Marshalling an astonishing parade of images--brutal, exquisite, erotic, and painterly by turns--avant-garde director Derek Jarman supplies visual counterpoint to Benjamin Britten's masterwork, the 1961 oratorio
War Requiem. Jarman's hallucinatory vision of war draws on the life and verse
of WWI poet Wilfred Owen, who was killed on a French battlefield two weeks before the Armistice. Owen's preoccupations--e.g., the Christ-like martyrdom of soldiers, the interplay of sexuality and death, the pity and horror evoked by the mutilation of young bodies--mesh perfectly with those of the
director. An anti-war film of surpassing power, WAR REQUIEM can also be read as...
Released:
1989
Rated:
NR
Length:
93 mins