On the morning that followed Margaret Thatcher’s death, The Guardian published a front-page article in which Hugo Young whittled Thatcher’s political legacy down into two words: ‘materialistic individualism’. It was an ideology that had undeniably defined the sociopolitical climate of the past decade, in which the National Front had procured a newfound vocalness and children of the Windrush generation began to navigate their youth in an increasingly racist and xenophobic capital. This very individualism seeps into the 1980 classic, Babylon, from a Thatcherist reality into Rosso’s diegesis and momentarily dissolving the distinction between feature film and documentary. 

Originally conceived as a BBC Play for Today (a project aiming to birth fresh, contemporary political dramas) and loosely based on Dennis Bovell’s wrongful imprisonment in the sixties, the film follows its protagonist, Blue (played by Aswad’s Brinsley Forde), running an underground sound system in Brixton. Rosso’s portrait of the Black experience is raw and uncompromising: white, xenophobic rage hangs thick in the air and police officers are entirely indistinguishable from National Front members until they flash their badges. Bovell himself curates a musical score so impassioned it attracted hundreds of young Black locals from the neighbouring boroughs of Lewisham, Peckham and Brixton, clamouring to be extras in the soundclash scenes that feature the esteemed Jamaican dub artist Jah Shaka. Tapping into the political potential behind cinematic authenticity, Rosso’s neorealist approach was as effortless as it was imperative. 

Yet Bovell’s soundtrack of Lovers Rock lends more than just a sense of legitimacy. The depiction of soundsystem culture in Babylon is nothing short of magical: visually embodying the spirit of rebellion that courses through the film, a soft, neon glow cast on bobbing heads is often all we can discern on screen, as if D.O.P Chris Menges has left a thermal camera in the middle of the dance. Shots are often protracted, drawing out moments of pain - a method particularly powerful in the film’s heartbreaking final scene of Blue’s ‘Warrior Charge’ performance before his impending arrest. And despite tension gradually building from a series of interrupted outbursts by Beefy throughout, Babylon is a film that sees no real retribution. Frustration boils and never bubbles - in the words of Brinsley Forde himself, “the subtle anger of a young black man pushed against a wall well as opposed to the early days when I thought the anger needed more meat [is] far more in tuned with the ways today’s society can recognize compared to those who couldn’t comprehend it in 1980.”

Of course, Babylon is not all misery. Amidst the grief, Rosso gifts us with moments of profound intimacy - often without dialogue. Black joy in Babylon is as underground as Black anger - and yet this is its beauty. The unspoken nature of intimacy in the film (and particularly in its male friendships) is, in part, what makes it so exceptional. With English Judge Leslie Scarman famously requesting to watch the film in order to ‘better understand the Black experience in Britain’, it’s undeniable that what Rosso created out of only a brief, BBC-graced time slot was something much more propulsive than originally envisioned. A small, powerful capsule to commemorate an equally vibrant and troubled point in British culture, Babylon is a tender insight into the struggle of Britain’s disaffected Black population, and the history of a materialistic (and by extension, Nationalist) individualism that still lingers today. 

THE GARDEN

Piecing together an alternative history of humankind, Derek Jarman’s 1990 film The Garden is less a narrative piece than a collection of fragments, evading conventions of storytelling like linearity, structure, and sequence. The film, shot on the grounds of Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, begins with a voice-over narration read by character actor Michael Gough. As brilliant lights flicker across the screen, Gough’s voice – at once elegant and austere – foregrounds the film’s theme: “I want to share this emptiness with you, not fill the silence with false notes or put tracks through the void.” “I want,” he says, “to share this wilderness of failure.”  

The only desert in the UK and home to an imposing nuclear power station, Dungeness’ desolation proved an appropriate setting for Jarman’s doomy later work. He moved to the Kent hamlet in 1986, shortly after he was diagnosed as HIV positive, remaining there until his eventual death from AIDS in 1994, at the age of 52. While both the nuclear power plant and Jarman’s death cast their respective shadows over the film, The Garden (as its name might suggest) is primarily a celebration of life. The film asks us to imagine the merging of queer culture with the greater makeup of history. What might this alternative account look like? And how might it clash with a normative understanding of history? 

The film’s central motif is that of a loving gay male couple whose idealistic existence is interrupted when they are arrested, humiliated, tortured and killed. Amidst their story, Jarman splices idiosyncratic, sometimes hilarious images of religious iconography. In a variety of tableaux, we witness the twelve apostles as twelve middle-aged women in headscarves, Mary Magdalene and Adam as drag queens, the devil as a BDSM leather daddy, and a Madonna (a perfectly cast Tilda Swinton) as a paparazzi-hounded movie star screaming into the void. These scenes, arriving and departing like hallucinations, jam our perception of chronological time and offer moments of resistance to the established temporal order. 

However, the most enduring image from The Garden is that of Jarman himself. In one recurring motif, we spy a naked, sleeping Jarman as he is surrounded by a group of men and women. Circling him ritualistically, they seem to represent an enclosure that would soon swallow the director whole. Still, Jarman invites us to dream with him, and for the duration of the film, we follow the artist down the rabbit hole of his mind, delighting in its many nooks and crannies. Filled with spectral revelations spilling over from time past and present, The Garden is essential viewing for those who have felt or lived out of step with the world around them.