Originally published: Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1994.

Rowland Wymer gives detailed, original critical readings of Derek Jarman's eleven feature-length films, and argues that he occupies a major and influential place in European and world cinema.

Part autobiography and part social history: the acclaimed director’s filmmaking process revealed through his private sketchbooks Legendary filmmaker Derek Jarman recorded his life and work in highly detailed sketchbooks. Encompassing both the private and the professional, these offer a personal view into the life and career of a highly influential filmmaker and artist. Drawn from the collection of handmade books that Jarman gave to the British Film Institute shortly before his death in 1994, Derek Jarman’s Sketchbooks showcases the most insightful and beautiful pages. Each of the original volumes is composed of drawings, photographs, and cuttings; pressed flowers are set beside scrawled ideas, and carefully penned poems accompany typed and edited working scripts. These once-private books are an intimate pictorial record of the detailed planning and research and the creative and emotional engagement behind every scene in Jarman’s films.

Of all Italian painters, Caravaggio (c. 1565-1609) speaks most intensely to the modern world. His early works suggest a fascination with his own youth and sexuality and the trancience of love and beauty his later religious art speaks of violence, passion, solitude and death. Ugly, almost brutal-looking, Caravaggio was constantly embroiled in fights and entangled with the law; the prototype anti-social artist, he moved between the worlds of powerful patrons and the street life of boys and prostitutes. Helen Langdon uncovers his progress from childhood in plague-ridden Milan to wild success in Rome, and eventual exile and persecution in the South, and sets his work against the political, intellectual and spiritual movements of the day. Fully illustrated, her dramatic portrait shows Carravigio's life to be as sensational and enigmatic as his powerful and enduring art.