Caravaggio

(Paperback, 2nd edition)

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Caravaggio (1986), Derek Jarman's portrait of the Italian Baroque artist, shows the painter at work with models drawn from Rome's homeless and prostitutes, and his relationship with two very different lovers: Ranuccio, played by Sean Bean, and Lena, played by Tilda Swinton. It is probably the closest Derek Jarman came to a mainstream film. And yet the film is a uniquely complex and lucid treatment of Jarman's major concerns: violence, history, homosexuality, and the relation between film and painting. In particular, according to Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio is unlike Jarman's other work in avoiding a sentimentalising of gay relationships and in making no neat distinction between the exercise and the suffering of violence. Film-making involves a coercive power which, for Bersani and Dutoit, Jarman may, without admitting it to himself, have found deeply seductive. But in Caravaggio this power is renounced, and the result is Jarmans most profound, unsettling and astonishing reflection on sexuality and identity.

Author Bio

Leo Bersani was for some years the Class of 1950 Professor of French, and Ulysse Dutoit is Lecturer in Film, both at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. They are co-authors of The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (1985), Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (1994) and Caravaggios Secrets (1998).