The Last of England ($19.99 DVD) "The world's curling up like an autumn leaf," observes the narrator of Derek Jarman's ardent, poetic protest film. "The wind's coming to blow it into the final winter, and on every green hill, mourners stand and weep for the last of England." At once apocalyptic and nostalgic, The Last of England blends home movies (Jarman's own) with distorted visions that could be tomorrow, or next week, or never. Shot mainly on Super 8, transferred to video and then back to 35mm (and now, of course, to DVD), the film's images have a grainy, oversaturated quality, with skies so orange it looks as if the world's on fire. The film has no narrative, but its cumulative logic is ineluctable: Bedraggled figures are herded through industrial wastelands by balaclava-clad men with machine guns, while a clothed male soldier and a naked man couple on top of the Union Jack. It's a world where pleasure is furtive, but not necessarily less pleasurable for it. Jarman's overheated imagery is itself a form of rebellion, its refusal to make sense a rejection of the "nice, orderly protests" at which Nigel Terry's voiceover scoffs.

Released in 1987, The Last of England is specifically a rebuke to Thatcherism—in one of few dialogue sequences, a wealthy woman congratulates a soldier for his work in the Falklands; he hopes that the next war "will be a big one." But Jarman's visionary outrage is as undying as the conditions it protests, which may be why, according to the audio commentary by several of Jarman's collaborators, the film was a success abroad but a failure at home: Britons who weren't immediately offended probably expected Jarman to be more of an issue man. At times, particularly during a Bacchanalian montage scored to Andy Gill's stuttering guitar, the editing is so rapid your mind simply can't keep up. Jarman's poetic didacticism overwhelms your conscious faculties, but the underlying motives are crystal clear, as when he juxtaposes a naked, wild-haired figure gnawing cauliflower on a rubbish heap with a wealthy, corset-clad man pouring food over his head while the soundtrack blends a QVC pitch and "Pomp and Circumstance." Featuring Jarman veterans Spencer Leigh and Tilda Swinton (who takes over the movie's desperate climax), The Last of England is as much a rebuke to the heavy-handed issue movies currently hogging headlines as it is to right-wing rule. Jarman reminds us that true political art challenges the way viewers see, and not just what they think.