A Footnote to My Past
When I started to write Dancing Ledge in a Roman hotel room (Croce di Malta) late in 1982, my worklife was becalmed, deserted by the funding bodies and the British cinema renaissance running hard for Mrs Thatcher’s new Jerusalem – absolute beginners all. My own renaissance (Caravaggio made on the Isle of Dogs for £475,000 from the BFI) was three years away. Angry, Nico said why don’t you write it out. One thing led to another and what started as a book on the frustration of funding led to the writing of an autobiography at forty. I had so little to do in the daylight hours, I stayed up late unbuttoning Levis in back rooms. Fucking which had seemed so impossible when I was eighteen was now easy and the HIV virus but a distant shadow. I would fall into my bed and wake in a happy hangover to write my Past.
Now a decade later my Queerlife is reprinted. For though it received only a couple of reviews, it has gradually sold out in a quiet corner of my friend Ian Shipley’s Charing Cross Road bookshop.
The years since have seen the renewal and reinvention of my cinema (Angelic Conversation, The Last of England, and The Garden), the reclaiming of the Queer Past in War Requiem and Edward II, my move to Prospect Cottage, the building of the garden, catching the virus, and falling in Love.
My body was thrown into the struggle, bringing me into a spotlight in a way I never expected or wanted. On 22 December 1986, finding I was body positive, I set myself a target: I would disclose my secret and survive Margaret Thatcher. I did. Now I have my sights set on the millennium and a world where we are all equal before the law.
Derek Jarman
1991
I
26 December 1982. Monteverde, Tuscania
All through Christmas, spent in this old farmhouse high on a windy hill in Tuscany, I have told myself I must begin recording the labyrinthine saga of the Caravaggio film – 1·30 and the family has left for a hunters’ lunch with the contadini, who have been chasing wild boar all morning through the maize fields and woods along the banks of the Ombrone, which glitters below. The first sporadic bursts of gunfire were to be heard at sunrise, and upon coming down for breakfast I found the maid, Zara, in tears: her dog had just died. Shot, I thought, like the butcher last year, by some local cowboy. As she brushed back the tears she told me her ‘darling’ had had a heart attack at the ripe age of fourteen, over-excited by the traditional Saint Stephen’s Day massacre.
~
Six days ago, when Nicholas Ward Jackson, producer of the Caravaggio film, and I left very early in the morning for Rome, we had hoped to have the contracts signed by the Italian co-producers before the turn of the year … Nothing that I’ve worked on has ever produced such problems as this life of Caravaggio. Everyone is excited by it and everyone is suspicious. Friends find two years of delays perplexing, the lack of funds annoying. Why lose yourself in the chiaroscuro? Films about painters end up pleasing nobody; there is a visionary tug-of-war from which neither artist nor film-maker emerges victorious.
~
Michele C. (Painter, 1572–1610)
Had Caravaggio been reincarnated in this century it would have been as a film-maker, Pasolini. It’s impossible to have a conversation about the film in Rome without Pier Paolo’s name being mentioned. Today Michele C. would toss his brushes into the Tiber and pick up Sony’s latest video, as painting has degenerated into an obscure, hermetic practice, performed by initiates behind closed doors. There is a remarkable lack of emotional force in modern painting. Who could shed a tear for it now? But you can weep at Pasolini’s Gospel According to Matthew, and Ricotta can make you laugh. In 1600, who knows, painting might have evoked the same immediate response. Of course Pasolini painted very badly.
~
30 December. the ‘Star’ Over Bedlam
A tabloid, the Star, has devoted its front page to an attack on Channel Four for its policy of buying certain ‘gay’ films, Nighthawks and Sebastiane, particularly the latter. ‘It must not be shown on television.’
When he first met me last March, Jeremy Isaacs, the director of Channel Four, said that although they had bought my films they would probably never show Sebastiane. I was surprised when he said it would be too ‘controversial’.
Nicholas has not rung from Rome and the article won’t make the launching of Caravaggio any easier.
~
31 December
Today the Telegraph printed a statement from Channel Four denying that they intended to show either Sebastiane or Nighthawks. They explained that they had been bought as part of ‘a package’. Times change. Last week they completed the show print for transmission.
~
March 1978. London
I meet Nicholas Ward Jackson at a gallery opening in Covent Garden. He proposes a film on the life of Caravaggio and the next day sends all the available material on the painter’s life.
~
May 1978. Paris
I travel to Rome to write the first screenplay of Caravaggio, stopping on the way at Cannes where Jubilee is opening as part of the Semaine de la Critique. I come down with two actresses from that film, Jordan and Jenny Runacre. Jordan is at the height of her media fame as ‘punk princess’, with her ripped Venus T-shirt, Bunsen-burner hair and extrovert make-up. Educated at Miss Angela’s ‘academy de danse’, Jordan has carved a meteoric career as a shop assistant at Sex, now Seditionaries, in the bend of the King’s Road, and her style has launched a thousand hairdos. We stop in Paris and I take her to the Louvre to see Caravaggio’s ‘Death of the Virgin’. As she walks through the gloom of the great galleries whole parties of soporific tourists switch their attention from the Poussins and Rembrandts and illuminate her with a thousand flashbulbs. All this reaches its climax in a momentous confrontation with the ‘Mona Lisa’. For the first time in her 470 or so years of existence the Mona is utterly upstaged; for a fleeting moment life triumphs over art. Then the walls open, guards rush out and bundle us into a secret lift; and we descend into a basement office where an embarrassed lady expels us from the gallery for ‘disturbing the aesthetic environment’.
At Cannes Jordan was a star. From the moment we arrived on the Carlton Terrace she was besieged by the press. Within seconds of her arrival Miss Nude America, a sun-kissed Martini blonde, was deserted. Businessmen fell about while their starlet protégées sulked in the shadows. In the streets photographers ran backwards through the crowds. I followed discreetly a few steps behind, like a Muslim wife. The whole silly show, which we thoroughly enjoyed, ended at the Five Nation Televised Opening in the gilded casino with its glittering chandeliers and banks of carnations. With Louis Malle we were made the guests of honour, perched on little gilt music chairs, while an audience of punks invited by the TV company staged a riot. The fashion model presenter continued making her announcements, trying to hold back her tears as the Festival President was deluged by champagne, and the vases of carnations flew through the air. We watched the chaos on the video monitor as the cameramen and editors fought desperately to eliminate the unexpected riot from the screen. Within seconds the entire casino dissolved into anarchy, like the climax of René Claire’s A Nous la Liberté, around the distraught announcer who sat at her table and forced a last tearful smile into the camera. Hefty electricians were chasing punks and shouting ‘merde!’ Completely forgotten, Jordan, Jenny and I sat alone and sipped our champagne.
