Derek Jarman wrote a series of autobiographical texts, scripts and journals, in which he again and again revisited his past and continually reinvented the forms of self-writing. The sequence includes
Dancing Ledge(1984),
The Last of England(1987) (republished as
Kicking the Pricks(1996)),
Modern Nature(1991),
At Your Own Risk(1992),
Smiling in Slow Motion(2000),
Blue(1993), and
Chroma(1994).
The series begins with Dancing Ledge (1984), written when money for his film projects had dried up and he felt excluded and vulnerable to the gathering strength of homophobia in Thatcher's Britain. This is a book conceived in anger and isolation, and the self presented in it is that of the avant-garde film maker and defiant celebrant of promiscuous homoerotic sexuality, both his own and that
778 words
Citation: Mepham, John. "Dancing Ledge". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 March 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5764, accessed 21 November 2024.]
