The Last of England is a 1987 British arthouse film directed by Derek Jarman and starring Tilda Swinton. It is a poetic, rather than realistic, depiction of what Jarman felt was the loss of traditional English culture in the 1980s and his anger about Thatcher's England, declaring it a homophobic and repressive totalitarian state. In 1986, Jarman was also diagnosed as HIV positive and had just finished his 'masterpiece', Caravaggio, so the film is a confluence of angry imagination. It is named after The Last of England, a painting by Ford Madox Brown. The painting and the film, share themes of escape and the changing of place. The film uses a shaky hand-held camera to evoke anxiety and paranoia, and the ever-present melancholy is expressed in the extracts from poems, including T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men and Allen Ginsberg's "Howl", which are monotonously read by narrator Nigel Terry. One of the film's most famous scenes is of Tilda Swinton, dressed not unlike the woman from Brown's painting, as a bride mourning her executed husband, screaming and letting out a primal cry whilst rubbish burns around her. The scene was shot near the director's home on the beach of Dungeness, Kent. Other images in the film, are counterpointed by Bach violin sonatas and 1980s disco. Skulls, fire and ashes embody death and destruction, while scenes of sex on a Union Jack flag and 'Spring' masturbating show a disregard for social conventions and suggest a country in a state of chaos and sordid decadence.
Derek Jarman received the 1988 Teddy Award in Berlin for the film. Also Tilda Swinton received the jury prize for her performance in the film.
Reviews
On Rotten Tomatoes, it has an average score of 68%, based on 3 reviews. 'What proof do you need the world's curling up like an autumn leaf?' is Time Out magazine's review. "Terrible" is David Bezanson's review, "Impressionistic" doesn't have to mean "bad" and "It's graphic and disorienting, yet also totally trite".
Book
Jarman wrote a book to accompany the film, which deals more explicitly with the relationship he had with his father, who was a Lancaster bomber pilot in the Second World War. Jarman used the impact of his father's despair, depression and violence on his own artistic vision. The depression that his father suffered is attributed to the high number of fatalities that bomber crews experienced and the carpet-bombing of civilians. The book and to a lesser extent the film are very much in the tradition of Roland BarthesCamera Lucida, Susan Sontag's On Photography, Jeanette Winterson's Art Objects and to a lesser extent John Berger's Ways of Seeing in that he has used the deeply familiar and personal as a vehicle for dialogue about art and contemporary culture.
