Learning on ScreenWar Requiem
GB. 2008. DVD (Region 2 PAL). Second Sight. 92 minutes + extras. £19.99
About the Reviewer: Toby Haggith is a historian who joined the Imperial War Museum’s Film Department in 1988. He has a PhD in Social History from the University of Warwick and has published various essays on film and history. In 2000 he became head of non-commercial access to the film and video collection and responsible for devising the daily Public Film Show programme. In 2001, he started the IWM Student Film Festival (now the IWM Short Film Festival) and was closely involved in the creation and recording of the musical tracks on the Museum’s DVD release of the digitally restored 1916 film, The Battle of the Somme. He is now a Senior Curator in the Department of Research and is currently leading the Museum’s project to restore and complete the British concentration camp documentary, retrospectively titled, Memory of the Camps.
War Requiem (1989) was made to accompany Benjamin Britten’s oratorio, first performed in Coventry cathedral in May 1962 as part of the ceremony to mark the dedication of the re-opening of the church, which was bombed during the Second World War. Britten’s composition was itself inspired by the poems of Wilfred Owen, nine of which, along with the Latin words of the requiem mass, comprise the libretto. Produced by Don Boyd and directed by Derek Jarman, War Requiem was the first film project to receive funding through the BBC’s Independent Planning Unit, set up to encourage British independent filmmaking. At a cost of nearly £1 million it was the most costly film of Jarman’s career and included a number of rising British stars including Nathanial Parker, Sean Bean and Tilda Swinton. It also included a cameo from Laurence Olivier, which was to be his last performance on-screen.
Made without dialogue and using the libretto as the script, Jarman’s film comprises a series of dramatised sequences and symbolic tableaux interspersed with documentary sequences of wars from the First World War to the 1980s. Four of the scenes in the film directly refer to paintings and sculptures. Jarman’s imagery loosely narrate Wilfred Owen’s experiences in the First World War as well as the fictionalised story of a British Tommy (also representing the ‘unknown soldier’) who serves with Owen and develops a relationship with the officer poet.
The film was well received when it was released, but I found it a very dissatisfying piece although it includes many beautiful and arresting images, particularly when Tilda Swinton (playing the nurse and sister of the dead soldier) is in shot. Swinton was one of Jarman’s favourite performers, working on seven of his films, and she provides the most interesting and intelligent of the interviews which form one of the extras on this DVD.
While some of Jarman’s tableaux and theatrical sketches are powerful (such as the scenes around a stone alter, based on Charles Sargent Jagger’s War Memorial), others are amateurish and clichéd. For example, a scene of British soldiers digging in a chalk pit is so poorly directed and ill conceived that the desultory digging of the cast, all impressively daubed in chalk, is meaningless and does little to complement the music. The archive film cut with this sequence, which show British soldiers in the trenches, only highlights the lack of authenticity and weakness of the dramatisation.
Jarman incorporated a large amount of archive film, including thirty-six items amounting to approximately ten minutes of screen time, sourced from the archives of the Imperial War Museum. As well as serving a narrative function (for example, a flashback or memory of the First World War veteran played by Laurence Olivier), and operating as flashes of archival reality to support the scenes which historically reconstruct the Western Front, Jarman also used a ten-minute montage of war footage to symbolically represent and comment on the continuing persistence of warfare since 1918. Edited by John Maybury, the montage rapidly cuts a mass of footage covering the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Falklands and even fighting between the Mujahidean and Soviet forces in Afghanistan, ending with the film recording the explosion of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. Although Jarman recalled questioning the morality of the indiscriminate use of such potent footage, the archive film is so rapidly edited and with so little reference to historical logic that the resultant montage is a sensationalist and tasteless survey of modern warfare. Apart from offering the bland and obvious message that wars are bad, the editors’ real intent was clearly to produce the most disturbing and shocking assembly of images possible, titillating the viewer rather than provoking their intellect.
Dr Toby Haggith
