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BLUE
1993
Director
Derek Jarman
Starring
John Quentin
Nigel Terry
Derek Jarman
Tilda Swinton
Runtime
79 minutes
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“The virus rages fierce. I have no friends now who are not dead or dying. Like a blue frost it caught them. At work, at the cinema, on marches and beaches. In churches on their knees, running, flying, silent or shouting protest.”
This voice, one of four narrators (including Derek Jarman, John Quentin, Tilda Swinton, and Nigel Terry), speaks over a field of pure blue in Jarman’s final work BLUE. In the film, Jarman fills the screen with blue—still and unyielding for an hour and nineteen minutes. This radically experimental gesture places something rather simple (a color) where something grand should be (a narrative film). Jarman’s eyesight was deteriorating from the virus and experimental medication and his decision to simplify image to static color is one way of inviting the viewer into his sightlessness.
“In the pandemonium of image / I present you with the universal Blue / Blue an open door to soul / an infinite possibility / Becoming tangible.”
Jarman is interested in reifying the ultimate questions of human existence through the film and this one color. Blue—and all color for that matter—is essentially an abstraction, the wavelength of light reflected from a surface or through a prism which the retina receives, sending signals to the brain that results in our perception. Blue has one of the shortest wavelengths visible to the human eye, which reminds us there are colors we are incapable of seeing. BLUE makes visible those colors or wavelengths—or people—that surround us but have been rendered invisible. The endless and still dying are invoked, voices always echoing somewhere.
“Blue is the universal love in which man bathes—it is the terrestrial paradise.”
BLUE is Jarman’s baptism and death: a dream, a prophecy, poetry.
This voice, one of four narrators (including Derek Jarman, John Quentin, Tilda Swinton, and Nigel Terry), speaks over a field of pure blue in Jarman’s final work BLUE. In the film, Jarman fills the screen with blue—still and unyielding for an hour and nineteen minutes. This radically experimental gesture places something rather simple (a color) where something grand should be (a narrative film). Jarman’s eyesight was deteriorating from the virus and experimental medication and his decision to simplify image to static color is one way of inviting the viewer into his sightlessness.
“In the pandemonium of image / I present you with the universal Blue / Blue an open door to soul / an infinite possibility / Becoming tangible.”
Jarman is interested in reifying the ultimate questions of human existence through the film and this one color. Blue—and all color for that matter—is essentially an abstraction, the wavelength of light reflected from a surface or through a prism which the retina receives, sending signals to the brain that results in our perception. Blue has one of the shortest wavelengths visible to the human eye, which reminds us there are colors we are incapable of seeing. BLUE makes visible those colors or wavelengths—or people—that surround us but have been rendered invisible. The endless and still dying are invoked, voices always echoing somewhere.
“Blue is the universal love in which man bathes—it is the terrestrial paradise.”
BLUE is Jarman’s baptism and death: a dream, a prophecy, poetry.