General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Jubilee (1978 film)

Jubilee is a 1978 British film directed by Derek Jarman in which Queen Elizabeth I and her court alchemist John Dee travel 400 years into the future to find a dystopian London overrun by girl gangs, a media mogul and fascistic police. Made in the year of Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee, it is widely described as Britain's first punk film, and it features punk-era musicians including Adam Ant, Jordan, and Jayne County alongside a score by Brian Eno, his first original film music.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Directed by Derek Jarman, who wrote the screenplay in part with James Whaley³
Producers	Howard Malin and James Whaley, producing for Megalovision and Whaley-Malin Productions⁴
Runtime and rating	Rated 18 in the UK¹^•²
Principal cast	Jenny Runacre (Queen Elizabeth I and Bod), Richard O'Brien (John Dee), Toyah Willcox, Adam Ant, Nell Campbell, Jordan, Jayne County, Ian Charleson¹^•⁵
Music	Brian Eno's first original film score; on-screen music by Adam and the Ants, Wayne County and the Electric Chairs, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Chelsea¹
Production	Shot in six weeks on London locations in summer 1977 on a budget of £200,000⁶
Premiere	February 1978 at the Gate 2 cinema, London⁷
Critical standing	Metascore of 79 from six reviews; Time Out called it Britain's first official punk movie⁸

Spoilers

Premise

The framing device has Queen Elizabeth I consulting her court astrologer and alchemist Dr John Dee, who shows her a vision of her realm 400 years hence.⁶ The future England she visits is a wasteland of roving girl gangs, an all-powerful media mogul, fascistic police and violent, marauding killers.¹^•² Law and order no longer exist, and royalty is represented by Borgia Ginz, a giggling media mogul who gives the people what they want and thereby controls them, using Buckingham Palace as a giant recording studio.³

The gang at the center of the film includes characters named Bod, Amyl Nitrate, Crabs, Mad, Chaos and Angel. Bod, also played by Jenny Runacre, crowns herself Queen on a waste tip in Deptford as leader of a band that includes a pop singer, a pyromaniac and a nymphomaniac. Amyl Nitrate, played by Jordan, is chosen by Borgia Ginz to represent England at the Eurovision song contest with a bump-and-grind version of "Rule Britannia!". Crabs (Little Nell) falls for the Kid (Adam Ant), who is killed by the police, and the gang seeks revenge.³

Production

Origins. The starting point was Jarman's fascination with Jordan, the punk style icon who worked at Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren's King's Road clothes shop; Jarman had first seen her at Victoria station and described her in his diary. He originally wanted to make a Super 8 film of her, but in the spring of 1977 he decided instead to make a film about punk, recruiting actors from west London's punk scene.⁶ A Cambridge University Press book chapter on the film describes Jarman's ambivalence about where punk's violent youthful energy was heading as producing a film that is deliberately ugly in places and very uncomfortable to watch, one which, as he wrote in the published script, "always upset people".⁹

Shooting. Jarman was not a punk himself: at 36 he was older than the scene, and he was best known as a stage designer for Frederick Ashton's ballet Jazz Calendar and Ken Russell's film The Devils. While McLaren was in Hollywood trying to raise money for a Sex Pistols film, Jarman shot Jubilee in six weeks on location in London with a budget of £200,000. His biographer Tony Peake describes the production as perilous, with the producers raising money piecemeal so that filming stopped and started.⁶ According to Peake's 1996 biography, filming took place principally around Southwark, Rotherhithe and Victoria Docks, with the production based at Butler's Wharf on Shad Thames; the film was made between late June and mid-August 1977, with the first sequences shot early after Jarman learned that a street he wanted was about to be demolished.¹⁰

A changed ending. The 104-minute picture was originally to end with Adam Ant's character being raped in a photo booth by two policemen while the camera took still photographs. Ant refused to perform the scene, saying he would not be stuck in a small space with a possibly drunk crew member pretending to beat him up; instead, the officers beat his character to death behind a rubbish bin.⁶

Release and reception

Jarman had hoped to finish the film in time to release it during the Silver Jubilee year itself, but its theatrical premiere did not come until February 1978 at London's Gate 2 cinema.⁷ The Guardian's Derek Malcolm, reviewing on 23 February 1978, called it Britain's first film to reflect the punk era, crediting it with a fevered and restless imagination and a first-class Brian Eno score, while judging that its thin political and social comment and disjointed narrative kept it from being a very good film.³

Reactions from within punk were divided. Vivienne Westwood, the punk fashion designer, called it "the most boring and therefore most disgusting film I had ever seen". By the time of the premiere, some punks associated with the film, including Siouxsie and the Banshees, had dissociated themselves from Jarman; according to Adam Ant, the band denounced Jubilee as "hippy trash". Ant himself was embarrassed by the film on first viewing but later called it an amazing achievement and a testament to Jarman's persistence and ingenuity.⁷^•⁶ Time Out, in an otherwise positive review, charged that the film's determined sexual inversion, in which most women become freakish characters and men become sex objects, came to look disconcertingly like a misogynist binge.⁶

Later assessments have been more favorable. The film holds a Metascore of 79 based on six reviews collected by Metacritic; Variety called it one of the most original, bold and exciting features to have come out of Britain in the 1970s, and Time Out awarded it the title of Britain's first official punk movie.⁸ The Criterion Collection describes it as ahead of its time and often frighteningly accurate in its predictions, and as a fascinating historical document.¹

Place in punk culture

The film's title mocks the Silver Jubilee celebrations of Elizabeth II in 1977, the same year in which the Sex Pistols released "God Save the Queen" and attempted to perform it from a boat on the Thames during the official jubilee celebrations on 7 June.⁶^•¹¹ Jarman placed himself in that current of dissent, telling the Guardian's Nicholas de Jongh in February 1978: "We have now seen all established authority, all political systems, fail to provide any solution - they no longer ring true."⁶

The film also stands out for its casting. Jarman's predominantly female cast of gang members runs against the heavily male-centered discourse that surrounded punk at the time, and the use of actual punk figures such as Jordan, Jayne County and Adam Ant gives the ensemble a presence no conventional casting could supply.¹²^•¹³ The BFI characterizes the film as Jarman's personal vision of the punk movement, both prophetic and apocalyptic, in which the mythological past and a bleak future converge on the streets of London.²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026