Derek Jarman

'For days now I have tried to start this diary, but the clatter of my existence has warned me off; the first mark on the page eludes me...' Derek Jarman's Smiling in Slow Motion concludes the journey started in Modern Nature, these previously unpublished journals stretch from May 1991 until a fortnight before his death in February 1994. Part diary, part observation, part memoir...

England's brashest independent filmmaker (Edward II, Wittgenstein), Jarman, who died of AIDS last February, draws on personal anecdote, literature and the work of Wittgenstein, Leonardo, Pliny and Kandinsky in this sketchy and highly idiosyncratic series of meditations on color. Focusing chapters on individual colors or on qualities like iridescence, Jarman moves freely from one passage, be i...