 and 20 in Jarman's screenplay (fig. 1) will underscore the supposition
that the material text is hardly transparent but is indeed already inscribed within
a system of cultural practices and values.
Given its investment in and mediation by different technologies and media,
it is hardly surprising that Derek Jarman's Caravaggio should be especially con
cerned in its pages with the relationship between word and image. Leaving aside
for the moment the photograph of Caravaggio's The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, the
text here presents us with reproduced words as images, themselves enacting a
dialogue among a variety of cultural discourses. The quotation from Giovanni
Pietro Bellori at the top right-hand corner of the page is drawn from a 1672 his
torical biography, Le Vite de'Pittori. It is mechanically reproduced in bold font and

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:23:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Screenplay as Book 221

19
THE STUDIO. LATE EVENING

'Therefore, in order to find figure types and to compose them, when he came
upon someone in town who pleased him he made no attempt to improve on the
creations of nature.' beilori

JERUSALEME, sitting on the studio table, peels lemons and

into his mouth. He grimaces at the sourness. The camera travel
revealing the colours, the flasks of oil. the porphyry slab for gr
mortars, brushes, spatulas, and it comes to rest on a lar
M1CHELE turns a page and reads aloud:

Upon my bed at night

I sought him whom my soul loves
I sought him but found him not
I called him but he gave no answer.
I will rise now and go about the city.
In the streets and the squares
I will seek him whom my soul loves.
I sought him but found him not.

20
posing RANUCCIO for ST MATTHEW. studio

In front of the canvas ofThe Martyrdom, MICHELE has posed RANUCCIO, in

the exact position he will be painted. He turns and looks at the young man
thoughtfully.

The Martyrdom of St Matthew

DerekJarman's Caravaggio. Courtesy: Tony Peake

in quotation marks, in conventional terms signifying both significant emphasis

and recorded authenticity. We might conjecture, then, that it is the discipline of
history and the genre of biography that are privileged here. By contrast, the mate
rial that we recognize as more conventionally part of a film script—the directions
and the dialogue—pales on the page. The use of italics for directions is not
uncommon in this context, but we might note how the words that actually would
be spoken on screen are reproduced in clear imitation of a crude typewriter font.
The effect is ambiguous. On the one hand, we recognize here an ironic homage

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:23:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
222 Miguel Mota

to a type of twentieth-century authorial authenticity in the allusion to the figure

of the lone artist at the typewriter, unencumbered by a more sophisticated tech
nology, at home with a seemingly less mediated form of representation. Such a
reading would position the creative act of composing the screenplay firmly
within the discourse of literary genius itself. On the other hand, we might note
that in 1986, when this book was published, this type of font would have been
reserved more or less exclusively for students' essays, vanity presses, personal
correspondence—forms of writing, in other words, that conventionally might be
constituted as inferior within literary discourse, or not even literary at all.
A cultural connection can be made, then, between the film script and these
other forms of less literary or nonliterary writing. In addition, the presence of a
typewriter font within the pages of a technologically and technically sophisticated
book speaks of a certain incompleteness, a sense of roughness, a work in progress.
The words in the film script, as image, call attention in this case to the uncertain
place of the screenplay within cultural and more specifically academic discourse,
situating it as less legitimate, less permanent than the discourse of history and biog
raphy with which it must share the page. Yet what is perhaps most emphasized
graphically but most likely to be missed are the large, bold numbers, 19 and 20, sig
naling the shot sequence used in the actual film and reminding us once again that
whatever ambiguous or ambivalent relationships are enacted on the page, they nev
ertheless are embodied within the genre of the screenplay itself. At the same time,
the decorative appearance of these numerals on the printed page flaunt their aes
thetic ornamentation in the face of the conventionally accepted view of the film
script (and here especially of the shooting script) as simply functional. The use of
words as images here, then, calls attention to a struggle among specific cultural
forms—biography, history, art, literature—the script confessing its vulnerability in
the face of other, more legitimated cultural discourses while simultaneously
attempting to reestablish itself as the controlling voice within the text, not least per
haps in the manner in which the italicized directions often subject the reproduced
works of art to highly idiosyncratic interpretation.
Dialogue or contestation among different forms of discursive practices is by
no means limited to a reading of words as images. Relevant here, too, are the rela
tionships enacted among passages in the book in terms of their semantic mean
ing and the cultural forms inscribed therein. Scene 14 contains the same mix of
historical/biographical discourse (in bold), directions (in italics), and dialogue
(in typewriter font), but it adds the following:

