«This is a love story between two men, which takes place through an oneiric passing from the industrial desolation of the Isle of Grain to Dancing Ledge in the south of England. The passage is interwoven with the sonnets of Shakespeare. Time ticks by without remorse on the sound track, while the film slips by like the seconds on an old watch. There is a distancing from narration, and a focusing on the music.» (Derek Jarman, from publicity materials for the film).

Originally, the film was a Jungian reading of The Wanderer, an Anglo-Saxon poem which is the oldest gay love song known from Great Britain. The symbolism of the images took on new meaning for Jarman during the editing phase. With The Angelic Conversation, Jarman uses, for the first time in a feature film, both magnetic tape and film, making the first of series of hybrids predated by Imagining October. «Video offers you a palette as if you were a painter», Jarman stated. Indeed, it is video which provides the possibility to play with different tonalities of images in order to obtain unusual chromatic solutions, as Antonioni had already shown with Il Mistero di Oberwald (1980). Furthermore, by projecting entire sequences at a speed of 3-4 frames per second, the author gives the filmic images another property typical of painting: suspension in time. In this way, theoretical formulation of his cinema of small gestures is reached, as expressed by Jarman himself: «The single frame calls for extreme attention, voyeuristic concentration. Time seems suspended, the smallest movement appears amplified. This is the reason why I call it the cinema of small gestures.»

Gianmarco del Re