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30 Apr 1999

96 pages

Published/distributed by BFI Publishing

ISBN/EAN: 9780851707242

Paperback

Price: £9.99

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Caravaggio: BFI Film Classics

Bersani, Leo; Dutoit, Ulysse

Caravaggio (1986) is probably the closest Derek Jarman came to a mainstream film. And yet the film is a uniquely complex and lucid treatment of Jarman's major concerns: violence, history, homosexuality, and the relation between film and painting. However, according to Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio is unlike Jarman's other work in avoiding a lover-boy sentimentalising of gay relationships and in making no neat distinction between the exercise and the suffering of violence.

Film-making involves a coercive power which, for Bersani and Dutoit, Jarman may, without admitting it to himself, have found deeply seductive. But in Caravaggio this power is renounced, and the result is Jarman's most profound, unsettling and astonishing reflection on sexuality and identity.

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