A Commercial Break—the Media Image [of] the Painter, 1983

In an advertising break during my film Jubilee, shown on Channel Four
eight years after it was made, Hitachi used Caravaggio's Calling of St.
Matthew for their commercial, symbolically replacing Christ with their
latest television. The Light of the World usurped by a TV screen. Later,

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:23:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Screenplay as Book 223

on the programme Right to Reply, several members of

ity lambasted an uncomfortable Jeremy Isaacs, the
Four, over Jubilee. None of the critics of the violence i
the only films to deal with this area) noticed the viola
advertisement.

I'm certain that the images on TV that promote violence are not in my
films but in the adverts in between, since they sell a greedy world which
is no longer attainable for most people. These are the real cause of disil
lusion and despair—false dreams that millions can no longer afford to
buy. I should have got Hitachi's advertising company to help me dream
up the images of jubilee: "ABC, ITY KGB, 1NRI, etc. I bought them all
and rearranged the alphabet." It is ironic that Channel Four, which
failed to fund the film of the painter, violates his work to sell television
sets. (40)

Here we are given the figure of the author as both cultural critic and self
promoter, pushing still further the formal conventions of the screenplay genre,
introducing additional voices into the text. Appearing throughout the book,
these sections at times call attention to the collaborative nature of the work. Thus
we read the following:

Lux Aeterna

A month before shooting!,] the lighting cameraman, Gabriel Beristain,

was a constant visitor. He dropped all his other work to pore over the
script and the meticulous drawings Christopher Hobbs had made of
the sets. From these drawings it was possible to form a clear idea of the
architecture in which we would work. (22)

These production diary entries elsewhere address issues of funding, or the

lack of it, reminding us of the status of the work of art as commodity, what Dillo
calls "the mammon-fingered economics of art"29: "Our budget of£475,000 is lik
a picture frame—you can't go beyond it. The film is six weeks in shooting, ninety
minutes long. How much of such a hectic life can one show in such a short time?
Can we afford vermilion?" (28)
And finally, there are times even when the juxtaposition of passages in the
text break down presumed generic distinctions:

"Alone in the music room CARDINAL DEL MONTE plays the harpsichord.
The muslin curtains float in the breeze listlessly. The music of Frescobaldi, 'the
most famous organist of our time', steals through the palace.
Frescobaldi We arrived at the Pitti Palace just as the caretakers were
closing the gates. They eyed us suspiciously as we waited for the musi
cian Piero Donati. In the dark the palace looked forbidding" (56).

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:23:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 224 Miguel Mota

The move from the world of the scre

directions to the world of the filmmaker
expected distance between fiction and n
tence of at least two concurrent narrative
avaggio and Jarman as the respective p
itself interrogated through such juxtap
tions in Scene 16, for example, we are cle
and plot development:

DAVIDE and RANUCCIO fight a bitter

onlookers cheers them on. MICHELE s
CIO, pressing his advantage, beats DAVIDE
its allegiance. The blows are deadly and cr
cio's girl, kisses him smiling triumphantl
RANUCCIO a golden coin. DAVIDE is f

Turning the page, our expectations as

tion of such a narrative. Instead, what w
dated 31 May 1606 documenting a fight
and a Ranuccio of Terni, resulting in the

"On Sunday night a fight took place

men on either side. The leader of one side was Ranuccio of Terni
who died immediately after a long fight, and the other Michelan
gelo da Caravaggio a well-known painter." NOTICE 31 May 1606
(48)

Juxtaposed to the material that immediately precedes it, this is a historical

narrative that calls attention to its own rhetorical invention, complicating the cat
egories of both history and fiction. Accordingly, the reproduced paintings here
speak to Jarman's own reinterpretation of Caravaggio's life. Such a life, Jarman
claimed, could be accessed not through the usual history books but rather only
through an imaginative reading and recreation of the paintings themselves.
Though much of Jarman's play and critique of cultural practices is articu
lated in and through the words of the screenplay, Gerald Incandela's photographs
also occupy an important position in the book in this context. Incandela's film
stills register the attempt to create a hybrid form of representation that seeks to
enact a different dialogue between past and present, that looks to write a differ
ent history. If Roland Barthes was right when he claimed that the photograph is
at the center of "a complex of concurrent messages,"30 then the meanings of
Incandela's sumptuous, highly decorative stills arise from an unstable, relational
play of signs. As photographs of the film's scenes, they may be seen initially as
expressing a nostalgia for the absent or lost object, the film itself, which the pho
tograph can but quote.

