Mr. Jarman once lamented that heterosexuals had so colonized and despoiled the screen — his actual phrasing was less polite — “that there’s hardly room for us to kiss.” He made it his mission to create that room. His first feature, “Sebastiane” (1976), an ancient Roman idyll that made explicit the gay subtext of the sword-and-sandal epic, was not just candid but also celebratory in depicting homosexual desire. It sparked some condemnation but was among the first films showing an erection to make it past the British censors.  Despite the dandyish elements of Mr. Jarman’s work, he was at heart a punk filmmaker — a connection reinforced by “Jubilee” (1977), which dramatizes punk’s “no future” nihilism with the help of a time-traveling Queen Elizabeth I. Mr. Jarman called himself a “controversialist,” but he was no mere troublemaker. Aesthetics and politics were, for him, inseparable. His signature combination of beauty, wit and anger was a polemical stance.  His filmmaking career coincided with the reign of Margaret Thatcher, an archnemesis and a kind of negative muse. In public and in films like “The Last of England” (1988), he railed against what he saw as the ruinous greed and soullessness of Britain in the ’80s. Thatcher-era policies scaled back government support of the film industry, but inhospitable conditions only seemed to bolster his do-it-yourself resourcefulness and sense of artistic community.  Trained as a painter, Mr. Jarman appreciated the communal aspect of filmmaking. “I think he made films primarily for the company,” Ms. Swinton said. “Working with him was to work alongside him.”  Mr. Jarman’s life fed his art, and vice versa. It was not a surprise that his impending death became central to his work. Fighting the stigma of AIDS just as he fought the stigma of being gay, he spoke openly about his H.I.V.-positive status. The films that followed the diagnosis of his disease, especially “The Last of England” and his anachronistic Christopher Marlowe adaptation, “Edward II” (1991), are notable for their fury and lucidity.  By the time he made “Wittgenstein,” not long before his death, his eyesight was failing — hence the boldly exaggerated color scheme. His final feature, “Blue,” which for 76 minutes pairs an aural collage with a solid screen of deep blue (the shade patented by the painter Yves Klein), seeks both to represent and to transcend his blindness and the abyss of mortality.  Today Mr. Jarman is considered the founding father of what came to be known as the New Queer Cinema, a loose grouping of filmmakers — among them Todd Haynes (“Poison”), Tom Kalin (“Swoon”) and Mr. Julien (“Looking for Langston”) — who emerged in the late ’80s. But as Mr. Julien said in an e-mail message, “Derek paved the way for independent filmmakers, period — not just queer filmmakers.” Of particular relevance, he added, was the way Mr. Jarman “prophetically refused to be tied to a single medium,” insisting on a continuity among his works in film, installation, painting, sculpture, design and poetry.  Mr. Jarman in some ways seems well remembered in his native country. The Film London agency recently established the Jarman Award for young filmmakers. The garden he tended at his cottage on the English coast has become a tourist attraction. But as “Derek” suggests — with scenes of Ms. Swinton wandering around pristine present-day London, as if looking for traces of him — much of what he stood for has vanished. In other words, it is hard to imagine an oppositional artist like Mr. Jarman emerging, let alone thriving, in the current climate.  Mr. Jarman took pride in remaining outside the British film establishment, in never being marketable enough to count as an official export. With that in mind, how does Ms. Swinton think he would have reacted to her recent Oscar win for “Michael Clayton”?  “I think he would have laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed,” she said in her e-mail message. “And then,” she added, referring to her golden statuette, “he would ask me for the thing to melt it down into an artwork.”
Derek Jarman, indie pioneer, iconoclast and the subject of a new documentary and DVD set, is ripe for reappraisal, years after his death.