September 19, 2024

We’ve got a rare double dose of From Below offerings this week!

For our regular weekly screening we’ll be showing *Derek Jarman’s *The Garden (1990) on Thursday, September 19th at 7pm. You can RSVP here for that one. And for 🎂 Charlie’s 31st birthday 🎂 we will be doing a screening this Sunday, tomorrow, at 7pm, of Johnnie To’s classic extra-bonkers Hong Kong supernatural action flick, The Heroic Trio (1993). You can RSVP here for that one! It stars Michelle Yeoh and Maggie Cheung in an unhinged spectacle about three women teaming up to foil the Evil Master’s plan to kidnap and train 18 babies into the world’s deadliest fighting force.

Doors will be at 6*:50* for both films and we’re starting the movies at 7:10!

“I want to share this emptiness with you. Not fill the silence with false notes or put tracks through the void. I want to share this wilderness of failure.” So begins The Garden (1990), Derek Jarman’s loose, abstract interpretation of the story of Jesus’ life (this time with the Christ figure divided into two men in love) set with a backdrop of the AIDS epidemic in England. Filmed at Derek Jarman’s home in Dungeness, England in the shadow of a nuclear power plant four years after he’d been diagnosed as HIV positive, and four years before his eventual death, The Garden is an excellent and gorgeous showcase of the breadth of Jarman’s style, a masterpiece among masterpieces. He intersperses intimate Super 8 diaristic footage–characteristic of his early short films–with playfully distorted tinted edits of 1980s gay street protest, and with his signature grandiose surreal tableaus. He retains his unique sensibility for colorful juxtapositions between ornate costuming and ruined, sparse sets, emblematic of his perhaps better-known films like *Jubilee (1976), *Caravaggio (1986), and Edward II (1991). A key progenitor of what would later become New Queer Cinema, this is the first but certainly not the last of Derek Jarman’s work we’ll be showing at the From Below.