A couple of days later I took the train to Rome, having been shunned by the little clique of British journalists, accused of instigating the disturbances and letting down ‘the side’. At the airport Jordan was refused admittance on to the plane until she’d changed. Someone lent her a shabby old mackintosh to cover up the Venus T-shirt.
~
June 1978. Rome
Jean Marc and I booked into a small hotel near the Spanish Steps where each morning for the next eight weeks I tried to unravel a narrative from the jumble of highly partisan and often antagonistic records we have of Caravaggio’s life.
Not a victim like Orton or Pasolini but a murderer who happened to be an artist. Caravaggio painted some of the most powerfully religious images of the seventeenth century; and changed the way an entire generation looked. Notorious amongst his contemporaries as a dangerous and dangerous-looking young man, the violent trajectory of his life calls assumptions about an artist’s relation to society into question … casual pickups painted as Saint John, dead prostitutes hauled from the Tiber hung as Virgins over the counter-reformation altars of Rome. Self-portraits of deepening disillusion: himself as Medusa, Saint Francis and Goliath, not merely to represent, but anticipate and instigate the life itself.
There he is as the pretty vain boy of the early genre paintings, painting himself in the mirror as Bacchus, toasting himself with wine, laughter and music; he points at a piece of paper with words written coyly ‘you know that I love you’, the beginning of the song. Shadows disturb the ambience of enjoyment – the winglike shadows, for instance, that rise behind the boy with a basket of fruit. There is the hungover Sick Bacchus; it is known that the young Caravaggio had suffered from a malarial illness. And the fruit in the still lives is always rotten – the first time it had been painted in that way.
In his late twenties came the first public commission, the Contarelli Chapel, when the task of painting became a struggle: he spent far more time than was thought necessary to produce these paintings of Saint Matthew; and this was used against him by his enemies in Rome to cast doubt on his ability to draw and paint. He always painted from life.
~
‘I, Caravaggio Did This’
Through his patron the Medici Cardinal Del Monte he received his first major commission, the ‘Martyrdom of Saint Matthew’ in the Contarelli Chapel, in which a handsome assassin – he occupies the centre of the canvas – is cruised by the artist gazing guiltily over his shoulder; it is a self-portrait of one in his late twenties whose good looks have been prematurely destroyed. Meanwhile, the martyr lies abject, a cypher of holiness, at the feet of a murderer reminiscent of the triumphant Christ in Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgement’.
Caravaggio, the theatrical hard boy, fades into the chiaroscuro, the light and dark of his schizoid vision – gambling in taverns, stones through windows, artichokes thrown at waiters, the endless petty sword fights. Finally he murders Ranuccio Thomasoni (his lover?) after a game of tennis then goes on the run. Safely in Malta, he signs a confession in the blood of John the Baptist, ‘I, Caravaggio did this.’ In one of the final paintings the hollow-eyed severed head of Goliath which the young David holds in his hand is recognisably the artist’s own. David is not pretty; he is a rough little number, one of those Roman street boys in whom, like Pasolini, C. continually sought ‘perfection’.
~
When I left Rome in July I had completed the first script which was based on a reading of the paintings rather than the biographies of Baglione or Mancini. The tale was a good one but the characters I had invented were dead on the page. I felt that a great deal more work had to be done. In any case, the sudden funding of The Tempest was to defer the project for another two years.
~
Brideshead Recidivists
March 1981: I’ve started on the third Caravaggio script spurred by a meeting with Melvyn Bragg who was interested in the project for LWT. Nicholas thinks it should remain a feature and Melvyn agrees. It might be possible for LWT to make a film of us working when the project is financed. Looking back over the first scripts the narrative seems strong enough but the dialogue is dry and rather pretentious. The tale of Lena and Ranuccio, the prostitute and her pimp, both destroyed by their relationship with Caravaggio, the artist, is excellent and makes very exciting reading. But I dislike the brown varnish which seems to cover it. There is nothing more excruciating than English Historical Drama, the stuff that is so successful in America and is usually introduced by Alistair Cooke as Masterpiece Theatre; in which British stage actors are given free reign to display their artificial style in period settings (Brideshead). At all costs this film must avoid that. There are so few examples of films where ‘period’ is treated with imagination. The Swedish My Sister, My Love is one. In this rewrite I’m going to filter in my own life. My Italian childhood in Villa Quessa would make a perfect start, a few miles down the road from Caravaggio.
~
May 1946. Lago Maggiore – ‘Dolce Fa Niente’
Four years old: the sound of swallows, itys itys itys. I lie awake in a grand old mahogany bed, staring at the high ceiling of my bedroom, which glows pearl-white in the early morning sunlight. Itys itys itys. In the yard Davide, the handsome one, who rows across the lake and throws me high in the air and takes me hunting on the handlebars of his bike is whistling ‘Dolce Fa Niente’. A swallow sweeps in through the window along a random sunbeam like a dark meteorite through galaxies of glowing dust clouds. Itys itys itys. For a second it becomes a crucifix, flattening itself against the wall, then falls away and out through a foaming tide of lace curtains. The hours pass. The clock in the yard chimes in six, then seven, then eight. Then Cecilia ‘Zia di questo bel uomo’ bustles in with a long bamboo feather duster swearing incoherently at the swallows, the mess they’ve made building their nests. She lies in wait like an evil cat then shoo shoo shoo her feather duster waves through the air like a palm tree in a tornado. The swallows are gone, the spell is broken.
