Derek Jarman, Paul Humfress (1976)
Take 1
Although Sebastian became a Christian saint, his religious belief is presented here as pantheistic – he has an almost physical obsession with spectacular nature. The sunlit, dust-blown compositions, photographed by Peter Middleton, are beautiful, the sex scenes more sensitive than the ‘unashamed eroticism’-type blurb for Sebastiane leads you to expect. In atmospheric terms, the film is a success. You feel the power of the dizzying, irritating heat of the desert, where a group of Roman soldiers is exiled (by Diocletian), and the aimless, isolated tedium that underlies and nurtures the homosexuality on display. Sebastiane is, however, hopeless as drama. The scenes don’t build and become repetitive. The editing is slack. The dialogue is in Latin and some of the English subtitles remind you of stilted, schoolbook translations from the language. There’s a matching woodenness to the line readings. Most of the cast, unable to project much in the way of emotion, mug their way through. Neil Kennedy at least has some excuse for doing so, as a queer-baiter with a vigorous line in lewd braggadocio. As Sebastian, Leonardo Treviglio has a melancholy, quiet nobility. The players also include Richard Warwick, Barney James and Lindsay Kemp, who appears in a prologue that is gorgeously decadent and superfluous to the main story. The film’s title is the hero’s name in the vocative case (Sebastian, O Sebastian …). You can’t help thinking that, in spite of his tireless abstinence, ‘Up Sebastian’ would suit better and sell more tickets.
[1970s]
Take 2
In 1975, Laura Mulvey, in her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, coined the cinematic term ‘male gaze’. At around the same time, Derek Jarman, with Paul Humfress, was making Sebastiane, in which the male directorial gaze is almost exclusively on other men, whose bodies are, more often than not, either nearly or completely naked. Shortly before his death in 1994, Derek Jarman said that:
‘Sebastian [sic] didn’t present homosexuality as a problem and this was what made it different from all the British films that had preceded it. It was also homoerotic. The film was historically important; no feature film had ventured here[1].’
Jarman’s first point is disputable. Homosexuality as such wasn’t a problem in, for example, Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971). The problem in John Schlesinger’s film is that the younger man in the gay relationship is carelessly selfish and dividing his time between a male and a female lover. Otherwise, it’s hard to disagree with Jarman’s retrospective judgment.
Sebastiane is set in AD 303, at the start of the most sustained period of Christian persecution during the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian. Text on the screen at the start explains that numerous Christians have already been executed as punishment for setting fire to temples. The specific date is somewhat misleading since the film-makers don’t feel bound by strict historical accuracy. For example, it’s widely believed that Saint Sebastian actually died much earlier in Diocletian’s lengthy reign (c AD 288). Jarman and Humfress are primarily concerned with dramatising the martyrdom of an enduring icon of both western art and gay mythology.
Diocletian holds a great party to mark the twentieth year of his rule. The occasion, which serves as a prologue to Sebastiane, is dominated by the performance of a group of male dancers, with Lindsay Kemp at its literal centre, encircled by members of his troupe. Kemp wears a G-string, each of the other dancers a huge, multi-coloured phallus. While it doesn’t prefigure Sebastian’s torments and death by arrows (to which the following narrative leads up), the Kemp number is an adumbration of the sadomasochistic reverie and queer cornucopia to come. The mega-phalluses encroach on the central figure. The dance culminates in a mime of anal penetration that causes him agony and ecstasy.
Immediately after the dance is over, Sebastian (Leonardo Treviglio), chief of the palace guard and a favourite of the emperor (Robert Medley), intervenes to defend a Christian accused of arson. The angry Diocletian demotes Sebastian to the rank of private and banishes him to a remote coastal garrison (actually Sardinia). Another of the group of nine soldiers stationed there, as he informs us at the end of the party at which he too is present, is Maximus (Neil Kennedy), a relative veteran in the military. The rest of the film’s action takes place in this distant outpost of the Roman Empire, where the sandy terrain amounts to desert. The hint that Max, as he’s known, will be the narrator of events isn’t followed up and reasonably so. The images speak for themselves.
It would be an oversimplification to describe the garrison life as gay. The soldiers’ roughhousing is often on the cusp between homosocial and homosexual but Max, provocative in more ways than one, scorns effeminacy and repeatedly tells the others he can’t wait to get back to Rome and sex with female prostitutes – in particular, the notorious Mammea Morgana, who was glimpsed at the palace party. The garrison’s senior officer Severus (Barney James) is strongly attracted to Sebastian. The latter’s determined celibacy thwarts and intensifies Severus’s desire. Sebastian’s pacifism, reflected in his refusal to continue military training, compounds Severus’s frustration and results in the protagonist’s abuse, torture and eventual murder. The sweet-natured Justin (Richard Warwick) also loves Sebastian; in this case, the balance between platonic and sexual impulses is more ambiguous. The only straightforward gay coupling is between two other soldiers, Adrian (Ken Hicks) and Anthony (Janusz Romanov), who are hardly characterised beyond their physical relationship. The others in the group – Claudius (Donald Dunham), Julian (Daevid Finbar) and Marius (Stefano Massari) – are minor figures in the story.
