Category: Echoes of Dissent

Programme composed for 25fps festival, Zagreb 23 – 27/09/2025

It’s not a little ironic that I ended up naming this program after a song by The Smiths. We used to loathe Morrisey. I mean, some of us even wore t-shirts defiantly brandishing the print “Morissey is a Twat”. Though that didn’t stop us from quietly mumbling along with Schneider™ & Kpt. Michigan’s understated elegant version of “There is a Light that Never Goes Out”. Or secretly admiring Johnny Marr’s swirling guitar sound on “How Soon Is Now?” But Moz? No, too lofty for our taste. Too pompous for our post-punk, post-rock, post-everything sensibility. Too much faff and bore and chaff and chore and ego. We preferred our music frail and resilient, gritty and unsettling. We sought out the “noise, warmth and unassuming grace” (the title of an obscure single of one of our darling bands at the time). We aligned with the freaks and geeks, the outsiders and dilettantes, the bedroom tapers and studio alchemists.
It was not a big leap then to discover the world of what is commonly known as “experimental” cinema. When one of my housemates – who later became my colleague at Courtisane – introduced me to the work of Bruce Conner and Frans Zwartjes and Abigail Child and many others, two worlds merged into one.
It’s not that sound and cinema were ever separate entities in my mind. I remember repeatedly listening with my grandmother to one of her favorite records, the soundtrack to Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in The West, starting an Ennio Morricone infatuation which continues to this day. I remember walking to my 24h video store after my night shifts to compulsively look for films by Jean-Luc Godard and Satiyavit Ray, and realizing that they are both tremendous sound artists in their own right. I remember discovering Toru Takemitsu’s soundtrack for Woman in the Dunes, or Alan Splet’s for Eraserhead, or Mario Nascimbene’s for The Night of Counting the Years, or Eduard Artemiev’s for Solaris, and not believing my ears: sound works so ahead of the curve that their force was only recognised decades later, if at all. Pretty soon it became clear to me that some of the greatest sonic explorers of the 20th century did some of their most innovative work for cinema or television: Vladimir Ussachevsky, Bernard Parmegiani, Ornette Coleman, Terry Riley, Klaus Schulze, Haruomi Hosono, Delia Derbyshire… Too many names to list.
The world of “experimental” cinema upped the ante. For some artists (Tony Conrad, Michael Snow, Trinh T. Minh-ha) a clear separation between experimentation in sound and cinema was just non-existent. Others found their match in creative friendships (Toshio Matsumoto & Toshi Ichiyanagi, Stephen Dwoskin & Ron Geesin, Sally Potter & Lindsay Cooper, Peter Forgaćs & Tibor Szemzö, John Akomfrah & Trevor Mathison) or romantic partnerships (Patrick & Michèle Bokanowski, Henning & Ursula Reuter Christiansen, Maya Deren & Teijo Ito, Carolee Schneemann & James Tenney). Some have made groundbreaking work by way of collage (Arthur Lipsett, Betzy Bromberg) or optical sound (Guy Sherwin, Paul Sharits). Others found a singular approach to sound tinkering and layering (Will Hindle, Jane Arden) that far surpassed established codes and practices, even for today’s ears.
I feel there is a multiplicity of histories here that still need to be told. This program only gives a modest taste of some of the adventurous sonic approaches that can be found in the experimental terrain of cinema. Its composition is not unlike that of a mixtape, in that it is based on an intuitive, handpicked selection of films whose soundtracks excite me for one reason or another. I know some of these films only through their sound, so I am thrilled to discover them with you in all their audio-visual glory.
All of these soundtracks have featured in Shadows of the Unseen, a series of mixes I have based on sound and music made for film or stage. This series was started during Covid and now has its own life on the online stegi.radio platform. In the meantime, I have also set up Echoes of Dissent: a project (at KASK School of Arts) that aims to counter the hegemony of the eye and the subsequent disregard for the ear by considering the relationship between cinema and politics from the perspective of sound. After many years of reluctantly having had to approach cinema and sound as two different worlds, it seems I have finally come full circle. Morrisey, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have circled much at all: more than ever, he’s still a twat.

