Smiling In Slow Motion

'The life-affirming expression of an artist engaged in living to the full' The Times Smiling in Slow Motion is Derek Jarman's last journal, stretching from May 1991 until a fortnight before his death in February 1994. Jarman writes with his trademark humour and candour about friends and enemies, as he races through his final years of film-making, gardening and radical political protest. Written from Jarman's Charing Cross Road flat, his famed garden at Dungeness, and finally from his bed in St Bartholomew's Hospital, Jarman meditates on his own deteriorating health and the loss of his contemporaries. Yet Smiling in Slow Motion is not simply a chronicle of illness and regret: it is, at its heart, one of endeavour, determination and pride. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY NEIL BARTLETT

'The life-affirming expression of an artist engaged in living to the full' The Times Smiling in Slow Motion is Derek Jarman's last journal, stretching from May 1991 until a fortnight before his death in February 1994. Jarman writes with his trademark humour and candour about friends and enemies, as he races through his final years of film-making, gardening and radical political protest. Written from Jarman's Charing Cross Road flat, his famed garden at Dungeness, and finally from his bed in St Bartholomew's Hospital, Jarman meditates on his own deteriorating health and the loss of his contemporaries. Yet Smiling in Slow Motion is not simply a chronicle of illness and regret: it is, at its heart, one of endeavour, determination and pride. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY NEIL BARTLETT

Rowland Wymer gives detailed, original critical readings of Derek Jarman's eleven feature-length films, and argues that he occupies a major and influential place in European and world cinema.

Originally published: Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1994.

This book reflects on the motivations of creative practitioners who have moved out of cities from the mid-1960s onwards to establish creative homesteads. The book focuses on desert exile painter Agnes Martin, radical filmmaker and gardener Derek Jarman, and iconoclastic conceptual artist Chris Burden, detailing their connections to the cities they had left behind (New York, London, Los Angeles). Sarah Lowndes also examines how the rise of digital technologies has made it more possible for artists to live and work outside the major art centers, especially given the rising cost of living in London, Berlin, and New York, focusing on three peripheral creative centers: the seaside town of Hastings, England, the midsized metro of Leipzig, Germany, and post-industrial Detroit, USA.

This highly sensitive and beautifully written book looks closely at the way contemporary Western artists negotiate death, both as personal experience and in the wider community. Townsend discusses but moves beyond the 'spectacle of death' in work by artists such as Damien Hirst to see how mortality - in particular the experience of other people's death - brings us face to face with profound ethical and even political issues. He looks at personal responses to death in the work of artists as varied as Francis Bacon, Tracey Emin and Derek Jarman, whose film 'Blue' is discussed here in depth. Exploring the last body of work by the the Kentucky-based photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, and Jewish American installation artist Shimon Attie's powerful memorial work for the community of Aberfan, Townsend considers death in light of the injunction to 'love they neighbour'.

A fascinating journal written after the creation of Derek Jarman’s The Last of England, covering the making of the film itself and the origins of its deeply autobiographical content. In 1986 Derek Jarman started filming The Last of England, one of his most original and innovative films. It is also his most personal work, with the strongest autobiographical content. Shortly after filming began Derek Jarman started work on this book, which contains diary entries, interviews and notes from the script. Jarman writes of his extraordinary childhood and his kleptomaniac father; the process by which he came to terms with his sexuality; his early work as painter and designer; and finally his debut as a film director. Throughout, however, the reader will follow Jarman at his most fervent, as he writes of the corruption of the cinema industry, of the moral and personal consequences of the AIDS virus, and of the evils of Thatcher's Britain.

Jesus was not in a hurry. He had only three years of public ministry—three years to heal and teach and change the world—but the Bible never tells us he was rushing through them. We are the ones who rush through them. Catching the gist of this parable. Smiling at the punch line in that dialogue. We can race through the Gospels in hours, fully briefed on Christ’s life, but hardly changed. Until we sit down with Mike Nappa’s God in Slow Motion. Nappa hasn’t carved up the Gospels for quick review or sliced them into tiny pieces for academic study. He has taken ten important moments from the life of Christ and reveled in them, chewing on their words, relating them to life, comparing them with modern culture, allowing the Spirit to work, and letting Christ change him. The result is a rich, personal, and biblical narrative about Jesus and how His purposes unfold, then and now. See how God is sneaky about his glory. How he presents evidence for belief. How he can be comforting and terrifying at once. This is the “good news” in all its many-splendored wonder: the life of Christ, frame by frame. And it is worth every minute because it will change you too.