Blue (1993), Derek Jarman
[LGBTQ History Month] Blue (1993) was British filmmaker Derek Jarman’s final feature-length film before his death in 1994 of an AIDS-related illness. Blue consists of 75 minutes of only a single shot of blue - “International Klein Blue,” a hue Jarman first encountered in 1974 and which inspired him to make a film. Jarman and three of his favorite actors, including Tilda Swinton, narrate in prose and surrealistic poetry - on fate and history and the universe between clinical, vivid descriptions of living with and dying of AIDS.
Jarman’s narration alternates between gloomy and thoughtful, whispered abstract observations, and sharp, matter-of-fact, explanatory, even mildly perturbed. All this over a still shot of blue, which in its bare minimalism expresses all: The suffocating personal and social stigma of Jarman’s illness. An existentialism both individual and communal, reflecting his own impending death and the lives and deaths of his gay and lesbian friends. “The virus rages fierce,” mourns Jarman, “I have no friends now who are not dead or dying.” “My heart’s memory turns to you.” He lists, presumably, dead friends, his voice dreamy and fading away into blue void: “David. Howard. Graham. Terry. Paul.”
Jarman was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1986 and toward the end of his life began to lose his eyesight. What sight was left “became filtered through a dense blue veil.” In Blue, he muses on color, and illness in colors - yellow for infection, yellow for evil, yellow for bile, yellow for jaundice; green for hospital pyjamas, green for Cytomegalovirus. Blue for blood, sky, for “infinite possibility,” for bliss, for a “bearded reaper” - for Death.
“In the pandemonium of image
I present you with the universal Blue
Blue an open door to soul
An infinite possibility
Becoming tangible”
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