Audio-Visual Biography: The Collaboration of Music and Image in Derek Jarman'sCaravaggio∗

Working beyond mainstream practice, Derek Jarman creates films that are unusually musical. Caravaggio, a biography of the artist, is a case in point. Jarman's collaboration with composer Simon Fischer Turner from the start of the filmmaking process enables music to assume a structural role, a procedure that turns common music-image interaction on its head in two ways. First, rather than strive for the audio-visual fusion common to many mainstream films, music and image are here juxtaposed. Second, as music becomes audible, the film's illusion of realism is destroyed. This article explores how Jarman's challenge to conventional filmmaking procedure can expose the fragility of reception history by comparing visual, literary, and musical versions of Caravaggio's biography.