Gunvor Nelson, My Name Is Oona (1969, 10’. Sound by Steve Reich & Patrick Gleeson)

My Name Is Oona is based on optically printed footage of Gunvor Nelson’s daughter, Oona. Inspiration for the film’s soundtrack came when Nelson attended a Steve Reich performance in which he taped and processed comments and utterances by people who arrived at the gallery. A few years earlier, Reich had already taken part in the making of several films by her husband, Robert Nelson, for which he experimented with the same principles that would become central to his pioneering minimalist phase-pieces: “It’s Gonna Rain” (1965) and “Come Out” (1966). For this film, he worked with recordings of Oona saying her name and repeating the names of the days of the week, looping and phase-shifting the phrases into a mesmerizing multi-rhythmic structure. Throughout the film, the reverberating polyphony intensifies before gently disappearing to give way to the lullaby sung by the loving voice of a mother humming to her child. Gunvor invited Patrick Gleeson – who later made a great score for Bruce Conner’s Crossroads (1976), amongst others – to create the final audio track, which she used to edit the image track. The result is a complex meditation on childhood, memory and identity, in which the interplay of sound and image generates something truly unique.

Werner Nekes, Hynningen (1973, 20’. Sound by Anthony Moore)

You might know Anthony Moore as member of the avant-pop ensemble Slapp Happy, or even from his minimal classics, Pieces from the Cloudland Ballroom (1971) or Secrets of the Blue Bag (1972). These records were produced by the legendary cultural insurgent Uwe Nettelbeck, who was once described as “the Godard of Krautrock”. Moore met Nettelbeck during his stay in Hamburg, where he also developed a long-lasting relationship with the filmmaker-couple Werner Nekes and Dore O. While Moore made soundtracks for other filmmakers, notably for David Larcher’s Mare’s Tail (1969) and Klaus Wyborny’s Chimney Piece (1969-71), his works for Nekes and Dore O stand out the most. On these soundtracks, he further developed the experiments with tape recorders and permutatory compositions that can be heard on his first albums. For Hynningen, which is the fifth instalment of Nekes’s film anthology Diwan, Moore layered shimmering, weeping drones of sine tones and processed acoustic elements, which aligned with his growing interest in Folkways recordings and minimalist music. The beguiling audio assemblage complements Nekes’s extraordinary multiple exposure composition, suggesting the complexity and depth of an enchanting dream state.

Akiko Limura, Mon Petit Album (1973, 10’. Sound by Jacques Bekaert)

One of my all-time favorite Belgian records must be Jacques Bekaert’s self-titled album, originally released in 1981 by the Igloo label. Featuring luminary musicians such as Maggi Payne, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Georges Lewis, David Rosenboom and David Behrman, the record consists of three delicate configurations of acoustic instrumentations and field recordings, two of which were created for film works by Akiko Limura. I could have easily chosen films by her life partner, Takahiko Limura, a filmmaker who worked with some of the greats of the Japanese sonic avant-garde, such as Yasunao Tone, Takehisa Kosugi or Yoko Ono. But I feel that the work of both Akiko and Bekaert has been historically undervalued and that their collaborative efforts need to be heard – and seen. I haven’t seen it yet myself, so I’m really looking forward to it! A rare review of Mon Petit Album describes it as a “layering of experimental imagery over a natural setting, folding sprawling, overlapped film footage of a pastoral scene under an original soundtrack by Jacques Bekaert combining flute and violin phrasings atop subtly processed sounds. Iimura herself drifts in and out of the frame, making direct eye contact with the camera while embedded in the landscape—a powerful act asserting autonomy over her own image as a woman.”