~
New Year 1971. Venice
Karl. More beautiful than Botticelli’s angels. Jet-black curls, grey-blue eyes, and a Texan slouch, he sits with me at the base of one of the columns in the candlelit interior of Saint Mark’s. Listening to the hidden choir singing in the New Year with Handel’s ‘Messiah’. Outside it is raining. To our left at a side altar a little priest bobs up and down like a sleek tourist-fed pigeon. Suddenly he comes over. ‘Cattolico? Protestante?’ Taken aback, I say ‘Pagano!’ not knowing if this is Italian, but the message goes home. He darts back to the altar, crosses himself and prays for us.
Don Giovanni is the priest of San Servolo, the madhouse of Venice: an island surrounded by a prison wall, with large barred lunettes which open on the lagoon. After a lunch which is served by his maid, a lady who resembles Punch with dark frizzy hair, he asks me in French (the language in which we must communicate) if we would like to take a bath. As we both decline he is satisfied only when we agree to take a siesta in his bed, while he goes below to take a service. The singing of nuns drifts up. Karl is furious with me as we’re both stuck here for the afternoon, till the boat returns. Later, Don Giovanni creeps in on tiptoe, hoping to find us entwined in one another’s arms.
The madmen, he said, tend the garden between the asylum walls. They shuffle about under the huge funereal cypresses in their grey prison-like garb. We have to dodge them as he thinks the presence of strangers will upset them; ‘Last year one of the madmen picked every last rose on the island and trundled them in a wheelbarrow into the church while I was saying mass. He tipped them up right here in front of the altar as I was elevating the host.’ Don Giovanni is scandalised; for him this is true madness.
~
May 1982. Rome
We are here to look at costume-houses as there is a possibility Caravaggio might take off in the autumn. Yolanda Sonnabend, the designer of The Tempest, sits in her bedroom at the hotel surrounded by pills. She swallows so many it’s no wonder she doesn’t feel well. Everyone gives advice, homeopathic, macro-neurotic, antibiotic. Yolly listens to it all and dispatches Nicholas for more unlikely potions. This afternoon the jumble on her bedside table was so chaotic she took a swig from a bottle of black Indian ink!
~
Nec Spec Nec Metu
Tom Priestley, who edited Jubilee and will be working on Caravaggio is providing a sounding-board for the fourth rewrite of the script. In the third version I introduced myself as a protagonist and onlooker, which although it has brought the piece to life has left a certain confusion. Now I’m writing myself out; and using a deathbed sequence which allows the film to progress as a series of flashbacks, cutting through the tedium of a straight A to B narrative. This is similar to Prospero’s sleep in The Tempest. After three years, the voices of the main characters and their relationships are much clearer. I find I know them now and can see them through the work in a much freer manner. Caravaggio, when he is sober, sees himself as Saint Francis, his lovers as Saint John the Baptist, Lena as Mary Magdalene or the Blessed Virgin. In the middle of this motley array Caravaggio’s patron, the Cardinal Del Monte, is a mephistophelian figure with whom Caravaggio makes a pact when he receives his confiscated dagger, with its motto ‘no hope, no fear’, in return for a painting.
The one major loss in the new script is at the final moment when I stretch hands across the centuries with Mayakovsky’s wonderful final poem – ‘Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind now you and I are quits’ – but perhaps that is now implicit in the script and doesn’t need to be realised as a tangible image.
There are two areas which need attention. Caravaggio’s deep religious conviction, which is so difficult to portray in a contemporary film, and the problem of time. At present the confusion between ‘now’ and ‘then’ has to be resolved. The script must avoid the baroque. Michele is the most austere classical painter of the Renaissance.
~
Pah-Lah-Reh Ee-Tah-Lee-Ah-Noh
July 1982. London: Each morning, I walk over to the language school where I’m doing an intensive course in Italian, one-to-one across a table, no English at all. At tea-time, back to Phoenix House where Julian has organised tea with a different actor or actress each day. Since I have no television, hardly ever go to the theatre, and I’ve asked Julian not to tell me who my guests are – he introduces them as Nigel, Bob, Julie – I am usually unaware, at least for a while, who they are. This worked well until Julie Covington, surprised I hadn’t recognised her, rang Julian to say she was taken aback by the meeting. The blind approach does have its drawbacks. Jules and I altered our tactics.
~
Winter 1947. Rome
The winter was bitterly cold; it snowed in Rome. No fuel except for cooking. Admiral Ciano’s flat, with its marble floors, was icy. The living-room, with its huge copy of Titian’s ‘Sacred and Profane Love’, was unused. The only warm spot was the kitchen where Lena the Italian maid sat me beside her and spoke non-stop. In this way I picked up my first few words of Italian. When I was not in the kitchen, which had the added attraction of Nada Ziganovitch singing rousing Yugoslav partisan songs, I played in the Admiral’s box-room: a treasure trove. There were two circular ostrich-feather fans with handles, sown with hummingbirds, a tinsel Christmas tree, and letters to the Admiral from Mussolini scattered across the floor. The flat in the Via Paisiello still exists, and I wonder who lives there now.
Then Rome was empty, closed to everyone except the military. There were very few cars, everyone travelled on bicycles. Limbless soldiers and maimed children begged in the streets and lived in the ruins on the Via Appia, a quiet little lane that wound into the countryside. At every turning there were priests like flocks of crows, scurrying busily about their work. My father called them Grubbies. When the Pope extended his hand for Dad to kiss it, Dad shook it firmly. We would tell this story and then show us the rosary he was given.
By the time we returned to England I was speaking Italian; but at a party my parents asked me to perform and I was so embarrassed I forgot it on the spot. I have never been able to pick up languages since that day.
~
September 1981
Caravaggio is shelved again. Winter is setting in and we need the light; although the film could be made in January, we would then have to rewrite Caravaggio’s childhood, which takes place in sunlight.
