Rediscovered Gems: War Requiem

The faces of War Requiem: Nathaniel Parker, Sean Bean and the incomparable Tilda Swinton

I'm currently preparing to direct a production of Stephen MacDonald's Not About Heroes, a moving play about the friendship of British poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen during World War I. Doing a play like that at this point in history has become an emotional challenge for me. The play speaks to my own pacifism, my long-standing belief that humanity needs a massive reframing of its views on violence. At the same time, I feel caught in a political landscape that fills me with anger every day. It's easy to seduce yourself with images of Trump, his political enablers and his cultish supporters writhing in agony. There are times his behavior makes me wish hell existed, though I realize that's the same kind of thinking that leads fundamentalists to threaten hellfire and damnation for everything from same-sex love to wearing yoga pants in public.

After a fulfilling day of auditions to find the perfect actors for the two roles, I was in a very vulnerable state when I decided it was time for a reviewing of Derek Jarman's War Requiem, his 1989 tribute to Benjamin Britten's monumental work and Owen, whose too short life inspired Britten's composition. I had watched the film years earlier and found its imagery compelling but a little beyond my frame of reference. I was fairly new to Jarman's work at the time (I think I'd only seen his 1986 Caravaggio) and didn't know much about Owen beyond the fact that he had been killed in World War I. Watching it again years later from a more informed space, I was deeply moved. I now consider the film and Tilda Swinton's performance among the screen's greatest accomplishments.

In his Washington Post review of the film on its 1990 U.S. debut, Joseph McLellan called it "the first music video that must be taken seriously." (Quick note: I only heard of this evaluation in podcaster Alonso Duarde's informative introduction to the picture on Filmstruck—just giving credit where it's due). That evaluation seems a bit reductive both of music videos and Jarman's film. There were some pretty damned good music videos before 1989, including Jarman's own work for Marianne Faithful and The Smiths, not to mention innovative work from other filmmakers for artists like ABC, Devo, Cyndi Lauper and Bonnie Tyler. I would suggest that even lighthearted videos like ABC's "The Look of Love" and Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" are well worth serious consideration. These videos transcend the commercial end of the form, the sale of music.

In addition, McLellan's assessment reduces the film to the level of marketing tool. It seems to suggest that 26 years after Britten's premiere recording of War Requiem, Jarman suddenly felt the need make a promotional video to increase the recording's sales.

Rather, War Requiem is a fascinating confluence of three artists — composer, poet and filmmaker — to create a wholly new work of art. To obtain the rights to the 1963 recording, Jarman had to agree to present it complete and with nothing else on the soundtrack during the performance. That's a blessing to music lovers who may have cringed at what MGM did to the ballet in An American in Paris (1951) or the cuts Woody Allen took in Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" at the start of Manhattan (1979). All Jarman adds are a bell ringing at beginning and end and a recording of Laurence Olivier's reading from Owen's "Strange Meeting" before the music starts. The images he plays against the music, however, carry the film beyond a mere recording of an admittedly fine composition.

Jarman visualizes the music in three ways. Some sequences are played against montages of newsreel footage from World War I, with images from World War II, Korea and Vietnam added for the "Libera Me" (the images of wounded soldiers may be too intense for some). Using Nathaniel Parker, in his film debut, as Owen, Owen Teale as The Unknown Soldier, Swinton as a nurse and Sean Bean as a German soldier, Jarman also creates his own images related to the war, jumping through time and space to show Owen in the trenches with his men, children celebrating Christmas, Owen with his mother and Swinton grieving over his dead body, among many other visuals. Finally, the second half of the "Requiem Aeternam," the "Libera Me" and the "Offertorium" play against short wartime stories, the only clear narratives in the film. The first shows men going through the initial stages of training, with Parker and Teale becoming friends. The second depicts a brief moment of détente between Teale and Bean, enemy combatants, disrupted when Parker fires at Bean. The third plays out the story of Abraham and Isaac as depicted in Owen's "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young," in which the poet changes the ending to have Abraham defy God to sacrifice his son "and half the seed of Europe one by one."

