I bought the DVD of Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane. ($20.97 from the Kino Lorber catalogue.) I should have read the information available about it on the internet first.
The film is weird. Clearly it was made for homosexual males. There are two locations in the movie. One was a room in the palace of Diocletian, with a long scene of naked men carrying huge multi-colored phaluses between their legs prancing around in what is supposed to be some sort of Roman rite celebrating the birth of the sun. The only role this long scene plays out in the plot is that Sebastianus is present and Diocletian sends him into exile on the accusation that he, as a Christian, had set fire to Diocletian’s bedchamber. The second location is some lonely area of rocks and sand on a seacoast, where about a half-dozen muscular young Roman soldiers live together in an isolated stone tower and spend their days exercising and playing on the sand. Man-on-man petting is one of the most frequent pastimes, and Sebastian is ordered to be executed by his squad leader for having refused his amorous advances. The fact that Sebastian is a Christian is mentioned scornfully several times by the men, but there is no clear connection drawn between his religion and his refusal to let his squad leader mount him.
The biographical information about Derek Jarman provided as a special feature on the DVD says that this film made him the “father of the New Queer Cinema Movement.” I suspect that the subject of the film was chosen because the producer looked upon ancient Rome as a sort of “Golden Age” for homosexuals.
Reading up about St. Sebastian on the internet after having seen the film, I found that there was little historical basis for the story Jarman tells. Of course, I rather guessed that when I watched the long scene of the near-naked Roman soldiers playing frisbee on the sand. St. Sebastian was indeed ordered executed by a firing squad of archers, but it was in the immediate presence of Diocletian, apparently in Rome, and some versions of the story go on to say that he did not die at that time, but was nursed back to health by St. Irene, only to be clubbed to death later for insulting Diocletian. The connection with homosexuality came up with depictions of St. Sebastian in the Renaissance, who is most often depicted naked but for a loin cloth, writhing in pain from the arrows piercing him, and with his eyes cast up to heaven. Some art critics cite this as “homoeroticism,” but I think that is going too far. The artists of the Renaissance were fascinated by the statues from ancient Greece and Rome and came to have a greater appreciation for the beauty of the human body, but I have never heard of anyone say that the Davids of Michelangelo or Donatello were “homoerotic.”
But this group would be interested in the use of the Latin language in the film. The translation was done by someone named Jack Welch, apparently the John W. “Jack” Welch who teaches at Brigham Young University. Mr. Welch is said to be responsible for the name of the film, Sebastiane, which I assumed to be Italian. Jarman originally wanted to call the film “Sebastianus,” but Mr. Welch suggested that it be in the vocative case, to mean “O Sebastian.”
I must confess that my knowledge of Latin is not good enough to follow the spoken language, so much of the dialogue was beyond me. Every now and then there was something I could get, as when one of the Roman soldiers playing catch with a ball in a tidal pool called out “Mihi!” Although some of the actors spoke the Latin liines fluidly and with apparent feeling, most were clearly reciting words they did not understand, speaking their lines in a choppy manner. Unfortunately, the narrator fell into the latter category. The pronunciation was to the Oxford standard rather than the ecclesiatical standard: “c” being pronounced like the English “k,” and “j” like English “y.” An exception was the “v,” which was pronounced like the English “v.” I also noticed some misplaced accents, as for example “FacieBAM” and a lot of missing vocatives and plural imperatives directed towards a single person, as when the squad leader yells out, “Sebastian, pugnate!” For me, the movie did not seem to be worthwhile, but others may feel that anything in Latin is good.