~
September 1982
The violence of Caravaggio’s paintings is echoed in the work of his contemporaries and followers which are on show at the Royal Academy’s exhibition of Neapolitan painting. ‘Judith and Holofernes’ and ‘The Beheading of John the Baptist’ occur over and over again. The blood-soaked canvas by Artemisia Gentileschi has Judith revelling in the decapitation: a picture of such sexist violence you have the impression the blood should be dripping on the floor. Although not on show, Caravaggio’s work on the same subject and also his ‘Sacrifice of Isaac’ portray a similar violence. He was obsessively interested in knives and swords. They occur all over his canvases and also in the police records which document his life in Rome. To carry arms legally one had to be a gentiluomo, which he became when he was dubbed a knight of Malta in 1606; but by then the habit of violence had led to Ranuccio’s murder. ‘The Beheading of Saint John’, in which he’d signed himself in blood spilled on the floor, was painted in Malta, and hangs in the cathedral in Valetta: ‘I, Caravaggio did this.’
~
Before he fled from Rome he had painted Ranuccio Thomasoni as Saint John (the version in the Kansas City Museum) and carried it with him on the run. Saint John and his lover were synonymous; the iconography of the knife as an instrument of execution is unusual.
Now that I’ve embarked on the fifth rewrite of this script I have carefully traced the adventures of the knife. ‘No hope, no fear’ is engraved on its handle, and is given back to the young painter by Cardinal Del Monte in exchange for his art.
His first major commission was the violent Martyrdom of Saint Matthew; before that it was wine and roses. Then the violence escalated until the murder was committed. After 1606, when he was on the run, the paintings became more introspective. The violence of ‘The Beheading of Saint John’ is confessional; in ‘David and Goliath’ he notes his own destruction. In his last, and only recently discovered painting, ‘The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula’, there is resignation in death. The saint looks at the arrow which has pierced her without a trace of horror (we must bear in mind the taste, at this time, for dramatic explosions on canvas – a violent deed evoking a violent response). Less in anguish and more in reverie, Ursula is oblivious to her executioners. The arrow is an object of contemplation.
~
To Caravaggio’s sexuality there are two references. One to the girl Lena, his girl, in the police records, and the second to his involvement with some schoolboys in Sicily which led to his leaving town rather quickly. Neither is in any way conclusive; so the evidence is to be sought in the paintings. This, as all the work was painted from life, is much easier than might be imagined. With so little documentation on such a taboo subject it’s difficult to know how the seventeenth century understood physical homosexuality. How it was viewed obviously depended, as now, on who you were. It was certainly associated with heresy, and was an ingredient of many contemporary witch trials and public burnings – hence the expression ‘faggot’.
In the cities, people must have identified in underground groups; leading to rumours of covens, celebrating ‘wild’ sexual acts. The laws of the Church certainly forbade what it called ‘sodomy’, and Saint Ambrose linked it with usury as a social sin ‘contra naturam’; in Dante’s Purgatory the sodomites occupied the same circle as the usurers. The term ‘homosexual’ which identifies and ostracises a group because of their desires and inclinations, is a nineteenth-century clinical invention, c. 1860.
I suspect that Southern peasant society remained relatively oblivious to the strictures of urban moralists. As late as the latter part of the nineteenth century the Baron von Gloeden’s orgies with the boys of Taormina caused no comment.
The revival of the male nude ensured that the civilisation of the early Renaissance in Italy was dominated by male images, images of homosexual passion, of varying degrees of refinement. The ideological savagery of the seventeenth century marked the loss of this refinement; and the Church eventually managed to assimilate these trends and turn the sinners into saints. Caravaggio’s life illustrates this dramatically.
He identified himself personally with the heathen gods of the Renaissance. For Michelangelo a century earlier, Bacchus was sculpted as an ideal youth, but when Caravaggio raised the wine to his lips as Bacchus it was not as a courtly ideal but as himself. Later, he painted the god with a hangover, ‘The Jaundiced Bacchino Malato’.
Caravaggio breathed his life, himself, into old ideals. Bacchus was the androgyne god and this was a reflection of the painter’s sexuality. At first Caravaggio was probably bisexual, at eighteen or nineteen growing up with the conventions that surrounded him. Later you hack them away, but the strictures of Church and society leave a cancer, a lingering doubt, which leads to dis-ease in this painter, and to the extraordinary force of his work as he attempted to overcome it. He brought the lofty ideals down to earth, and became the most homosexual of painters, in the way that Pasolini is the most homosexual of film-makers. In a hostile environment this extreme of self-analysis became self-destruction. It’s worth noting how many ‘gay’ artists die young: Murnau, Pasolini, Eisenstein, Fassbinder, Marlowe, Orton, and Caravaggio … From the moment he grew up and identified himself with the murderer in ‘Saint Matthew’ – the murderer imaged as god – he unconsciously took on the Church as his true and deadly enemy – after all, its authority, its over-selective reading of its holy texts, had led to the outlawing of the centre of his life.
~
Michele gazes wistfully at the hero slaying the saint. It is a look no one can understand unless he has stood till 5 a.m. in a gay bar hoping to be fucked by that hero. The gaze of the passive homosexual at the object of his desire, he waits to be chosen, he cannot make the choice. Later his head will be cut off by a less godlike version of the young assassin; his name is now David and all the weight of society is behind him and he can cut off the head without a trace of pity.
~
Passion and Cruci-Fiction
At first the painter is unaware. All the boys together chant the latest song, ‘You Know that I Love You’, and share his bacchic orgies. The boys are beautiful, healthy and young; the worst they can do is play at being Medusa and frighten nobody. Then comes the pent-up violence, and the destruction of his looks with the wine, over-indulgence and success. He hasn’t identified the enemy: it’s his landlady, some boys in a restaurant. He bolsters up his insecurity with hostility and he numbs the hurt with wine. He paints his lovers as Saint John, the wild one in the wilderness, who will be destroyed by a capricious woman. When he’s not gazing at these heroes he paints himself as Saint Francis, contemplating death. He paints with a knife: painting is a revenge; on the knife is written, ‘No hope, no fear’. He hacks his way through altar pieces, Isaac and Holofernes, crucifixion, wounds, flagellations. It culminates one morning in the real murder of Ranuccio.
‘For each man kills the thing he loves’; following that, shadows envelop his work; but after the confession of ‘Saint John’ at the end there is complete awareness of self. Even if his head has been cut off, he can contemplate the wound and venerate the arrow in the Saint Ursula. The battle is inevitably lost, but the understanding is gained. He is the most self-conscious of artists, a man who understands the Passion, the most powerful religious painter of the Renaissance.
