Blue

Derek Jarman’s last film Blue is an experimental documentary/memoir about his life and his final struggle with AIDS. The film consists of a single stationary blue screen that remains unchanging throughout the entirety of the piece, accompanied by an intricate soundscape consisting of Jarman’s voice, the voices of close friends and collaborators, and a few sound effects and music choruses. It was an interesting experience to “watch” the film, since it was more about listening than seeing. Jarman decided to make the film in this way because he lost his sight due to AIDS, so it represents the last stage of his life and how he “saw” the world.

While watching Blue I found that I had to listen very carefully to even attempt to understand what was “happening.” With more traditional films, sound is not always as important and the viewer can occasionally guess what has been said by the images and actions. Blue had no such safety net, so unless I wanted to constantly rewind the film, I had to be very diligent in my listening. This was a little difficult for me since there was nothing for my eyes to focus on besides the blue screen, but there were a few moments when it was easy to pay attention.

The moments of the film that were particularly intriguing to me were those that included a musical chorus. The first time one occurred, it caught me by surprise and I was not able to really engage with it. Every other time one occurred, I listened carefully and even turned on the subtitles to be sure I understood the words. Once I knew what was being sung, however, I did not really understand the words. Like many songs, the lyrics were very metaphorical and symbolic, requiring the “viewer” to think on them for a while.

For example, one of the early refrains is “Blue protects white from innocence / Blue drags black with it / Blue is darkness made visible.” Those lines stuck with me long after the film was over as I tried to understand them. Is it that blue–representing Jarman’s blindness–enables him to see the world in different and possibly upsetting ways, thereby destroying innocence? If so, what is the white being protected? What is the black being dragged by blue? Why is blue “darkness made visible,” does it have anything to do with the correlation between blue and the feeling of sadness?

I am not sure I will ever know the answers to these questions, but it is interesting that Jarman included them. If the chorus were in a traditional film with many changing images, the significance of the words would potentially have been lost due to the fixation on the visual. What message did Jarman want to convey with all of the words he included in Blue, so much so that he forced viewers to really listen by giving them nothing else to focus on?

Blue can be called many things–a film, a podcast, a memoir–but I think that “documentary” is the most fitting. According to Film Feminisms by Kristin Hole and Dijana Jelača “the documentary is both an artistic object and an attempt to document a reality.” (175) The chapter on documentaries focuses on the fact that documentaries provide truth and strive to be objective, and yet there is always some sort of bias or constructed narrative. Blue is most certainly an artistic object and documented reality, and it does seem to be object, but it is deliberately constructed. In some ways, Blue is closer to a fictional film since it heavily dictates the information the viewer receives and how. Unlike traditional documentaries that document real life usually in real time, Blue is a reflection on Jarman’s life so he therefore decided what to include, what not to include, and how to order it. He decided to add musical choruses that were unlikely to actually have been created before the film.

Jarman managed to merge many forms of media with his film Blue. It is not a true documentary, nor is it a true memoir, podcast, or fictional film. Even at the end of his life and suffering from AIDS, he still managed to push the boundaries of film to create an everlasting and thought-provoking work.