Standing stones, urban hellscapes and male nudes: Derek Jarman’s glorious Super 8 short films

The easy freedom of this medium allowed the artist to range over subjects as diverse as tarot, male nudes at Fire Island and a friend’s flat – and offer clues to his more public feature films

Thirty years after his death in February 1994, it is perhaps unexpected that Derek Jarman – multi-faceted artist, activist, film-maker, socialiser – is probably now most widely known as a gardener. The patch of beautifully arranged salt-resistant vegetation he built around a windswept clapboard cottage in Dungeness, in the shadow of the now non-functioning nuclear power station, is the subject of books, exhibitions, and many a magazine picture spread. A number of high-profile keepers of the flame regularly bang the drum – Tilda Swinton, Isaac Julien and Neil Bartlett among them – ensuring the Jarman legend is not likely to slip away any time soon.

The latest move in this perpetuation process takes place with a programme of Jarman’s Super 8 short films at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts – appropriately enough, as the radical-chic venue on the Mall was one of Jarman’s own regular screening locations. If you are unfamiliar with these, it’s worth acquainting yourself with them on the cinema screen; the scrubby approximations on various corners of the internet don’t really do them justice. It’s hard now to understand just how important a film-maker Jarman was in the UK in the 1980s and the early 90s, at a time when there was so little else around that was British-made, and the 70-odd short films he made are foundational to his more accessible feature-film oeuvre.