~
September 1982
I have made a final decision to update the costuming and settings of the film. It has to take place in the present. The paintings will not be seen as an anachronism but in their true perspective. I’m certain they will survive in the hurly burly of the modern world – only by making Caravaggio a contemporary will we see how revolutionary a painter he was. He was the first Italian painter to depict street people on religious canvases. This will be lost if Lena is dressed as a seventeenth-century whore – she will seem a sort of romantic gypsy dancer. Only if she is presented sitting by the side of the Via Appia in a white fur coat can it work. Then, when she’s painted as a virgin, the sheer bravado of Caravaggio will be appreciated. His life is also very ‘contemporary’; he has the self-inflation that has driven many contemporary idols to destruction. His excesses create similar ‘scandals’ to those of Jim Morrison or Janis Joplin. When he is not hurling insults and writing scandalous poems about his contemporaries, he is uncommunicative and surly. But the film will not be a modernisation – the structures of ideology and power will remain emphatically those of Caravaggio’s lifetime: in matters temporal and spiritual the Pope shall be supreme. This should give the spectator quite a jolt. The streets of Rome will be ridden with violence as they were in the beginning of the seventeenth century. Not the Red Brigades, but religious factions. The Spanish against the French parties. Suddenly the Swiss Guard are in combat gear, and the bankers scheme over Vatican contracts and buy Caravaggio’s paintings to hang over the altars of Rome. On them are the publicans and sinners whom Christ preferred to the priests and money-changers. This should allow us to make a genuine exploration of this painter and his impact on the culture. The film will dig and excavate and make no attempt to hold the mirror up to reality. When Caravaggio paints the reflection of Narcissus it is no true reflection but a comment on all vanity and our film should treat his life in a similar way, penetrate the surface.
~
This film should be called ‘The Murderer who Held the Keys of Heaven’. Nicholas has just phoned from Rome and told me he’s away in ten days to meet with Suso d’Amico, who also sent me a letter in a very small hand saying how much she’d enjoyed The Tempest. I’m writing back this afternoon and I’m certain that I’ll be able to construct a fuller script, something nearer the vision of our extraordinary painter. She will also give me enormous help if we encounter any of those producer problems of the kind that warp your vision for a quick buck!
~
At Tony Rayns’ farewell dinner last night Carole Myer, distributor of The Draughtsman’s Contract, asked me why I thought the film had been so successful. I said I’m certain it’s part of the reaction we find around us – unlike the films that Ron Peck, Chris Petit or I make, it has no shadows, in spite of the murder at the end. It has more than enough elements to appeal to British snobbism – aristocrats, a country house, a pretentious, stagey script, and named actors. It’s the upstairs without the downstairs of independent films … On the whole I liked the film; it was over-designed but nicely shot. I didn’t care for the acting but this was compensated by the countryside which has all the swirling clouds and sunlight of a beautiful ‘English’ day. I mentioned that I thought the drawings were atrocious. They certainly were not seventeenth century and were pretty abysmal art-school stuff. Carole said that they were meant to be like that, which left me decidedly undecided about the whole thing …
~
27 January 1983
Nicholas is still stuck in Rome with endless discussions with the lawyers during the day and dull evenings at the Collona Palace. I rang him late this afternoon after a sudden decision to rewrite the film in period or an approximation of period. Quite counter to all my last ideas – it’s a pingpong game I’m playing to keep the project alive. The decision to update was grounded on the old obsession to modernise texts. It was Russell’s idea to update the production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress that I designed for him in Florence, not mine, and when I returned to London and rewrote Caravaggio, flushed with the opera’s success, it naturally spilled over into the new script. A year later, I feel that the modernisation would become the cause célèbre of the film at the expense of content and would destroy its subtler shades. In period perhaps a gentler, less brash effect and greater depth would result.
~
4 February 1983
Nicholas rang from Rome last night and managed to string everything on yet again with his open-minded genius. He swore he’d serve writs on the producers through his lawyer Forsyte Kerman if they thought of producing my script of Bob-up-a-down, which the British Film Institute might finance, which he added was hardly a film script at all, using Suso Cecchi d’Amico’s comment that it was great but only good for sixty minutes. Then he flew into a tantrum about the suburban English film world; and when I said that was all right but I was down to my last suburban £ while the millionaires played with themselves in Italy, he snapped, ‘Why don’t you get a job on the roads? You’re so tiresome, it would do you good.’ Ron Peck sat on the chair laughing at this transcontinental battle. Nicholas pronounced that he’d put the Italian investor Dr Giacomo on the line but it’s a line that at this end seems to curve like a figure of eight into infinity. Christopher and I talk of the problem for the umpteenth time. Screen International announces the film and Carole Myer says she knows of no other British film that has so much pre-publicity, and that perhaps they should all go through this refined torture.
~
A Rock and Roll Swindle
John said, ‘It’s a bit lopsided, isn’t it?’ (he asked me if I’d received any money when the Rock and Roll Swindle and Jubilee played together last Saturday). Alasdair laughed: ‘Oh! Oh! The naïve. You’ve obviously never heard of Publicity’ – only insults, I said. Someone got up and left saying, ‘Middle-class rubbish’ – they couldn’t sing along with it and the Swindle is much more fun. Jubilee’s no ‘fun’ at all. Did you know that the black and white footage of Paul picking his nose in the Swindle is mine, I said. That’s the best bit. I filmed it at Andrew’s one afternoon when no one else had heard of them. Jordan came down to the studio and said the band’s upstairs, come and film us. I had some grainy black and white 4X and dutifully recorded it. During the filming, Christopher came over and yelled, ‘My God they’re certainly going nowhere.’ Paul was stuck at the drums so he couldn’t avoid the evil lens, Johnny turned his back on us. Jordan and Vivienne aggravated the audience. I had to hang on to the camera for dear life. Later I gave the Pistols the footage and forgot about it. Lopsided, said John. Oh I got paid for that. That piece of Super 8 made me more than Sebastiane. The receivers paid my tax bill of £700 in exchange for my signing the release. Not a bad exchange at all. And the other films? NOTHING. I was told I should be happy with the publicity which apparently cost a fortune.
