| Published for the first time, Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping, chimes with many of the obsessions the director carried through his films In Sebastiane, Derek Jarman and Paul Humfress’ 1976 film, the soon-to-be-martyred Roman soldier is warned by his friend Justin to stop fighting against their pagan authorities. “The truth,” Sebastiane responds, “is beautiful”. As they speak, Justin tends to the wounds of the third-century saint in an act of love that has the potential to endanger both of them if they are caught by their tyrannical overseer or their fellow soldiers. This moment of intimacy is luxuriant; where there could be a palpable sense of terror, Jarman and Humfress instead focus on the tenderness between two defiant men. Sebastiane’s “truth” is not just his devotion to Christ in a pagan society, but also his willingness to receive and give affection in the overtly masculine, violent and sexual environment of a military outpost. This is the kind of truth echoed in Jarman’s only known work of narrative fiction: Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping, which was written in 1971 and published for the first time in 2022 by House Sparrow Press. It follows a blind protagonist known as King who is accompanied on a trip across a mythical America by his valet John. On this trip (almost entirely on foot) they encounter pierrot clowns, poets excavating the land in search of old spoken verses and a mystic guide called Begum, who shows them the sights of Movietown. King and John, like Sebastiane and Justin, remain constants to one another in an increasingly unreliable and disrupted landscape. Continue reading... |
No comments:
Post a Comment