blue • derek jarman
Category:
Blue 1993 is a film directed by Derek Jarman that displays a static view of the color blue with a narrator and musical backdrop. Jarman’s narration is diaristic and lyrical prose detailing his AIDS-related sickness and approaching death at a period when he had become half blind, his vision often disturbed by blue light.
Background and formal function:
Jarman’s last movie was finished only a few months before his death. As a result, Blue is a direct counterpoint to Jarman’s late work Ataxia – Aids is Fun 1993 (Tate T06768) in its depiction of his terminal sickness, although from a completely different perspective. McDonald’s did not plan a unique campaign of blue hamburgers when the film opened at the Venice Biennale in June 1993, while Coca-Cola kept to its red-colored cans and brown-colored liquid.
Process:
Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry, John Quentin, and Jarman himself speak in a sound collage of visceral and lyrical storytelling in this monochrome video. The film’s experience extends well beyond the surface despite its simple graphics.
Mirror:
Jarman’s Blue symbolizes the transforming and creative forces inherent in the alchemical activity, especially those in the “journey” stage. The journey is “one of the more widely used metaphors to describe the unfolding of the alchemical process and the achievement of the goal, which is the integration of the psychic, energetic and corporeal principles that preside over the life of man and the universe,” according to Astrology, Magic, and Alchemy in Art.
Flower:
The feeling of that deep IKB is never static; it changes rapidly throughout the film because of the story provided by sound. As bells rang, I felt at peace but was interrupted by the sounds of busy nightclubs and medical equipment. The sounds of the hospital fill the area in a manner that is as overwhelming as the blue that shines on you as you accept the truth of his impending death.
Key& Knife:
Blue is an extreme example of cinematic perception and expression. A soundtrack of voices, sound effects, and music weaves a poetic and fragmented first-person narrative of Jarman’s observations, memories, and emotions in relation to his failing eyesight, horrific medical experiences, and approaching death, all in the context of a larger community of lovers, friends, and strangers living with and dying.
Formal elements:
For more than five decades, John Waters has distilled everything of America’s filth, depravity, and crassness into exuberantly distorted, bad-taste movies.