Rei Hayama, Kodomo Ga Mushi No Shigai Wo Umeni Iku / A Child Goes Burying Dead Insects (2009, 11’)

Another film I haven’t seen before. I discovered its soundtrack when it was released on the wonderful Belgian label Ultra Eczema. According to the label’s promo blurb, “the soundtrack is driven by a beautiful Japanese folk loop, blown over by a HNAS type of sound collage, primitive in its set up, and sliced open by Rei’s own angel type of vocals, like a creepy lullaby.” I couldn’t describe it better myself! The film, structured around a repeated sequence of a young girl burying dead insects in a forest, concerns death, rituals, and lamenting loss. Hayama notes that the burying of dead insects was just one of the ceremonies she developed as a child, which functioned for her to find a sense of order in a chaotic world. In the film, however, we see this ritual repeated over and over. he Single-8 film stock is degraded through exposure and manipulation time and again until the deterioration of the image drains all colour from the screen. As the film progresses, the cycle becomes more abstract and illegible. The cycles of life and death, of nature and rituals are found in the materiality of the film itself, suggestive of a blurred line between animals and humans, man and technology. It was previously shown at 25FPS, but it’s in dire need of a comeback!

Frans Zwartjes, Achter je Muren / Behind Your Walls (1970, 12’)

Praised as “the great magician” or on one occasion even as “the most important experimental filmmaker of his time” (Susan Sontag), Frans Zwartjes produced, directed and edited his own films; but more importantly, he created and improvised the soundtracks too. When my former housemate showed me Zwartjes’ Living (1971) many decades ago, I was immediately entranced by the combination of the visual bravura of a fantastically mobile camera, swooping and swirling with extraordinary elegance, and the sonic delicacy of an electronic organ generating drifting and oscillating chordal tones. The soundtrack, it turned out, was the result of an improvisation by Zwartjes himself along with Michael Waisvisz (a great pioneering inventor of experimental electronic musical instruments). The soundtrack of Behind Your Walls was made in collaboration with his brother Rudolf and features a collage-like assembly of processed sound textures and bruised melodic figures, adding a hypnotic layer to a hallucinatory kammerspiel of feminine estrangement and isolation. In 2013, a few years before he sadly passed away, Stanley Schtinter located Zwartjes and uncovered a rich archive of unheard music. To release a selection of this collection, Schtinter founded purge.xxx, which is surely today’s best soundtrack label. Let’s hope we get to hear more of Zwartjes sonic treasure trove!

Jeff Keen, Marvo Movie (1967, 5’. Sound by Jeff Keen, Annea Lockwood, Bob Cobbing)

“Noise Art” is a posthumous collection of Jeff Keen’s sound work, comprising cassette recordings created during the 1980s for his expanded cinema shows. That phrase fits Keen’s films very well. Their strobe-like barrage of imagery impacts the eye like visual noise, while the soundtracks feel like aural blatz-poems, combustible palimpsests of voice and noise, hiss and fizz. The late Mark Fisher once enthusiastically wrote that one of his films, Rayday Film (1968–70), “is soundtracked by an exhilarating roar of abstract noise that possesses a pleasure-in-pain jouissance worthy of Merzbow. A collage of manipulated voice, chopped and chomped so that it’s devoid of any sense, it resembles a dada chant, or Damo Suzuki being tortured, or a swarming buzz of malign spirits being routed by an exorcist.” Keen’s breakthrough film Marvo Movie is no less of a cineblitz. A rapid-fire montage of sequences of Keen and friends dressed in a variety of costumes and masks are superimposed over cuttings from newspapers and comics and various moving toys. The wildly incantatory soundtrack was recorded in a quick afternoon (just in time for a screening in Liverpool) by Keen, sound artist Annea Lockwood and concrete poet Bob Cobbing. Upon seeing Marvo Movie, filmmaker Ken Russell was famously quoted as saying, “It went right over my head and seemed a little threatening, but I’m all for it.”

