Christopher Hughes
A dramatization, in modern theatrical style, of the life and thought of the Viennese-born, Cambridge-educated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose principal interest was the nature and limits of language. A series of sketches depict the unfolding of his life from boyhood, through the era of the first World War, to his eventual Cambridge professorship and association with Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes. The emphasis in these sketches is on the exposition of the ideas of Wittgenstein, a homosexual, and an intuitive, moody, proud, and perfectionistic thinker generally regarded as a genius.
A film on Saint Teresa that leads us through an unnervingly authentic extreme state of religious and sexual ecstasy. With the central image of the statue of Saint Teresa of Avila in Rome, together with glimpses of colour-saturated flower gardens, the Crucifixion and Baroque plasterwork, we listen to the gulping and frenetically clipped voice of the ‘saint’ pouring out her rapturous lament, attempting to express the unsayable. The film’s soundtrack combines a spoken voice by Nina Danino and performed vocals by New York experimental singer Shelley Hirsch.
Instructional documentary produced in association with the Terrence Higgins Trust.
Ron Peck talks about his experiences of growing up as a gay man, the attitudes to homosexuality in Britain, and his journey towards making his film "Nighthawks" (1978).
Adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer, telling of a warrior's loss of a beloved Lord and his subsequent loneliness as he tracks across countries, exiled from a community.
A nearly wordless visual narrative intercuts two main stories and a couple of minor ones. A woman, perhaps the Madonna, brings forth her baby to a crowd of intrusive paparazzi; she tries to flee them. Two men who are lovers marry and are arrested by the powers that be. The men are mocked and pilloried, tarred, feathered, and beaten. Loose in this contemporary world of electrical-power transmission lines is also Jesus. The elements, particularly fire and water, content with political power, which is intolerant and murderous.
The artist's personal commentary on the decline of his country in a language closer to poetry than prose. A dark meditation on London under Thatcher.
Three song clips by The Smiths ('The Queen is Dead', 'There is a Light that Never Goes Out' and 'Panic'), all directed with an artistic and conceptual vision by the late Derek Jarman. The result is the junction of the powerful lyrics and melodies by Morrissey and Marr combined with Jarman's expressive images.
The Angelic Conversation is a lyrical, haunting film about a young man’s search for love, in a dreamlike landscape. Offscreen, Dame Judi Dench recites a sequence of Shakespeare sonnets, that counterpoint the action. Jarman called it, “My most austere work, but also the closest to my heart.”