Jarman, Humfress and James Whaley (who worked with them on the screenplay and was one of the film’s producers) create a growing tension between the spiritual and quasi-sexual aspects of Sebastian’s faith, and his veneration of the Roman sun god Phoebus Apollo. In an early sequence, the tension is filtered through Severus, who watches, covertly and avidly, as Sebastian washes his body at the start of a new day and his voiceover intones the ecstatic prayer:
‘Hail, God of the golden sun. The heavens and earth are united in gold. Comb your hair in the golden rays of light. In your hands the roses of ecstasy burn. The wheel turns full circle. Cooled by breezes from the four quarters. the swallow has risen in the east. The doors are open. Your body, your naked body, initiated into the mysteries, steps forth. That beauty that made all colours different comes forth into the world. Hail, God of the golden fire. Your beauty holds my heart captive.’
A similar blend of reverence and rapture informs Sebastian’s words when he worships alone and unobserved by others. In a later scene, by order of Severus, he is staked to the ground, in burning heat. In spite of Justin’s attempts to ease his suffering, Sebastian remains focused on his God: ‘I love him. He is beautiful. More beautiful than Adonis. He takes me in his arms and caresses my bleeding body’. When Justin tries to shield him from the powerful sun, Sebastian jerks his head back into it: solar heat and light are at once punishing and intoxicating.
This distressing scene complements an earlier, serene one in which Sebastian and Justin swim out to rocks. They relax there, telling each other what they can hear in a shell that Justin brings up from the sea. Water is an element both spiritually and sexually liberating, as well as physically cleansing. As such, it’s essential to the film’s themes and imagery – in the seashell idyll, in Sebastian’s ablutions, in the love-making of Adrian and Anthony as the soldiers bathe outdoors, in a similarly extended bathhouse sequence. Each of these episodes is visually sophisticated to a quite remarkable degree for a film made on such a tiny budget (around £25,000 at the time). Sebastiane is also extraordinary to listen to – the only feature film I know with dialogue in Latin (James Welch did the translation of the English script) and, since the soldiers do most of the talking, ‘dog Latin’ at that. The harsh, guttural sounds are unexpected to anyone for whom spoken Latin connotes church Latin.
Although the language of the dialogue makes it easier to accept its delivery as somehow unnatural, this isn’t enough to conceal the limitations of some of the cast. At the time, Richard Warwick was the only well-known name among them: he’d had plenty of film work, most notably a leading role in Lindsay Anderson’s If … (1968), and was a familiar face on British television. Other than the lead actor’s, Warwick’s is the only playing in Sebastiane that could be described as nuanced. Even allowing that Jarman and Humfress don’t place a high priority on nuance, some of the acting is as coarse as the Roman soldiers’ humour. (There’s a great deal of profane laughter, much of it effortful.) Neil Kennedy’s ribald energy makes Max relatively entertaining: he and Barney James went on to play supporting roles in Jarman’s next feature, Jubilee (1978), but not much afterwards. (By the way, a few of the outfits and hairdos among Diocletian’s party guests also anticipate Jubilee.) Some of the minor players in Sebastiane still have it as their only credit on IMDB.
This isn’t the case with Leonardo Treviglio who, until a decade or so ago, worked fairly regularly, often on Italian television, though rarely, it seems, in big roles. Perhaps, like Richard Warwick, Treviglio has a built-in advantage in Sebastiane in playing a relatively complex character but he’s certainly the star of the show. He conveys a gentle, submissive quality but there’s a toughness in his features too – it’s an ideal combination for a martyr in the making. Regardless of their acting abilities, most of the cast must have got the job because their bodies were fit for purpose. And regardless of the viewer’s sexual orientation, s/he can hardly fail to admire the physical beauty to which the camera gives rapt attention. Watching these young men at this distance in time is affecting. At least one of them, Richard Warwick, is dead (like Derek Jarman, from AIDS, in the 1990s, in only his early fifties). The surviving performers must now be in or approaching their seventies.
BFI curator William Fowler’s introduction to this screening in NFT2 was rambling and ill-prepared but he was right enough that it seems a wonder Sebastiane received a BBFC certificate back in 1976. Fowler mentioned the film’s successful run at the Gate Cinema in Notting Hill. The breadth of theatrical release is even more remarkable: when I saw Sebastiane in the late seventies, it must have been at the Odeon or the ABC in York. The remnants of the notes I made then are rather shaming in light of this second viewing: their facile sarcasm does the film a serious injustice. But if I overhaul what I wrote at the time, it rather defeats the object of the ‘Take 1-Take 2’ exercise …
29 August 2018
[1] Quoted in Michael O’Pray’s Derek Jarman: Dreams of England (BFI, 1996).