Derek Jarman, Pirate Tape (1982, 10’. Sound by Psychic TV)

Derek Jarman is surely the artist-filmmaker who was the closest to the subterranean cultural movement that David Keenan has coined “England’s Hidden Reverse,” involving avant-garde, industrial, and experimental music scenes that emerged from the 1970s onwards. In 1980, Jarman invited Throbbing Gristle to provide a soundtrack for In the Shadow of The Sun. The collaboration started long-lasting relationships with members of TG, Psychic TV and Coil. In 1982, Jarman filmed William S. Burroughs during his first visit to London, where he made a cameo appearance for Jürgen Muschalek’s film Decoder (featuring Genesis P-Orridge) and attended the legendary Final Academy events, curated by Psychic TV. Jarman’s film shows Burroughs on Tottenham Court Road signing autographs with fans and inside a shop buying alcohol. The soundtrack by Psychic TV is a magical-industrial dreamscape of broken transmissions, arcane whispers, and psychic residue, featuring a sample of Burroughs repeating “boys, school showers and swimming pools full of ’em'”. Additional footage shot by Jarman during Burroughs’ visit is reported to have been confiscated by Scotland Yard in 1991 and remains lost. Jarman and Psychic TV would continue to collaborate (“magic bound us together,” Jarman wrote), with Jarman directing the music video for Catalan and starring as the spokesperson in the Psychic TV video A Spokesman for the Temple of Psychick Youth.

Stan Brakhage, I… Dreaming (1988, 7’, Sound by Joel Haertling)

Stan Brakhage was always intensely dissatisfied with the conventional uses of sound and music in cinema. He studied with John Cage and Edgard Varèse, searching for a new relationship between image and sound and with the idea of, thus, “creating a new dimension for the soundtrack.” However, the more informed he became of the aesthetics of sound, the less he began to feel any need for an audio accompaniment to the visuals he was making. Instead, he developed a concept of music as the “sound equivalent of the mind’s moving.” Out of nearly 400 films made between 1952 and 2003, I… Dreaming is one of around only 30 which have a soundtrack. The rest are silent. It is set to a sound piece by Joel Haertling, member of the experimental music collective Architect’s Office (also featuring Rick Corrigan, another Brakhage collaborator). The piece is a melancholic collage based on recurring fragments of songs by Stephen Forster, referring to loss of love in the popular “torch song” mode. The film, described by Brakhage as “my self-in-crisis portrait”, envisions a re-awakening of such senses of love as children know best, as it posits – along a line of words scratched in the film – the maddening experience of waiting and longing.

In the context of Courtisane Festival 2025 (Gent, 2 – 6 April 2025), with the support of KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts.

“So I scrabble in the rubbish, an archaeologist who stumbles across a buried film. An archaeologist who projects his private world along a beam of light into the arena, till all goes dark at the end of the performance, and we go home. Home is where one should be, as Dorothy said, clicking her ruby slippers, there’s no place like it. Now, I’m not going to duck it, ART is the key. Those who don’t know it simply don’t live, they exist. It, of course — is an approach to existence, an inner approach to the outer world; it’s not just words and music, but gardens, sweeping, the washing-up; it needs no money this archaeology of soul, tho’ the powers grab it and run it through the projector to blind you. An artist is engaged in a dig. Deep down, depth, ‘the way up is the way down, …’ ” (Derek Jarman)

Derek Jarman loved to use archaeology as a metaphor in his work: in his painting, in his written memoirs, and in his cinema, which he recurrently characterised as an “archaeology of soul”. An apt metaphor for the work of an artist who always strived to dig down deep into England’s Hidden Reverse, tirelessly and unflinchingly searching to reassemble the fragments of a world he saw falling apart, including his own private world. Shortly after being diagnosed HIV positive, he bought a little plot of land in Dungeness — amidst a seemingly inhospitable landscape known as “the desert of England”. There, Jarman continued to excavate industrial and political leftovers, scavenging and cultivating the bleak wasteland to create a scenography of forgotten riches and new blossoms. It’s hard to avoid considering his garden at Prospect Cottage as the ultimate repository of Jarman’s life and work. Like his cinema, the garden was wild yet meticulously tended, English and alien, refined and subversive, avoiding walls or fences. A celebration of growth and existence, beauty and resilience, it also stands as a memorial to silence and disappearance.

