The Last of England (film)

Infobox Film
name = The Last of England


image_size =
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director = Derek Jarman
producer = James Mackay & Don Boyd
writer = Derek Jarman
narrator = Nigel Terry
starring = Tilda Swinton
Nigel Terry
Jonathan Phillips
Spencer Leigh
Spring - Mark Adley
music = Simon Fisher Turner
Andy Gill
Marianne Faithfull
Mayo Thompson
Diamanda Galás
Barry Adamson
cinematography = Derek Jarman, Christopher Hughes, Richard Heslop, Cerith Wyn Evans
editing = Derek Jarman, Peter Cartwright, Angus Cook
distributor =
released = 1987
runtime = 87 min.
country = flagcountry|United Kingdom
language = English
budget = GBP£276,000
gross =
preceded_by =
followed_by =
website =
amg_id = 1:28414
imdb_id = 0093393

"The Last of England" is a (1987) British film directed by Derek Jarman.

It is a poetic, rather than realistic, depiction of what Jarman felt was the loss of traditional English culture in the 1980s. It is named after a painting by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Madox Brown.

Jarman wrote a book to accompany the film, which deals more explicitly with the relationship he had with his father, who was a Lancaster bomber pilot in the Second World War. Jarman used the impact of his father's despair, depression and violence on his own artistic vision. The depression that his father suffered is attributed to the high number of fatalities that bomber crews experienced and the atrocities of carpet-bombing civilians. The film is also a means to explore his vision of the dissolution of traditional (pre-war) English life. (See his earlier film "Jubilee" to contextualize it with the 1977 punk movement of the time).

The book and to a lesser extent the film are very much in the tradition of Roland Barthes "Camera Lucida", Susan Sontag's "On Photography", Jeanette Winterson's 'Art Objects' and to a lesser extent John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" in that he has used the deeply familiar and personal as a vehicle for dialogue about art and contemporary culture.

Derek Jarman received the 1988 Teddy Award in Berlin for the film.

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