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:23:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Screenplay as Book 22 5

At the same time, though, the book clearly displays Incandela's photographs
as themselves works of art. Having finally cemented in the 1970s a presence in
the art gallery,31 photography is absorbed here within broader fine art practices,
and does not defer to but rather competes with the film that it cites. Furthermore,
these stills function as an indexical record of another medium—film—with its

own indexical claims, art quoting art and thus foregrounding the self-reflexive
nature of representation. But it may be argued, too, that Incandela's film stills do
not quote but rather misquote the actual film. For these pictures of the film's
action, following the usual convention and practice of film still photography, are
shot from different angles than those of the film camera itself. By shifting the per
spective, however slightly, Incandela's stills remind us that neither the photo
graphic nor the film camera is a neutral device but an ideological apparatus that
frames and constructs its subject.
Furthermore, the inclusion in the book of not only Incandela's film stills but
his photographs of scenes outside the film's frame—behind-the-scenes, seem
ingly unstaged, apparently informal contemporary portraits—enacts yet another
exchange in the book with the more obviously formal reproductions of the past.
These photographs not only foreground what in 1986 under Thatcherism would
have been condemned as forms of illicit desire (the film does this, too), but by
focusing on the actors as actors (which the film does not do), they also encour
age us to consider representation as performance. In their incisive analysis of Jar
man's film, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit refer to Caravaggio's insistence in his
paintings that we recognize his models as models, that we "take account of their
refusal to be used for representation."32 In contrast, they argue, Jarman's use of
anachronistic details such as a typewriter in his film seem crude by comparison.
Yet in Incandela's photographs in the book of the film's actors in various poses,
we see in fact a similar assertion of these figures as actors or models.
But this does not signal, as Bersani and Dutoit would conclude, a refusal to
be used for representation; rather, it frames a different performance. In the first
two pages of scene 12 (36-37), for example, Sean Bean, the actor playing Ranuc
cio, Caravaggio's object of desire, photographed in costume but outside the film's
frame amid other crew members, gazes at a film still on the previous page in
which the character Davide stands atop a restaurant table. From this photograph,
Davide appears to look back at Sean Bean on the opposite page. A reproduction
of the present exchanges glances with a reproduction of the past, both juxtaposed
to yet another attempt to represent the past—the directions and dialogue that
half surround the film still of Davide. A little later, in scene 15 (45), we are shown
two photographs of extras from the film: on the left-hand side of the page a group
of young men forming a human pyramid, arms around one another; immediately
to its right a tight facial close-up of another young man, holding his mouth and
lips open, perhaps in front of an unseen mirror or an unseen companion outside
the frame of the photograph, perhaps toward the group of young men in the

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:23:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
226 Miguel Mota

image facing him. If we follow his gaze

come upon the words: "I am obsessed by t
examples among many in the book, the
ing of history through a discourse of h
photographs and stills, the text locates
cating us in the same structures of desire
placing us in similarly illicit, transgressiv
In its occasional juxtaposition of film
also expands the diegetic boundaries of
diegetic possibilities of the latter. Richard
ment of a completed act whereas the p
ance. With the film still, you are free to
of personal intent; you are simply mass
graphs narrative is psychologically mor
can whereas life is endlessly mutable an
kill."33 If we accept for the moment Fl
its of the film still, then we might begin
with the photographs in the book, the stil
nection to the finished film, are in fact
gressive engagement with the world outs
they engage, of course, is not real "life,"
pure, unmediated ontology that Flood e
that the photograph implies; but rather
themselves yet to be articulated fully or
or less "politicized" than the film stills,
become by the mid-1980s truly a matte
graph and still operate as active collabor
to promote and celebrate histories and i
insisted upon by Thatcherite ideology.
stills in the screenplay carry overtly ho
ratives of the past that are reconfigured
ances of desire.