The approach to many of Jarman’s film works is similar to the layering of the palimpsest — conjuring up former and new forms on a palimpsestuous surface where they meet and contest one another. This is particularly the case for the inventive layering of his films’ soundtracks, the result of a process that he once called “the archaeology of sound”. Variably playful and quotational, violent and mournful, electronic and classical, the soundtracks heightened the time travel effect of his films, shuttling backwards and forwards through history, while animating the image tracks with a kind of sympathetic resonance or momentary dreaming between the two. As Dan Barrow has noted: “Just as individual shots, characters and narrative fragments in Jarman’s films ping, semi-maddeningly, out of their provisional contexts, forcing the viewer to reconceive the film’s shape at every step, so the music often seems to disappear into its own game of reverie and seduction before momentarily touching the carnal vicissitudes of the image.”

From the punk aesthetics of his second feature Jubilee (1978) to collaborations with musicians and bands as Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Brian Eno or Coil, the work of Jarman was instrumental in bridging the magical gap between the UK’s experimental music underground and the avant-garde film and art world. But Jarman’s most enduring and fruitful sonic collaboration was undoubtedly with Simon Fisher Turner. Their friendship started when Turner worked as a driver during the production of The Tempest (1979), after which Jarman invited him to compose soundtracks for a string of Super 8 films and the feature Caravaggio (1986). Their working partnership continued into the 1990s, culminating in Jarman’s final, devastating and liberating film, Blue (1993). Inspired by Robert Bresson’s note on sound from his Notes on the Cinematograph: “the noises must become music,” Turner’s work blends field recordings — which he prefers to call “life recordings” — with classical and modern elements, incorporating a variety of instrumentations, textures and colours into rich sonic frescos that, like the work of Derek Jarman, resolutely defy containment and categorisation. A palimpsestic poetics accommodating the multiplicity of the present, embracing the spectres of the past as well as the promises of the future.

With this programme of screenings, conversations and performances, we would like to pay homage to the work of Derek Jarman and Simon Fisher Turner.

In the context of the research project Echoes of Dissent (KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts Gent). In collaboration with Film Fest Ghent.

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SCREENING 1
3 April, 2025 – 14:00
ARCA

The Last of England
Derek Jarman, UK, DE, 1987, digital, colour, 92′

“The film is an attic; I’ve opened the doors. Think of the mead hall in Beowulf, with the swallow flying through… Think of that mead hall full of the junk of our history, of memory and so on; there’s a hurricane blowing outside, I opened the doors and the hurricane blows through; everything is blown around, it’s a cleansing, the whole film is a cleansing. I need a very firm anchor in that hurricane, the anchor is my inheritance, not my family inheritance, but a cultural one, which locates the film IN HOME.” (Derek Jarman)

Named after Ford Madox Brown’s iconic painting, Jarman’s bleakest vision is a violent howl against both the loss of traditional English culture and the Thatcher government’s creation of totalitarian anti-LGBTQI+ legislation. Jarman’s layered small-gauge images of a world in ruin are tied together by his own poetic narration, Christopher Hobbs’ audacious production design, Sandy Powell’s indelible costumes and Simon Fisher Turner’s hypnotic soundtrack of blended score (with contributions by Diamanda Galas, Mayo Thompson, Barry Adamson a.o.) and sound design, pre-empting their final collaboration on 1993’s Blue.

