Derek Jarman wrote a series of autobiographical texts, scripts and journals, in which he again and again revisited his past and continually reinvented the forms of self-writing. The sequence includes
Dancing Ledge(1984),
The Last of England(1987) (republished as
Kicking the Pricks(1996)),
Modern Nature(1991),
At Your Own Risk(1992),
Smiling in Slow Motion(2000),
Blue(1993), and
Chroma(1994).
“I'm continually reinventing my own past, it is not static,” Jarman writes in these journals. Not only does he reinvent his past he also reinvents himself and the genre of autobiography. The non-chronological “autobiographical collage”, or compilation, that he used in the first two books in the series, gives way in this volume to a more conventional form, that of the journal, as used
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Citation: Mepham, John. "Smiling in Slow Motion". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 March 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2005, accessed 25 November 2024.]
