AIDS Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Curators – Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard – 2026 – UK

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A chapel interior is repurposed as a reinvention of Derek Jarman’s final film Blue – exhibition / installation at Fitzrovia Chapel from Friday, October 16th to Wednesday, November 18th

Pollard and Forsythe’s third and final installation / exhibition at the Fitzrovia Chapel is a deceptively simple setup.

With the space opening from mid-morning to midday to five or six pm depending on day of the week, most visitors will be entering the building from daylight – although, as the evenings creep in, towards the end of the day, and losing an extra hour of daylight in the evening after the clocks go back an hour on Sunday, October 25th, some visitors may be entering from fading light or even darkness.

Entering from daylight as this visitor did, one is immediately struck by the lighting.

In a reimagining of the late director Derek Jarman’s final film Blue (1993), the interior is lit in that colour, which has the effect of locking the architectural interior into a sort of perpetual twilight, and not one in which the light goes slowly from light to dark but which seems more or less fixed. … Read the rest

Rock Hudson
All That
Heaven Allowed

Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed

Director – Stephen Kijak – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 104m

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Matinée idol Rock Hudson epitomised the Hollywood dream until he died of AIDS in 1985 – documentary portrait available on digital platforms from Monday, 23 October

It was only when Rock Hudson tragically died of AIDS in 1985 that the fact that he was gay entered into the consciousness of the American, movie-going public.

He originally came to Hollywood to pursue an acting career after a stint in the US Navy in the final years of World War Two, signing up with agent Henry Willson. Willson had a knack for renaming actors, and it was he who gave the young Roy Fitzgerald the name Rock Hudson with which he was to achieve stardom. Even so, the twentysomething spent the best part of a decade playing roles in Westerns and adventures before director Douglas Sirk cast him in the romantic melodrama Magnificent Obsession (1954) opposite Jane Wyman. Sirk clearly saw a quality in the actor that no-one else had identified, and a screen legend was born.

Hudson was to prove the perfect fit for the onscreen romantic lead and would play similar roles for much of his career which included not only further roles for Sirk in All That Heaven Allows (1955), again with Wyman, and Written On The Wind (1956), opposite Lauren Bacall, but also starring with James Dean in what was to be the latter’s final film Giant (George Stevens, 1956).… Read the rest