In the presence of Simon Fisher Turner
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SCREENING 2
3 April, 2025 – 19:30
Sphinx Cinema – zaal 3

The Garden
Derek Jarman, UK, DE, 1990, digital, colour, 88′

“The film is structured like a dream allegory, in a poetic tradition, rather like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The film is a dream allegory of the author, in this case, myself. I could have put somebody else into it, but really dreams are always in the first person, though people often invent proxies. I go to sleep and go on a mental journey. Sleep can take lots of side turnings and in turnings a lot of things can happen.” (Derek Jarman)

In many ways a companion piece to The Last of England, Jarman’s first feature of the 1990s is a highly personal, almost dialogue-free “dream allegory” reflecting on the hostility and violence faced by gay, queer and trans people in the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic. Drawing together a collage of scenes filmed at Jarman’s cottage in Dungeness, numerous references to classical and popular culture, and a bold retelling of the Passion of the Christ featuring a gay couple in the lead role, it is one of Jarman’s most startling meditations on mortality, loss and queer politics.

In the presence of Simon Fisher Turner
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SCREENING 3
6 April, 2025 – 12:00
ARCA

Blue
Derek Jarman, UK, 1993, digital, colour, 79′

“Blue walks into the labyrinth. Absolute silence is demanded of all its visitors, so their presence does not disturb the poets who are directing the excavations. Digging can only proceed on the calmest of days as rain and wind destroy the finds. The archaeology of sound has only just been perfected and the systematic cataloguing of words has until recently been undertaken in a haphazard way. Blue watched as a word or phrase materialised in scintillating sparks, a poetry of fire which cast everything into darkness with the brightness of its reflections.” (Derek Jarman)

Dedicated to his partner Keith Collins (aka “H.B.”) “and all true lovers”, Jarman’s last feature stands as one of the great final films and as a singularly poetic and affecting account of living and dying with AIDS. Famously, in acknowledgment of, and in meditation upon, his failing eyesight, the image consists wholly, unflinchingly, of a hue as close to Yves Klein’s patented “International Klein Blue” as could be captured on film. John Quentin, Nigel Terry, Tilda Swinton and Jarman himself read excerpts from the director’s hospital diaries and recite his poetry, atop an immersive soundtrack created by Simon Fisher Turner and several of Jarman’s other musical collaborators.

In the presence of Simon Fisher Turner
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SCREENING 4
4 April, 2025 – 13:15
KASKcinema

Sloane Square: A Room of One’s Own
Derek Jarman, UK, 1976, digital, colour, 9′

Records life in Anthony Harwood’s Sloane Square apartment where Derek Jarman lived during the period that he made Sebastiane. Long sequences in stop frame pixilation animate the interior. The middle part is a “removal party” held when Derek was finally evicted.

Garden of Luxor
Derek Jarman, UK, 1972, digital, 9′

An imaginary Arabian garden made out of old postcards of Alexandria, Egypt, is adorned with costumed figures and filmed through discarded footage from an old swords-and-sandals epic.

A Journey to Avebury
Derek Jarman, UK, digital, colour, 10′

A long car journey to the great Neolithic stone circle and its surroundings at Avebury in Wiltshire, filmed through a yellow filter which creates a map of a landscape saturated in gold: a path, fields, trees, sheep, cows, and the stones.

My Very Beautiful Movie
Derek Jarman, UK, 1974, digital, b&w, 7′

Fire Island in New York is filmed and reimagined through a glass prism held in front of the camera: waves, the beach, plants, jutting wooden posts, and a man holding a starfish.

Being Blue
Luke Fowler, UK, 2024, digital, colour, 18′

Being Blue was made on a residency at Prospect Cottage, the former home of Derek Jarman. Fowler sought to consider both the landscape of Dungeness and Jarman’s life and work during his time there. The film touches impressionistically on themes of sexuality, art making and nature, and features newly discovered recordings of Jarman, as well as music from Simon Fisher Turner and Bruce Gilbert.

