Imagining October (1984) is a lesser-known film by Derek Jarman that arguably marks a pivotal moment in his career, where the intersection of language, film, and political critique is rehearsed, ahead of many of his defining moments of cinema. Filmed during a British Film Institute–sponsored visit to Moscow and Baku with Peter Wollen and Sally Potter, the work fuses diary, documentary, and allegory to interrogate the ideological theatre of both East and West at the Cold War’s uneasy midpoint. Against a droning, minimal score by Genesis P-Orridge and David Ball, Jarman’s Super 8 and video footage glitches at a pace Jarman likened to a heartbeat. He captures fragments of Moscow’s monumental architecture, scenes of an artist observing and painting soldiers in his studio, footage of Jarman himself, a feast, prolonged periods of text, and street scenes in the city of Baku in Azerbaijan. The footage is grainy, tactile and processed with a deep red hue throughout. We see moments of close observation and intimate ritual displaying a sensuality of both subject and material.

At times, we see Jarman, seated on a chair that belonged to Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, the Soviet film director, screenwriter, film editor and film theorist, considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. A pioneer in the theory and practice of montage, Eisenstein’s house was preserved as a museum and was included in Jarman’s visit itinerary. With the inclusion of these scenes, Jarman situates himself within the lineage of revolutionary cinema yet queers ideas of heroism through wilful ambiguity and complex forms of desire. A large part of the film is devoted to a blank screen with intertitles; 'Books Seized by Customs?', 'Riot Police in the Streets?', statements thatinvoke Soviet censorship, yet mirror the repressions of Thatcher’s Britain, where gay bookstores were raided and public discourse, particularly around AIDS, was weaponised against queer communities at the time. The film somehow collapses geopolitical binaries as a result, and more than operating as simple allegory, offers a sharp yet tender realism, suggesting that ideology’s violence transcends national borders and can perhaps be felt closer to home.

Formally, Imagining October represents Jarman’s evolution toward a hybrid language of political poetics. The flicker and grain become not mere texture but critique. Structurally, and materially, the work dismantles the distinctions between documentary and dream, activism and aesthetics. With text, sound and image, it eschews narrative sense in favour of framing imagination itself as a radical act. Over forty years later, Imagining October remains urgent. Despite the political landscape changing in its specificities, the film offers a study of power’s entanglement with representation. Its soldiers, painters, and lovers enact a choreography of domination and tenderness which presents a vision of art that does not profess to do anything, but instead understands itself as both captive and subversive in its state of being.