The end of empire: Jarman, Swinton and "pre-industrial filmmaking."

Isaac Julien and Tilda Swinton, at the filmmaker's grave. Julien has curated a retrospective on Jarman. Photo Nina Kellgren.

On August 17, 2002, eight years after Jarman's death, Tilda Swinton, published an epistle to  Jarman entitled Letter to an Angel:

 Derek made filmmakers out of all of us who worked with him. Our work came out of the pre-industrial atmosphere of an art context, not the segregated professionalism of industrial filmmaking. This is the atmosphere I carry with me everywhere, like an amniotic sac.  It is the only way I know to work.

Well, some call her essay a lament for a lost era, yet I love the way she keeps it alive in her mind and the way it influences how she thinks and works today. A thinker, is Swinton.