In the presence of Simon Fisher Turner, Luke Fowler

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PERFORMANCE: Alessandra Novaga / Simon Fisher Turner with Sebastian Sharples

5 April, 2025 – 19:30
MINARD

Classically trained at the Musik-Akademie in Basel, Switzerland, over the last decade, Alessandra Novaga has emerged as one of the leading figures within northern Italy’s thriving new, experimental music scene, rendering striking solo efforts, in addition to collaborations with Loren Connors, Stefano Pilia, Paula Matthusen, and others. Remarkably ambitious and forward thinking, her approach to the guitar embarks upon a relentless deconstruction and rethinking of her instrument’s unique properties through distinct applications of structure, resonance, space, and tone, creating in a deeply personal and emotive music, seeking narrative and meaning within the abstractions of sound. With the LP Fassbinder Wunderkammer (2017), Novaga embarked upon the exploration of her love of film. Having begun with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, this was followed in 2020 by the release of the utterly fantastic I Should Have Been a Gardener (Die Schachtel), a deeply intimate mediation on the life and work of Derek Jarman. At the Courtisane festival, Alessandra Novaga will perform a live reiteration of this sonic homage.

“I spent almost two years immersed in his world, I read everything he wrote, I saw everything he shot, and slowly the idea of translating all this into music sprouted within me. It was a very slow process, many ideas were sacrificed because I felt the need for a clean, stripped, meaningful and above all evocative result. I eliminated all the parts that felt too descriptive. I visited Prospect Cottage, walked around his house and recorded my steps — and I hear those steps, I feel I am there walking; I feel his presence.” (Alessandra Novaga)

From child actor to teenage pop idol, self-confessed “extreme sound freak” to acclaimed solo recording artist, Simon Fisher Turner’s career has been nothing if not varied. After releasing his first solo album in 1969, Turner followed an often eccentric, sometimes outlandish musical path. He operated on the fringes of punk, performed briefly with The The and released two albums as one half of a fictional duo known as Deux Filles. But through all this, Turner was developing a deep and abiding interest in the stuff of sound, accumulating a vast library of collected sounds from daily life. It is this interest which forms the basis of his improvisatory, eclectic approach to music making, manifest on his most recent solo albums (on labels such as Mego Editions, Mute and A Colourful Storm). Turner cites Derek Jarman, for whom he composed the soundtracks for Caravaggio, The Last of England, Edward II, The Garden and Blue, as a continuing influence on his life and work.

Sebastian Sharples is a documentary film maker and photographer. He has worked collaboratively with Juergen Teller and Billy Childish and has made more than thirty films with Tracey Emin including her feature film Top Spot. Sebastian has contributed visual backdrops for Simon’s live performances for over twenty-five years and made the accompanying film for his album Lana Lara Lata (Mute, 2005). For the performance at the festival, Sebastian has created a moving collage of photographic images inspired by Simon’s music.

“Derek’s role in my life was like a teacher without teaching. He’s constantly on my mind. He was wise and curious, instilling in me a sort of bravery. He used to talk about things I’d never heard of: Yves Klein, Caravaggio. I had no idea who these people were. He was capable of so much and made incredible images. He could do a narrative film like Edward II and then do The Last of England (1987) or The Garden (1990), which don’t have a normal structure. And then you have Blue, which is not so much a story, but observations about life and death and love in this frame, this void, of Yves Klein Blue: nothing and everything.” (Simon Fisher Turner)

Simon Fisher Turner performs an extra solo concert following the screening of The Garden on Thursday April 3, 22h00 at ARCA.

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CONVERSATION with Simon Fisher Turner & Luke Fowler

4 April, 2025 – 14:30
KASKcinema

Simon Fisher Turner is renowned for his film soundtrack work which started in collaboration with Derek Jarman, for whom he scored many feature films—from Caravaggio (1986), through to Jarman’s final work Blue (1993). Filmmaker and musician Luke Fowler is a long-time admirer of the work of Derek Jarman. In his new film work Being Blue he sought to consider Jarman’s life and work during his time at Prospect Cottage, Dungeness. In this conversation we will talk about Jarman’s films and filmmaking process, with a particular focus on the remarkable use of sound and music.

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