~
Nicholas rang commanding me over to Rome with a peremptory NOW having promised forty-eight hours earlier that I was free to take my time. The film is starting off in the worst possible way. He’s locked both of us into an iron lung, and the dear Doctor’s made certain there’s no oxygen till we’ve won the prize. The film should of course be the film about the film, but those films close even quicker and make less than films about painters. Gaudier-Brzeska lasted two weeks at the height of Ken Russell’s notoriety. Michele Caravaggio has to beat that! By the time this film is made, film itself will be out of date. But anyway, who cares? I’ve seen enough to convince me that film is a very tacky medium. That brushes off on the people who work on it. Even the nice ones are monsters after a few years. Once you believe that there’s nothing to lose, that they’ve lost it for you before you’ve started, you’re OK.
The weather is awful here. Freezing. There’s six feet of snow in Rome, said James. Everyone laughs, I hate it there. The hotel is a complete prison.
~
Mog Johnson, who was taping an interview, said this morning that both Michael Ginsborg and Keith Milow, two painter-friends from the sixties, had been suspicious of my painting – that if it wasn’t working I gave up the struggle and tore it up. They thought that unless you showed yourself thrashing all around all over the canvas looking for the right note, you weren’t working. For me then the line of least resistance was the line of wisdom. Maybe life has come full circle and I’d agree with them now. Life’s more fun when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.
~
10 January 1983
5.30: the phone rings and I wake with a start and by 8.30 I’m on the plane to Rome. Nicholas looks fitter and has lost weight. At 4 p.m. I catch the bus to Via Paisello to meet Suso Cecchi D’Amico, who was Visconti’s and Rosellini’s collaborator and scriptwriter, who lives just across the road from the flat we had in 1947 when my father was posted here after the war. On the bus I remember that it is almost four years to the day since we started filming The Tempest. Suso meets me at the door wrapped up against the cold. She calls herself a ‘pollo freddo’. We sit in a large living-room. She looks at me quizzically, her face a thousand smiling wrinkles, and speaks rapidly in Italian with a deep bass. You’ve written a script without characters. Caravaggio has to be more forceful, the script more violent and should concentrate on the murder of Rannuccio. I’m tongue-tied. I can’t bring myself to defend what has been written so long ago. I’m certain she must think I’m quite spineless. She asks me which part of the script means anything to me. Nothing, I hear myself say. I don’t need to keep anything. The problem is that I’ve written a self-portrait filtered through the Caravaggio story, which is of course not in any way Caravaggio’s life. Perhaps all that should be saved is a certain perception about the content of the paintings, particularly the ‘Martyrdom’, the ‘Profane Love’, and the ‘Goliath’, which provide a key to Michele’s character. At one moment I want to save it, enrich it; at another, destroy the whole thing and start again. I’m so bored with it all. I’ve made this film several times already in my mind.
By the end of the afternoon conversation switches to English – this helps: my ears are attuned to taxi-drivers, not exquisite Tuscan. On the way out my pen falls from my pocket and hits the pavement, smashing the nib. I’m very upset. Maybe this is some awful premonition. Suso is by turns interested and gloomy about the project. I found it very difficult to counter her pessimism. I’m certain I did the best thing by sharing it. At the end we talked briefly about Visconti. I said he looked sad in his pictures, had sad eyes. Not at all, he was very violent, she replied.
~
Artists Steal the World in Order to Re-Present It as Art
One of the chief topics of conversation with Suso yesterday was the idea of art as a form of theft, artists being involved in the theft of the everyday creativity which the entire world should share. Theft in the story of Apollo’s lyre – and also murder …
~
April 1964. Rome
Ron and I spent the morning hunting through the market at Porta Portese and I bought two candlesticks in gilded wood. These I had to carry with me for the rest of the day (which we spent sightseeing) much to the amusement of passers-by. In one church we entered there was a side altar which was ablaze with huge candles in candlesticks which were like mine. Ron said, you need a candle – you keep a look-out and I’ll take one of them – and before I could stop him he’s shinned up the altar and bagged a candle, stuffing it up his jacket sleeve as quick as lightning. We were off and out of the church in a trice. We had gone only about 100 yards when a police car screamed to a halt and a couple of plain-clothes men jumped out and grabbed me, seizing my candlesticks. Both of us were bundled into the car and taken back to the church. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the candle protruding from Ron’s jacket – so to distract attention I waved my arms about and protested loudly my innocence. All eyes were on me. In the sacristy the priests who were waiting for us looked at my candlesticks and apologised for their mistake. They had never missed the candle. I could tell they still felt that something was amiss, so as they apologised I backed out covering Ron as much as possible and when we were on the street again we walked rapidly away. Hitch-hiking back to London the candlesticks got us many a lift and for years after the candle burnt in them.
~
11 February 1983. Rome
The morning started with two thunderclaps and peels of bells, after the sound of heavy rain which was slowly drowned by the noise of the traffic horns. I get up much later and open the window, Nicholas rolls over with a snort. It’s about 11 a.m. – so much for bright and early. It’s raining, I said. It’s been raining like this every day for the last month. Thank God we didn’t start the film at this time. No one suggested it, said Nicholas. Dear Nicholas, this film has been started every month for the last two years. Perhaps we should declare a new calendar like Robespierre, and rearrange it to suit ourselves.
~
I arrived a little early for my meeting with Suso so I walked along the Via Paisello to see if I remembered anything from my childhood. The building has to be No. 47, a thirties’ building with large balconies. Across the road was a mimosa tree in full bloom, a cloud of yellow set off against an ochre palazzo.
We drove to Cinecittà and watched a film made for RAI on the life of the Saint Filippo Neri – which as it is in our period exhibits all the problems we will face. There were a thousand DON’Ts and hardly any DOs. I have seen only a handful of historical films that have worked and all these have reinvented period. This film made no attempt to do that. So, a few points:
1. Design the film so you don’t need a set dresser. Props and furniture look disastrous enough but nothing is more awful than the artfully dressed street. The hay waggon standing in a vacuum, or the business one knows can’t run. The baker’s built into the corner of a church or blacksmith’s with a calor gas fire.
