Dedicated to his partner Keith Collins (aka “H.B.”) “and all true lovers”, Jarman’s last feature stands as one of the great final films and as a singularly poetic and affecting account of living and dying with AIDS. Famously, in acknowledgment of, and in meditation upon, his failing eyesight, the image consists wholly, unflinchingly, of a hue as close to Yves Klein’s patented “International Klein Blue” as could be captured on film. John Quentin, Nigel Terry, Tilda Swinton and Jarman himself read excerpts from the director’s hospital diaries and recite his poetry, atop an immersive soundtrack created by Simon Fisher Turner and several of Jarman’s other musical collaborators.
EN
You say to the boy open your eyes
When he opens his eyes and sees the light You make him cry out. Saying
O Blue come forth
O Blue arise
O Blue ascend
O Blue come in
“Blue walks into the labyrinth. Absolute silence is demanded of all its visitors, so their presence does not disturb the poets who are directing the excavations. Digging can only proceed on the calmest of days as rain and wind destroy the finds. The archaeology of sound has only just been perfected and the systematic cataloguing of words has until recently been undertaken in a haphazard way. Blue watched as a word or phrase materialised in scintillating sparks, a poetry of fire which cast everything into darkness with the brightness of its reflections.”
Derek Jarman
“In an interview with Jeremy Isaacs in 1993, Derek Jarman, wittingly nearing the end of his chromatic life, claimed that when he would be gone he’d like to evaporate and take his works with him: “to disappear completely.” During that interview on the BBC series Face to Face, Jarman describes his then soon to be final feature film Blue (1993) as a dedication to Yves Klein and a self-portrait of sorts. The film would be void of image and would draw its animation from a monologue performed by himself and others (Nigel Terry, John Quentin, and Tilda Swinton) on his life living with illness; and the screen would be illuminated as a rich and vibrating blue colour field – a proposal to which Isaacs cried out, “What on earth do you mean, ‘a blank blue film’?”
Before he was diagnosed HIV positive in December 1986, Jarman had been working with the colour blue for some time already. And not just any blue, but International Klein Blue (IKB). Klein, remembered for his monochromatic works in ultramarine blue, pink or gold had famously said about life in blue: “At first there is nothing, then there is a profound nothingness, after that a blue profundity.” Like Klein, Jarman was inspired by the paradox of blue:2 the colour of blue horizons and blue lips. Blue, the colour of immateriality, electricity, nuclear warfare – the fear of atomic annihilation that filled Klein’s era with dread – of poison and toxins. Blue, the colour of mysticism, spirituality and transcendence – the colour, vastness and unknowingness of the heavens and seas.”
Rebecca Jane Arthur1
“In the case of Blue, the intimacy of the voices in our ears encour- ages an identification with the experience described, at the site of that experience. With no images on the screen, we are given no way to dis- tance or hold ourselves away from the narrative. Much of this inti- mate dialogue has to do with severely restricted vision, the experience of which is mimicked by the screen and further enhanced by the sound track. Early in the film, for example, a narrator tells us, in the present tense, “I step off the kerb and a cyclist nearly knocks me down. Flying in from the dark he nearly parted my hair. I step into a blue funk.” After the first sentence, we hear a bell ring, the sounds of a bicycle speeding past, and, in a receding voice, “Look where the fuck you’re going,” allowing us to experience the disorientation and surprise that the nar- ration is recounting. After the last sentence—“I step into a blue funk”— we hear the clanging of an iron door shutting on us, a metaphoric sound that doubles the mood of the narration and encloses us within it. We experience the film at the site of the narrator.”
Jim Ellis2
“By late 1992 Jarman had completed two drafts of the script, under the title Blueprint (a title which remained into production in early 1993). As he saw it this was to be “the first film made by someone with AIDS as opposed to one made about the situation.” In a foreword to his first draft, preserved by BFI Special Collections, he writes: “To make a film about illness is dangerous because the parameters of any epidemic change rapidly. So far the films we have seen articulate from outside. Since the virus is essentially invisible, the Blue reflects it more accurately.”
This lateral thinking extended to the film’s innovative release strategy. In a rare collaboration with Channel 4, BBC Radio 3 would broadcast the film’s soundtrack simultaneous to its television premiere on 19 September 1993; a postcard in IKB was included with that week’s Radio Times for listeners. Jarman died exactly six months later.”
Simon McCallum3
The smell of him Dead good looking
In beauty’s summer His blue jeans
Around his ankles Bliss in my ghostly eye Kiss me
On the lips
On the eyes
Our name will be forgotten
In time
No one will remember our work
Our life will pass like the traces of a cloud And be scattered like
Mist that is chased by the
Rays of the sun
For our time is the passing of a shadow And our lives will run like
Sparks though the stubble
I place a delphinium, Blue, upon your grave
- 1Rebecca Jane Arthur, ““O Blue come in”. In Remembrance of Derek Jarman’s Blue,” Sabzian, 16 January 2019.
- 2Jim Ellis, Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
- 3Simon McCallum, “Blue at 30: remembering Derek Jarman’s final film,” BFI, 14 September 2023.
