Derek Jarman's passionate fusion of Super 8 material, riot footage and home-movies is jagged and bleak; an angry, powerful, Blake-like vision of England in turmoil.

A shaky hand-held camera evokes anxiety and paranoia, and the ever-present melancholy is expressed in the extracts from poems, including T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men and Allen Ginsberg's Howl, monotonously intoned by narrator Nigel Terry.

Jarman plays with literary influences and prose in a similar way to The Nine Muses, also screening as part of Out of Arcadia on 15 Nov, and charts a civilisational turn away from the natural and pastoral, with the sweeping scenes of industrialisation dominating the landscape.

Combined with a haunting score from Simon Fisher Turner, and a memorable turn from Tilda Swinton in one of her early screen roles, the film presents a dystopian vision of London in the wake of Thatcher, mourns the loss of youth and hope, and rails at a society grown sick and cruel.

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