2. I noticed bananas in one of those still lives of fruit which are used in nearly every historical film to denote plenty and fill up a blank space. This was particularly disastrous in a film which made a great point about the introduction of a turkey from Brazil.
3. Extras pose their own problems. This film was littered with undirected people going about their daily business absent-mindedly. They would stand still for minutes at a time and then suddenly spring into life.
4. Costumes are also a great problem. Because they never look as if they are worn. The costumes of the poor always look phoney. In this film they were designed like a uniform of rags which was in a style that bore no resemblance to the late sixteenth century. Very often the poorest clothing is made from the most expensive modern rough weaves, lurex is particularly disastrous and rich costumes turn up in hideous modern colours.
5. All the ragged children were in perfect health and their eyes sparkled – nowhere was that dull glare of starvation to be found.
On the way back we talked of The Tempest, how the exterior scenes just don’t have the strength of the interiors. This was partly because time and weather did not permit, but Suso had a point. Caravaggio shared this problem with me. We’re both nocturnal back-room boys. He avoided landscape as well.
~
17 February 1983
My script meetings with Suso begin at about 4 and last until about 7 p.m. She sits up straight on a high-backed chair and complains about her eyes, putting on her spectacles with slow deliberation, then we begin. She dissects my Caravaggio script and deftly turns it on its head: ‘Derek, you like Marino?’
‘Not particularly, it’s confusing to have two artists in a film.’
‘He go.’
‘Derek, you chose “Saint Matthew”, why?’ It’s the key to Caravaggio’s character and one of my favourite pictures. ‘Nobody understands thees picture’ – ‘Entombment, thees is right, we begin. We end him.’ The maid brings in the tea and Suso pours a saucer for her large white hunting dog. ‘Thees dog is jealous, he love me.’ The dog laps up his tea and then, pushing his snout between Suso’s legs, tries to fuck her. She pays no attention to him as he pants and puffs. She cuddles him without the slightest embarrassment. ‘He theenk he is a man.’ We carry on. ‘We build a house very strong. After we furnish. Then the film will be small masterpiece.’ Every now and then she digresses. She tells me of the uneasy relationship between Visconti and Zeffirelli and the disastrous Zeffirelli Othello with Gielgud. ‘The moment he appear he try to leave. He put his hands on set of Franco and the black come off all over it. Lucino he smile like thees,’ and she puts her hands to her high cheek bones, pushing her face into a wicked Florentine grin. After four days the script is transformed from the shambling poetical original with its private connections to a triangular love affair, Roman in its complexity. Into this is woven nearly all the best imagery of the old script, bridged by the ‘Entombment’ which now starts and ends the film.
~
Summer 1971. Porto Ercole
(The Beach on Which Caravaggio Died)
The beach at Porto Ercole stretches in a wide arc towards the distant mainland which disappears in the shimmering heat haze. I walked at the sea’s edge, skirting the foam on the drowsy July waves, and after fifteen minutes or so, started to leave the tourists behind. Half an hour and a good two miles further the beach was deserted – the only object a rowing-boat at the water’s edge in the distance. I decided to make it the full stop of my walk. When I drew closer I saw a young man lying in its shadow and as I passed his eyes met mine and sleepily followed me up to the dunes at the top of the beach, where I sat down and gazed into the sun, aware all the time that I was under observation. Far in the distance the family was unwrapping its picnic lunch, no doubt wondering where on earth I’d gone. I decided to leave them at it, and out of the sun-narrowed slits of my eyes watched my fisherboy. After a few minutes of this cat-and-mouse game, he got up and without averting his eyes for a second, walked up the beach and sat down with cool deliberation on the dunes a few yards from me. I smiled. My smile was returned. I got up and walked over to him. He looked up at me, suddenly shy. I sat down next to him and said, ‘Hello.’ He spoke no English and I, with my few words of Italian, attempted a formal introduction which I knew was useless. Then I put my hand very slowly through his dark hair. He smiled again and without touching me stretched out on the sand and slipped his bathing-trunks off with one movement. After we had made love, we lay together under the sun for an hour, our salty bodies burning in the sand. Then I kissed him and said goodbye for ever and walked slowly back through the frisbees and Ambre Solaire, castles and buckets and spades to find the family. They had almost finished lunch.
‘Wherever have you been, Derek?’
‘I went for a long walk, almost to the mainland and lost you in the crowds on the way back.’
~
Later that day – Terme di Saturnia: We were sitting in the beach bar this evening when Tony Fry suddenly suggested a trip to the hot springs at Saturnia on the mainland; so, slightly drunk, we piled into two cars and took off into the hills. After an hour’s drive we arrived at midnight at the springs which cascade down a wooded hillside past a massive stone-built millhouse at the water’s edge, with the old millstones scattered around like loose change. In the cold night air, in the moonlit valley, steam drifted off the warm water – giving the place a most romantic air, a landscape from Claude, ‘The Enchanted Castle’, and ourselves, a group of revellers from another age. In the darkness the damp ground was icy underfoot but the springs were the temperature of a hot bath, cascading over smooth worn rocks. I stood under a waterfall bracing myself against the rockface to stop myself being swept away. The water roared in my ears washing the centuries away, till one was back in the golden age, naked under the huge summer moon. The swirling waters swept away all the cares of the world while the dark wrapped a soft blanket round me. The sulphur dried on my skin which glittered like precious rock and set hard in my hair. Later, back home in Porto Ercole, I slipped into a delicious sleep. The waters of Saturnia washed through my life and carried it in whirlpools and eddies into a sea of still dreams.
~
Monday 7 March 1983
I woke up and felt a gauze separated me from life. The whole day washed grey, flapping listlessly. Caravaggio weighs like lead. Julian arrives. I make tea. I say that I took two looks at Responsibility, the world of ‘grown-ups’, and decided I’d have none of it. The infantilism that so upsets Nicholas – ‘You meet a heavyweight like Suso and collapse.’ Underneath, the ground is no longer firm. We’re on the defensive. Britain is a poisoned little stream. The dark satanic mills fold their sails but who walks in a green and pleasant land? Just the ruined factories and unending dreary housing developments with missiles hanging over them, Damocles style.