For the actors, this seems like a return to silent cinema. The "Offertorium" is the only section, however, to present the stereotyped image of silent acting as an exercise in scenery chewing. That seems natural, as the segment is an extended allegory, painted in broad strokes.  Even there, Parker, whose Owen takes the Isaac role, maintains his more naturalistic style from the rest of the film. Nigel Terry, who had played the title role in Caravaggio, is the leering, bloodthirsty priest, performing for an audience of lecherous, gluttonous one-percenters. Their gleeful overacting is jarring, but it's meant to be. Positioned as Owen's fantasy as he writes the poem and reads a Bible (that, in a typical surrealistic touch for Jarman, is overgrown with grass), the embroidered acting style is quite logical within the world of the film.

For the rest, the actors perform silently and simply, often matching their movements to the music's rhythms. That hardly stifles them, but rather seems to liberate depths of emotion tied into the music. Swinton, in particular, is a marvel to behold. In the "Requiem Aeternam," she mourns over Owen's dead body with an impressive physical commitment. When she puts her fingers over her eyes, you may be afraid she's about to pluck them out. The "Sanctus" plays over an extended medium close-up of her braiding her hair (Is this a reference to a section of "Strange Meeting" Britten did not use in the Requiem?). As the music swells, she transitions into laughter and then intense grief, gradually moving her arms and hair to the music in an extended dance of the emotions. It's a devastating sequence and one of the most amazing bits of acting I've seen on film.

As the images fly by, it's hard not to notice reflections of other visionary directors — Murnau, Dryer, Kurosawa and Vigo come immediately to mind. But I think a good deal of the film's aesthetic has a more theatrical basis. You may find yourself frustrated that the classical diction of tenor Sir Peter Pears and baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who sing the settings of Owen's poems, can be impenetrable at times. And Olivier's reading of "Strange Meeting" is the kind of plummy overplayed verse that makes my teeth heart. It's more about caressing each consonant than communicating meaning. But that, too ties into the film's artistic goals.

This combination of images, eschewal of an over-arching narrative and devaluing of language, for me, are a reflection of Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty. Inspired by a performance of Balinese dance he saw in 1931, Artaud advocated for a theatre of visual and aural images that bypassed language and logic, which to him seemed to be dominating the French theatre of his era, to affect audiences on a visceral level. This penetration to the viewers' psyche is the cruelty in Theatre of Cruelty (though many have associated it simply with the imagery, mainly because Artaud's primary examples were production plans for pieces that would have dwelt on human savagery).

Ultimately, I think this is what Jarman is doing in War Requiem. As the images build, there's no sense in trying to tie them all together. You simply have to let them wash over you, accepting the bits of narrative he supplies while opening yourself to the effects of the imagery. When he ends the archival footage in the "Libera Me" with shots of mushroom clouds, I found my brain trying to reject the image as trite and overused even as the rest of my body was breaking out in goose flesh. At that point, logical thought simply didn't matter.

The fragments of language that you can make out from Owen's poems add to the overall effect. Artaud valued language only for its aural aspects, though you can make a case for the cultural associations from words and phrases playing a role as well, with the power of those associations heightened by their being divorced from any extended syntax. The opening line of Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth," "What passing bells for those who die as cattle?" comes through clearly in the opening movement as young men race into position for wartime training. "Bugles sang" from "But I Was Looking at the Permanent Stars" counterpoints the suffering of the men in the trenches during the second part of the "Dies Irae."

The fragmented words achieve their greatest power in the final scene, the end of the "Libera Me." There's a visual reconciliation between The Unknown Soldier and the German soldier who had killed him. Teale poses as Christ in a re-creation of Piero Della Francesca's "The Resurrection" as Bean approaches him with a basket of poppies. This plays against a setting for tenor and baritone of Owen's "Strange Meeting," but the only really clear line is "Let us sleep now." It's a lovely moment that balances but hardly eradicates the violent images that have preceded it, the end of a symphony of images and sounds that shows Jarman's filmmaking at its best. And it represents a powerful humanistic message, as Jarman moves his imagery from desolation and violence to reconciliation, from war to its opposite.

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If you want to read more about War Requiem, I heartily recommend Jim Clark's blog entry on it at Jim's Reviews - Jarman's War Requiem. I discovered the page trying to identify the painting of the resurrection Jarman copies at the end of the film and found Clark's insights fascinating. It's also a valuable research tool, as he includes information on Owen and Britten and an annotated text of Britten's piece. He even includes the full versions of poems Britten only excerpted.