Blue is a film by Derek Jarman (1942-1994), a legendary English artist and filmmaker, best known for his avant-garde art films, and also renowned as a set designer, gardener, author and gay rights activist.
Script-driven narrative was not for him: instead, he favoured an organic painterly approach, creating vibrant montages of images and ideas. He started in set design, working on films including ‘The Devils’, directed by Ken Russell, then moved onto experimental super 8 mm film shorts, a medium he continued working with for many years. In 1976 he made his first feature film, the blissfully homoerotic Sebastiane. This was followed by the irreverent Jubilee (1977), one of the first and only punk films, firmly establishing Jarman as an underground hero. An unconventional and controversial adaptation of The Tempest in 1979 cemented this reputation. Jarman’s best-known and most accessible work is 1986’s Caravaggio, a fictionalised account of the life of the Baroque artist, and the first time Jarman worked with Tilda Swinton.
Jarman couldn’t help but react to the society he was living in, the country that was becoming Thatcher’s Britain. His answer to the Iron Lady was to produce iconoclastic art – art that looked at history but was located in the here and now. Alongside his feature films, he worked with key musicians and artists of the day, including The Smiths, Bryan Ferry, The Sex Pistols, punk band Throbbing Gristle, The Pet Shop Boys, Suede and dancer Michael Clark, producing music videos and film installations for live shows.
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Jarman was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986. Faced with impending blindness and his inevitable death, Jarman produced perhaps his strongest work, Blue (1993), in which a lush and vivid landscape is conjured up with just one visual component – Yves Klein blue and a beautifully judged narration. From 1986 up until he died in 1994, Jarman made his home on the shingle beaches of Dungeness, Kent. Prospect Cottage, his iconic house and garden, can be visited today thanks to the Save Prospect Cottage campaign, which saw Art Fund and Creative Folkestone rescue the property from private sale in 2020.
Derek Jarman’s Blue weaves a sensory tapestry that serves both as a political call to action and a meditation on illness, dying, and love. Originally released as a feature film in 1993, the year before the acclaimed artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman’s death due to an AIDS-related illness, Blue is a daring and powerful work of art. Moving through myriad scenes, some banal, others fantastical. Stories of quotidian life––getting coffee, reading the newspaper, and walking down the sidewalk––escalate to visions of Marco Polo, the Taj Mahal, or blue fighting yellow. Facing death and a cascade of pills, Jarman presents his illness in delirium and metaphors. He contemplates the physicality of emotions in lyrical prose as he grounds this story in the constant return to Blue—a colour, a feeling, a funk.
Against a plain, unchanging blue screen, a densely interwoven soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music attempts to convey a portrait of Derek Jarman’s experiences with AIDS, both literally and allegorically, together with an exploration of the meanings associated with the colour blue.
Blue and There We Are John: A Portrait of Derek Jarman was curated by Keith Whittle with support from Film London.