GROUND ZERO
My dreams are disturbed by ghastly luminous cathedrals that glow with a slight flickering of coals, the scarlet angels sinking into ash drift and ebb away over the darkening landscape.
~
Completing the C. Script
26 March 1983: I completed the script this afternoon and with a rush of relief took off for Heaven. I had walked around the club a couple of times before I spotted James in his studded leathers and working cap sitting in a corner. As I walked over, a young man in a grey sweater and khaki army trousers smiled. He was stocky with a shock of blond hair – I cuffed him on the shoulder as I passed, chatted with James for a few minutes then walked back and sat down beside him as decisively as possible, and waited for a conversation to develop. I fancy both you and your friend, he said, but since you’re here – we spent some time from our vantage-point on the staging spotting likely lads. One we called Alexander after the emperor – he looked Greek, I suppose – no, the technique he said. He had a very fine neck. What was your name? Mine’s Derek. I told you I was from Finland – it should be quite obvious – Tom. He smiled; made no reply. Tom said he liked necks, they were the link between mind and body. Sight is situated just behind your ears; if you think of that it gives things perspective. He bought me a drink and refused to allow me to buy one in return. ‘What do you do?’
‘Paint.’
‘Oh I hope it’s ceilings.’
‘That as well,’ I said.
‘Artists are prostitutes,’ he said.
For a moment I thought that was a leading reply. I asked what he did – no, he wasn’t a prostitute – Compostion, he said, which left me wondering. Where do you live – Hackney – Charing X. We walked downstairs to meet James and then he suddenly said let’s go. I was in two minds but said OK, yes. I’m not walking – he said – we’ll get a taxi. The first one refused us – ‘Look it’s just round the corner! I’m going East.’ The second one took us with slight disbelief. He pointed out the dossers’ cinema and the cafe across the road – he obviously knew the area. Who was this ‘Tom of Finland’ I was taking home? At home he glanced at the books, declared Thomas Mann was ‘for kids’, pulling out The Holy Sinner. He pulled out The Art of Memory and said he spoke four languages. After some guesses, Spanish and German – I never got the last one – I suggested Greek. He laughed and said Ancient Greek. Then back to The Art of Memory: I was explaining how Yates deduced the seven tiers of the Inferno were based on the ancient memory system, which directly visualised abstract ideas as buildings and statues. And what’s Nijinsky’s Diary like? I made a joint and some tea and we carried on talking.
Caravaggio – well, if it’s a matter of murder where’s the Gesualdo? I found a tape of Moro Lasso and he complained of the women’s voices on the recording. I undressed him and climbed into the freezing bed with my clothes. It’s freezing, said Tom. A blackthorn winter. He was a master of accents; earlier he had asked around for a light in perfect Somerset. He had a firm, well-muscled body with broad shoulders. Trace of a love-bite on his neck. He asked me if I ever got anything together in bed – sometimes. I undressed and held him close, he seemed to sob a little. Surely you brought me back for only one thing. We fucked – no amyl but baby oil’s OK.
Thank God that’s over he said and we laughed. But he carried on talking half to himself, half to me. I slept fitfully and dreamed that I was sold four fake tickets at an Underground station. Eventually travelling into London from the South along an arterial dirt-track on the top of a bus. Red brick houses and Victorian town halls; at one stop I saw the Swedish tenor Gosta Winberg.
We woke early and he said he must be going. I put on Rossini’s An Italian Girl in Algiers; ‘What music do you play first thing in the morning?’ He’d asked the night before. Opera arrests time, a minute becomes an hour. Rossini must have been very confident to allow himself so many repeats. Self-satisfied, he said. Strange to think this music was written twenty years or more after the Revolution, after Europe had gone metric. He was out of date, they all complained; but we’ve lost the ability to repeat. We exchanged phone numbers – is this a formality?
~
28 March 1983
The script for Caravaggio is typed up. Francesca and I celebrated at the dance gala for the Riverside at Sadler’s Wells last night; and this morning I took it to Jill at Scripts. We talked about it for a few minutes; then I breakfasted at Valerie’s. The sun shone all morning and I felt elated as I can get on with other work again. And try to clear my debts, which after a year of no income threaten to swamp me. The struggle with Caravaggio is resolved – all the personal elements still in it, and the work is structured around the paintings, which form a firm armature. But I also have characters and a narrative which is clear and straightforward as well. If this film can be realised, the right actors and locations found, it could be very beautiful and very unusual.
~
1970. Amsterdam
A sailor boy with an earring danced through the crowd on the floor of the DOK, chained to the sea by a loop of gold – a gold tooth in his smile and a blue tattoo on a pale shoulder. At the jeweller’s the next morning, I asked nervously where I could get my ears pierced – sit right there – said the old man and before I could change my mind it was done. He said he’d not pierced a man’s ear since the twenties when many of the Dutch sailors wore gold earrings. At home in Northwood there was a moment of shock – what would the neighbours think? But since I knew that my parents couldn’t care less what the neighbours thought I took this as a ploy.
On the top of Vesuvius the man who cooked the eggs in the volcanic stream stared up and called his mates – Zingaro? Zingaro?
~
April 1983
I’ve always preferred the painters of the North to those of the Italian Renaissance. The latter has an artificiality – is an exotic graft on stronger roots – quattrocento saints look like fashion plates from L’Uomo Vogue; everyone seems in an indecent hurry to strip off his clothes and swagger around self-confidently in the neoplatonic sauna.
Now it’s over, and our millennialist century has revived the crusaders and flagellants – embalmed its saints – and turned its back on the Enlightenment and overthrown reason. We are closer to Bruegel than Titian; the former’s brooding, stormy skies and studies of work and play should have been the seed corn of social realism.
For two years now the Caravaggio project has held me a prisoner. I’ve played the willing host as it has slowly sapped all will to action. For the last few months I’ve known I must shake it off as it’s proving spiritually and economically debilitating. In the last year it has swamped the present with the past and has led me inexorably backwards to painting and designing. Last week I completed the rewrite which has taken the project as far as I’m capable – if this is not funded then the film will never go forward.
~