The composition and juxtaposition of th

extend the film's queering of history w
obsession with the discursive practices
Cabe is surely correct when he argues tha
it is to be English is inseparable from a re
English Renaissance."34 Certainly, in suc
abeth 1 is afforded a vision of a late-twen
man's Renaissance is, as Michael O'Pr
England as the garden, as a repository
gone."35 And writing at the time, Nichola

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:23:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Screenplay as Book 227

sonal cry of nostalgia for a time and a security the [twentieth] century never knew
and can only experience through reading and imagination."36
But Jarman acknowledged, too, that this imagined Renaissance was firmly
embedded in the English national dream of expansion and capital, a dream that,
as O'Pray argues, "oiled the cogs of imperialist expansion and capitalist growth
and sustains that image."37 This is the dream that Thatcherism hoped not to
revive, since it had never really perished, but to strengthen and confirm in the
final decades of the twentieth century. Through the photographs' critique of
identities as performative, Derek Jarman's Caravaggio articulates a form of desire,
and thus a writing of history, to compete with the kind of social and individual
desire privileged by Thatcherism.38 The book's view and representation of the
past is uncertain and unresolved, but that very ambivalence reveals the English
national dream as itself a romanticized, nostalgic performance. Jarman saw in
Thatcher's unwavering devotion to her nostalgic national dream a severing of
Britain's links with what he perceived as the more unstable performance of his
nation's history (and it must be said that in a perversely ironic twist, for Jarman
"Britain" and "England" unfortunately were often interchangeable) .Jarman's rep
resentation of English history and identity flies in the face of the nostalgic
Thatcherite reconstruction of England's glorious past and its celebration of so
called Victorian values.

In "Aspects of a Semiology of Cinema," Pier Paolo Pasolini, an artist with an

uncanny resemblance to Jarman,39 refers to the screenplay generally as "a struc
ture that wants to be another structure," and argues for a "technique of the
screenplay." This he defines as "alluding to meaning through two different paths,
simultaneous and converging." According to Pasolini, "the sign of the screenplay
refers to the meaning according to the normal path of all written languages, and
in particular of literary jargons, but, at the same time, it hints at that same meaning,
forwarding the addressee to another sign, that of the potential film." Pasolini insists
that a screenplay asks of its reader "a particular collaboration: namely, that of
lending to the text a 'visual' completeness which it does not have, but at which it
hints."40 Though Pasolini is right to point to the ambivalence of the screenplay as
a medium, like many others, he fails to distinguish among the different cultural
and discursive spaces that unpublished and published screenplays must negoti
ate. I would suggest that the published screenplay—and Jarman's screenplay in
particular—need not necessarily look elsewhere for its "visual completeness" but
rather can articulate a separate visual text that both complements and competes
with the film, suggesting finally the potential of the screenplay as book. Derekjar
man's Caravaggio is an extended intervention into an existing form as it is under
stood by many—the screenplay as a functional blueprint for, or transcript record
of, a film. By addressing the book as a visual and material object, distinct from
Caravaggio the film, Jarman evinces and extracts from the pages of the published

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:23:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Zltt Miguel Mota

screenplay an entirely new text with a plurality ol narrative possibilities, in which

juxtapositions and relationships among different cultural discourses give rise to
innovative visual and verbal structures.

As a book, the hybrid text of Derek Jarmans Caravaggio enacts within its
pages a dialogue among various discursive practices, seeking out new narratives,
themselves productively unstable. Jarman's published screenplay is a palimpsest,
manufactured and constructed in such a way as to display a power of invention
in which text and image blend—sometimes in counterpoint dialogue, some
times in apparent unity, sometimes in clashing contradiction within a single page.
What emerges from this mixing of technologies is new yet never fully original,
always containing the referenced source—whether Caravaggio's paintings, the
words of his contemporaries, the photographs of Incandela, the film of Caravag
gio, or the implicit signs of a history and a culture that the published screenplay
both interrogates and attempts to rewrite.

University of British Columbia

Notes

1. Derek Jarman, Up in the Air: Collected Film Scripts, ed. Michael O'Pray (London: Vin
tage, 1996), vii.
2. Roger Wollen, "Facets of Derekjarman," in Derek Jarman: A Portrait, ed. Roger Wollen
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 15.
3. Tony Peake, Derek Jarman (London: Little, Brown, 1999), 319, 320. See also Matt
Cook, '"Words written without any stopping': Derek Jarman's Written Work," in
which Cook cites Jarman's "personal and political investment in writing and the writ
ten word" (Wollen, Derek Jarman, 105).
4. Cook, '"Words written without any stopping'," 105.
5. See William Packard, The Art of Screenwriting (New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1997):
"[Njothing is ever more enduring or more permanent than the text of a great stage
play. ... [T] he art of filmmaking is very young, a mere 90 years old—whereas stage
plays have existed for over 2500 years, and they will always remain the noblest and
most eloquent form of human expression" (33).
6. Larry McMurtry, Flim Flam: Essays on Hollywood (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1987), 34.
7. See, for example, James Naremore, Film Adaptation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2000); Erica Sheen and Robert Giddings, The Classic Novel: From
Page to Screen (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000); Jonathan
Bignell, Writing and Cinema (New York: Longman, 1999).
8. Steven H. Gale, The Films of Harold Pinter (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2001).
9. Douglas Garrett Winston, The Screenplay as Literature (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 1973).
10. Claudia Sternberg, Written for the Screen (Tubingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1997).

