The British filmmaker whose soundtracks read like a roll-call of the founding industrial scene · Throbbing Gristle, Coil and Psychic TV all scored his films, and his hand-made Super-8 cinema is the visual counterpart to their treated sound.
Derek Jarman (1942–1994) is the artist-filmmaker the Bureau files closest to the founding industrial scene, and the clearest case in the Adjacent sub-section of a visual artist whose work and the archive's sound are bound directly together. He was the filmmaker of what David Keenan named "England's Hidden Reverse," the subterranean industrial-and-avant-garde current of the 1970s onward, and his soundtracks read like a roll-call of the scene the archive documents.
The relationship began with Throbbing Gristle. In 1980 Jarman invited TG to score In the Shadow of the Sun, and he filmed the group in T.G.: Psychic Rally in Heaven; the collaboration started long-running ties with members of TG and the projects that followed it. It is the point at which the founding industrial group and the originating art-filmmaker of the milieu met, and it set the pattern for the rest of Jarman's engagement with the scene.
The deepest of those marriages of sound and image is The Angelic Conversation (1985), for which Coil recorded the soundtrack (released under the same name in 1994, the year of Jarman's death). Jarman's Super-8 meditation on Shakespeare's sonnets and homosexual desire, transferred to 35mm and slowed into a dream, is completed by Coil's languorous score; the two are inseparable, and the film is one of the closest sound-and-image collaborations the scene produced.
With Psychic TV the collaboration was repeated and mutual. Jarman filmed Pirate Tape (1982), the short featuring William Burroughs on his London visit, effectively a music video for a PTV composition; he directed further PTV video work and appeared in their orbit; and Psychic TV later gathered soundtrack recordings made for him across decades. "Magic bound us together," Jarman wrote of the relationship, and the phrase captures how fully the filmmaker and the post-TG projects shared a sensibility.
Jarman's method is the reason the affinity runs so deep. He worked in Super-8 transferred to 35mm, in saturated colour, slow motion and a painter's handling of texture and light, building a hand-made cinema of image rather than narrative. That treatment of film as material to be worked and degraded is the visual correlate of the industrial method of treated, manipulated sound; the two practices share an instinct, and it is why his films sit so naturally beside the records.
Beyond the scene, Jarman is a major figure of British art cinema (Sebastiane, Jubilee, Caravaggio, The Last of England and the final, near-blind Blue) and was a prominent and outspoken AIDS activist before his death in 1994. The Bureau files him in the Visual department's Adjacent sub-section not for that career as a whole but for the part of it that belongs to this archive: the filmmaker the founding industrial circle chose to work with, again and again, and whose images remain the scene's closest cinematic kin.