BLUE is British militant gay filmmaker Derek Jarman's final film, and the only one to bring his anger to bear explicitly on the disease that finally claimed him. Constructed in layers of sound and orchestral bridges over an unvarying blue matte screen, the film is a meditation on many
things--life, love, politics, metabolism. "All that concerns life and death is transacting within me," the voiceover claims.
The unapologetically poetic narration combines observations and epiphanies, at times seemingly lifted straight from journal entries, with an ongoing description of the body's failings against the onslaught of AIDS. The latter provides the film with its narrative engine, as the sense of sight,
the filmmaker's most precious, slowly departs, summoning up a lifetime of remembered images as it passes. Formally, BLUE accomplishes several things that no other feature in memory does. The unvarying blue, and the hypnagogic imagery it encourages, has the curious effect of highlighting the
dimensions of the screen itself, locating the film in the room with the viewer, rather than drawing the spectator into the frame. Second, with its preponderance of classically-trained voices and the liberal use of atmospheric sound, the piece works largely as radio broadcasts once did, marshalling
the inherent drama in the physics of the medium--"His Master's Voice" captured point-blank with maximized acoustics, something that location sound precludes in the interest of "realism." leave a comment