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:23:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Screenplay as Book 229

11. For the former, see Jakob Lothe, Narrative in Fiction and Film (Oxford: Oxford Uni
versity Press, 2000). For the latter, see, among others, Packard, The Art of Screenwrit
ing; David Trottier, The Screenwriter's Bible: A Complete Guide to Writing, Formatting,
and Selling Your Script, 3rd ed. (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1998); Robert
McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting (New York:
Regan Books, 1997).
12. Nathaniel Kohn, "Disappearing Authors: A Postmodern Perspective on the Practice
of Writing for the Screen," Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 43, no. 3
(1999): 443-49,448, 444.
13. Even the most common reasons usually given for the consumption of screenplays—
that they function as models for fledgling screenwriters; or that they provide an
opportunity to burrow even more deeply into the film itself by studying its dia
logue—are subject to the too common academic assumption that the published texts
are neither interesting nor culturally valid in and of themselves.
14. The connection between the publisher and the extent to which the film apparatus is
revealed on the page is unlikely to be accidental. As a "literary" press, Faber and Faber
attempts to produce the published text of the screenplay within the kind of material
conventions that will link it most readily to an already established print genre: the
stage play-text. The screenplays published out of Hollywood, on the other hand,
appear to celebrate the cinematic apparatus, positioning the print text more directly
in relation to the medium it supposedly serves.
15. Any discussion of the cinematic apparatus and the subject must start with the seminal
work of Jean-Louis Baudry. Baudry was himself indebted to earlier studies of Renais
sance and post-Renaissance painting that emphasized the role of perspective in posi
tioning the spectator as an omniscient, unique individual. In "Ideological Effects of the
Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," trans. Alan Williams, Film Quarterly 28, no.2 (Win
ter 1974-1975): 39-47, Baudry argues that because the camera lens is modeled on the
same optical principles that underlie the perspective system of Renaissance painting,
cinema ensures that the spectator is established as the center and producer of meaning.
Thus positioned, the viewer is actually blinded to the physical apparatus of the film and
basks in an illusion of unmediated and continuous reality. On the one hand, the pub
lished screenplay, to the extent that it is dependent on narrative continuity, also encour
ages this denial of the apparatus; on the other hand, unlike in most films, the references
to the cinematic apparatus in the screenplay remain wholly visible on the printed page
and thus complicate the subject's desire for unmediated reality. In this, the published
screenplay comes closer to Christian Metz's theory of the effect of the apparatus on the
subject. Extending Baudry's argument, Metz insists that the spectator in cinema at once
knows one thing and believes its opposite. Cinema thus involves a process of significa
tion in which the spectator's desire is both present and absent, thereby articulating a
highly unstable subject. See Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and
the Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1982). Jarman's screenplay, itself concerned at least in
part with Renaissance representation and perspective, uses the metaphor of the cine
matic apparatus to both assert and destabilize the subject.
16. Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni
versity Press, 1997).

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:23:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
ZJU Miguel Mota

17. Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Laundrette and Other Writings (London: Faber and Faber,
1996); Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (London: Faber and Faber, 1988).
18. Derek Jarman, Queer Edward II (London: British Film Institute, 1991); Wittgenstein:
The Terry Eagleton Script/The Derek Jarman Film (London: British Film Institute,
1993).
19. Jarman's closest artistic ally here (though it is doubtful Jarman himself would have
acknowledged it) is Peter Greenaway, whose published screenplays (especially Pros
pero'sBooks [London: Chatto & Windus, 1991] and the series of scripts published by
Dis Voir since 1989) speak to a similar interest in the screenplay as book, though, in
the editions published by Dis Voir, with radically different results.
20. Derek Jarman, Derek Jarman's Caravaggio. The Complete Film Script and Commentaries
by Derek Jarman. Photographs by Gerald lncandela (London: Thames and Hudson,
1986). Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.
21. In this sense, Derek Jarman's Caravaggio resembles Steven Dillon's description of Jar
man's later Chroma: A Book of Color (London: Century, 1994) as "a species of'cut-up,'"
a "critical collage" owing something to the American experimental writing of William
Burroughs, Charles Olson, Susan Howe, and Louis Zukofsky. See Steven Dillon,
Derek Jarman and Lyric Film: The Mirror and the Sea (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2004), 229. Roger Wollen also refers to the "cross-disciplinary elements" in much of
Jarman's work: "Some are technical, such as the use of collage and objets trouves in
painting and sculpture, superimposition and complex editing in film, and combina
tions of prose, poetry, journal entries and philosophical musings in literary works"
(Wollen, Derek Jarman, 15).
22. Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing
(Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991).
23. Jay David Bolter, "Critical Theory and the Challenge of New Media," Eloquent Images:
Word and Image in the Age of New Media, ed. Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 19.
24. Johanna Drucker, Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing, and Visual Poetics (New
York: Granary Books, 1998), 57.
25. Ibid.

26. D. E McKenzie, "The Sociology of a Text," in The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkel
stein and Alistair McCleery (London: Routledge, 2002), 190.
27. Drucker, Figuring the Word, 73.
28. Ibid., 73.
29. Dillon, Derek Jarman and Lyric Film, 133.
30. Roland Barthes, "The Photographic Message," in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen
Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 15.
31. See Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995): "From the
parochial perspective of the late-1970s art world, photography appeared as a water
shed. Radically reevaluated, photography took up residence in the museum on a par
with the visual arts' traditional mediums and according to the very same art-historical
tenets" (2). See also John Roberts, ed. The Impossible Document: Photography and Con
ceptual Art in Britain 1966-1976 (London: Camerawords, 1997).

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:23:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Screenplay as Book 231

32. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 9.
Though they are very good at recognizing the film's subtleties, Bersani and Dutoit too
easily disregard the more nuanced qualities of the published screenplay: "We could
of course also say that since the film is much better than the texts accompanying it
would suggest, there's not much point in giving serious attention to the texts" (11). In
the end, they insist, Jarman's print text serves merely to reinforce a simplified queer
politics. Curiously, though Bersani and Dutoit elsewhere refer in passing to some of
the graphic elements of Queer Edward II, Jarman's screenplay for his 1991 film, Edward
II, they ignore outright in this context any formal characteristics of the material text
of Derek Jarman's Caravaggio, focusing exclusively on theme and thus depriving the
book of its unique status and function.
33. Richard Flood, "Voodoo Auteurism: Film Stills and Photography," in Veronica's
Revenge: Contemporary Perspectives on Photography, ed. Elizabeth Janus (Zurich: Scalo,
LAC Switzerland, 1998), 207.
34. Colin MacCabe, "A Post-National European Cinema: A Consideration of Derek Jar
man's The Tempest and Edward II," Screening Europe: Image and Identity in Contempo
rary European Cinema, ed. Duncan Petrie (London: British Film Institute, 1992), 10.
Though the book has as its historical and geographical setting the Italian, not the Eng
lish, Renaissance, Jarman here joins a long tradition of using Italy as a site for articu
lating contemporary English society.
35. Michael O'Pray, Derek Jarman: Dreams of England (London: British Film Institute,
1996), 101.
36. Nicholas de Jongh, Guardian, February 2, 1978.
37. O'Pray, Derek Jarman, 98.
38. See, in this context, William Pencak, The Films of Derek Jarman (Jefferson, NC: McFar
land, 2002): "Jarman is bringing to life a past that could have occurred, and is exem
plifying the work of historical thinkers such as Carl Becker who argue that any
historical narrative creates facts to support an interpretation" (73).
39. For a persuasive account of Jarman's affinities with Pasolini, and of both with Car
avaggio, see Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio, 7 passim. In Dancing hedge (Woodstock,
NY: Overlook Press, 1993), Jarman himself wrote: "Had Caravaggio been reincar
nated in this century it would have been as a filmmaker, Pasolini" (9).
40. Pier Paolo Pasolini, "Aspects of a Semiology of Cinema," Writing in a Film Age, ed.
Keith Cohen (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1991), 191,192.

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:23:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms