Vague Visages’ Derek Jarman essay contains spoilers. This article covers A Journey to Avebury (1971), Studio Bankside (1971), Sloane Square: A Room of One’s Own (1976) and The Garden (1990). Check out more VV film essays at the home page.

Filmmaker Derek Jarman wrote, in his 1987 book Kicking the Pricks, that “in all home movies is a longing for paradise.” With this phrase, the British artist reframes paradise not as an idealized or nostalgic past, but rather as something fleeting and precarious. It resides in moments of attention that can only emerge through the spontaneous form of the home movie: a family preparing for a photo, light moving across an interior, a remembered voice, children celebrating a birthday, a mother quietly knitting by a window. Home movies not only preserve memory — they register the present as something already under threat, anticipating its loss even as they attempt to hold onto it.

Jarman’s understanding of the home movie was initially shaped by those made by his father and maternal grandfather. Fragments of this inherited footage — a plane flying over an airbase, a family picnic, children playing among flowerbeds — later appear in The Last of England (1987), while other films such as The Garden (1990) and Glitterbug (1994) incorporate material from Jarman’s own extensive Super 8 archive. The saturation and familial warmth of this footage puncture his otherwise monochromatic, apocalyptic vision of 1980s Britain with moments of respite. In these films, paradise is not presented as stable or recoverable; it flickers within ruins. The insertion of this amateur filmmaking becomes an act of reclamation, a reminder of tenderness and intimacy amid social and political collapse.

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When Jarman himself was gifted a Super 8 camera — a medium that would come to define his early short films and inflect much of his later work — he discovered a form suited to his own alchemical idiosyncrasy. For Jarman, the home movie was not defined solely by format or technology, but by its position outside institutional and commercial frameworks. It signified a mode of filmmaking rooted in intimacy, immediacy and subjective experience. These were images made without professional mediation or aesthetic polish, often marked by technical imperfection. Jarman was, after all, “cine-illiterate,” as he liked to claim. Overexposure, camera instability, images flickering in and out of focus and abrupt editing became stylistic signatures, akin to a painterly brush stroke. These home movie-like qualities were not seen as flaws but as signs of proximity.

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While Jarman’s early short films frequently experimented with colored gels, erratic in-camera editing and the deliberate use of costume as a performative device, they were often shot in real wastelands that surrounded his studio home at Butler’s Wharf and frequently featured the real people that punctuated his life with an artistic vibrancy. Even when filmed elsewhere, these works still gravitated toward sites of personal significance — the craggy cliffs near Durdle Door, the Avebury stone circle or a New York beach — locations loaded with private meaning. These are not grand landscapes rendered sublime through cinematic mastery; rather, they are places encountered through a lived experience and a personal contact. Crucially, they were navigable and familiar, affording Jarman both the practical ease to film and the freedom to pursue more daring images. Despite the sense of magic he brought to the form, the productions remain grounded in the aesthetics and affective charge of the home movie, where the everyday and the domestic become frameworks for resisting dominant, coherent narrative structures.

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This dynamic is especially visible in one of Jarman’s earliest films, A Journey to Avebury (1971), where a personal connection to place meets an immediate directorial style analogous to amateur home filmmaking. Long fascinated by Avebury as a painter, Jarman approaches the site not as a documentarian but as a lone wanderer. The film unfolds as a solitary pilgrimage, where the acts of looking, walking and filming collapse into a single gesture. The accidental use of a golden hue may heighten the landscape’s otherworldliness, yet the camera’s unsteady movements keep the film grounded in a bodily presence, even though Jarman is never explicitly seen. More than an act of memorialization, A Journey to Avebury records movement through the landscape itself, registering time and place without narrative propulsion or explanatory structure. Instead, shots of standing stones, surrounding buildings, animals and passing figures accumulate into a loose tapestry of encounters. The film’s structural openness aligns it with the home movie as it unfolds like a day’s excursion, guided less by story than by attention.

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With Jarman physically absent and unheard, his apprehension of the space around him takes a greater precedent, where perception itself becomes one of the film’s central subjects. Though shot far from the director’s London home, A Journey to Avebury retains a curious domesticity in the manner of Jarman’s construction of it. The audience’s understanding of the location becomes mediated through his choices: what to frame, when to cut, in what chronology to order the images. Viewers are subject to the rhythms of his real journey where Jarman’s movements shape the film in much the same way that home movies are shaped by the spontaneous contingencies surrounding the person holding the camera. The brisk editing also evokes the restless scanning of a gaze drawn from detail to detail. The ancient Avebury stones cease to function as stable historical artifacts and instead become elements within a private encounter. Through this, the home movie aesthetic demonstrates its propensity to draw even the most mythic of sites into the scale of lived experience, rendering them intimate and even momentary.

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Avebury would leave a lasting impression on Jarman, resurfacing years later in his garden at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness where upright stones and found objects bound with rope and wire punctuated the stark terrain. In A Journey to Avebury, the logic of the home movie becomes materialized where the shaping of a domestic space itself becomes a form of image-making. Prospect Cottage would also form the backdrop for Jarman’s film The Garden, which happens to incorporate some of the director’s private Super 8 home movie footage, made while he was living with AIDS. Across all these works, Jarman demonstrates that the home movie is not merely a record of domestic life — it is also a structure of desire; an attempt to hold onto the luminous present, even while acknowledging its inevitable disappearance.

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A Journey to Avebury and Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage demonstrate his wish to work with a fervent acridity. This sense of immediacy — an urgency to film what is nearby and at hand — is perhaps even more acutely demonstrated in two films shot in Jarman’s own domestic spaces: Studio Bankside (1971) and Sloane Square: A Room of One’s Own (1976, co-directed with Guy Ford). In these works, the home is not merely a backdrop but the very condition of the image.

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Studio Bankside, Jarman’s first film — shot in his riverside warehouse home near Butler’s Wharf — transforms the studio interior into a site of aesthetic experimentation. Filmed and edited in-camera, as many home movies also are, the movie embraces immediacy; like A Journey to Avebury, its structure arises from the act of looking itself rather than from any premeditated design. The camera lingers on textures like peeling walls, scattered objects, Bob Dylan vinyl records, shafts of light entering through windows, even occasional visitors or Jarman himself. It moves restlessly, rarely settling into any compositional stability. Unlike the inherited home movies of Jarman’s family, this is not an attempt to preserve familial ritual or celebratory moments. Instead, Studio Bankside documents a space in process — somewhere lived in, worked in and continually shifting. The home becomes both the film’s subject and its apparatus, dictating the rhythm via snapshots of the actual space it used to be.

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Whereas A Journey to Avebury traces a single pilgrimage and Jarman’s perception of a landscape, Studio Bankside turns this same attentiveness inwards, illuminating the intimate details of a lived interior. The placement of a desk, images pinned to a wall and the position of a bed all help shape the audience’s perception of the space and, in turn, shed light on Jarman himself through an accumulation of images and their spatial relationships. Each visual is loaded with a greater meaning as viewers become aware the space belongs to the filmmaker. These fleeting glimpses of Jarman’s private life transform the movie into a moving archive of textures and things, folding life and filmmaking into one another. As a first film, Studio Bankside also granted Jarman the means to experiment with his new filming equipment, rendering the home movie as something beyond mere documentation into a mode that enables creative development.

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Sloane Square: A Room of One’s Own is similar to Studio Bankside in that it records a real lived-in space and offers insight into Jarman’s domestic environment. However, where Studio Bankside and A Journey to Avebury rely on handheld camerawork that is shot from the director’s perspective, Sloane Square introduces something new to the form. Primarily shot on a tripod, the film features extended sequences of stop-frame time-lapse, documenting a “removal party” in which friends decorate the walls before Jarman’s eventual eviction from the flat. While time-lapse is not typically associated with home moviemaking, it still is a form that remains outside traditional narrative frameworks, defined by temporal compression rather than linear progression. Here, lived experience is condensed into sped-up sequences, reinforcing the very idea that paradise resides within the transient.

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The longer takes used in Sloane Square also help create a heightened spatial awareness, offering a clearer depiction of where objects are placed and how Jarman may have moved around the room. Home movies often function as informal archives of space and time, and this film extends that logic, as Sloane Square’s panoramic attention suggests an impulse to catalogue the space before its loss. Unlike Jarman’s more performative early works, such as Tarot (1973) and Sulphur (1973) — which were shot around his studio near Butler’s Wharf — the figures in the 1976 short aren’t costumed characters but appear as themselves captured candidly: seen in mirrors, sitting on a sofa, using a telephone. Even amid a career where Jarman experimented with color and performative gestures, Sloane Square demonstrates that the domestic remained a central aspect to his filmmaking as both subject and social space.

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Jarman’s articulation of the home movie aesthetic can be further understood when placed alongside the work of other British contemporaries experimenting with the moving image. Margaret Tait, who described her works as “film poems” (that were often shot around her home in Orkney), similarly locates meaning within the textures of familiar, everyday life. In works such as A Portrait of Ga (1952), Tait constructs a cinematic language attentive to gestures, durations and the quiet rhythms of domesticity as she films her mother walking around her home. Like Jarman, Tait does not monumentalize her subject but instead allows significance to emerge through accumulation and proximity. The camera lingers, observes and returns, producing a sense of intimacy that resists narrative closure. Yet where Tait’s images often sustain a gentle continuity, Jarman’s films remain more fragmentary, shaped by interruption and abrupt juxtaposition. Both filmmakers, though, share an investment in the act of looking as a form of care, where the home movie aesthetic becomes a means of preserving not only people and places but the fleeting conditions of their appearance.

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A contrasting approach to the use of the home movie aesthetic can be found in the early films of Peter Greenaway, such as H Is for House (1973) and Windows (1975), where domestic space is subjected to structures of ordering and classification. Here, the home is still present — seen in interiors, windows, gardens and everyday objects — but it is arranged according to a more deliberate logic. Rather than unfolding through chance encounters or passing moments, these images are organized into lists and repetitions, giving the films a measured, almost methodical rhythm. The sense of spontaneity that runs through Jarman’s work is replaced by something more controlled, where the act of looking feels guided rather than discovered. The domestic space is still there, but it is held at a slight distance, shaped into patterns rather than lived in.

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If these filmmakers help to frame the possibilities of the home movie aesthetic, Jarman’s work can be understood as occupying a position grounded most fully in lived experience. For him, this commitment extends beyond the films themselves. Jarman often hosted gatherings in his studio, projecting the films onto walls or sheets, manipulating frame rates and ultimately experimenting with modes of display that further helped reinforce the movies’ domestic character. As James Mackay notes in Derek Jarman Super 8 (2014), his films “were made to be viewed in a different way [where individuals] were free to move about and chat to their neighbors rather than be a still and seated audience.” Jarman extended the logic of the home movie beyond production into exhibition, keeping his films mutable and deeply tied to a social and spatial context. In extending the home movie across both making and viewing, Jarman reveals its capacity to move beyond the personal without losing its intimacy, demonstrating how the home movie aesthetic can carry a universal and powerful language — one that is always, quietly, longing for paradise.

Edwin Miles (@eaj_miles) is a filmmaker, screenwriter and documentarian from the West Midlands, United Kingdom. Now based in London, Edwin’s experimental work reflects on ideas of family and memory, home and displacement. His favourite filmmakers include Derek Jarman, David Lynch and Kazuhiro Sôda. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages

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