Blue

Many people complained about the triteness or cliche nature of the device of using an all-blue screen for the seventy-some odd minutes of this film. I'd guess that most of these people never saw the film on the big screen.

If you did see this on a big screen, however, you were sure to notice the tricks your eyes played on you. Jarman, directing this film as he lost his eyesight (and what could be worse for a director?), last saw the color blue. As you watch the film, your eyes become saturated with the color blue, and begin to try and compensate for the overstimulation, shifting to oranges, showing illusionary shapes in the blank field of the screen, and ultimately betraying you. What better allegory for the loss of one's vision, especially when it means everything to you?

Derek Jarman's final work is perhaps his most unusual. The visuals are nothing but a solid screen of bright blue. The soundtrack is a montage of sound effects, voice overs, and music. The dialogue is Derek Jarman's coming to terms with himself, and his terminal illness.

Some will find the whole affair a pretentious bore. Others will find it a moving farewell from a groundbreaking British film-maker who was completely blind by the time the film was completed. He broke the rules, especially with this film, and it's probably how he wanted to be remembered.

Jarman's masterpiece was always going to attract a lazy criticism from the mainstream mindset: pretentious, trendy, self-indulgent etc.

But to dismiss it out of hand as no better than a first year art student's project is to fail to appreciate the rich narrative.

The coldness of the blue focusses the mind on what Jarman has to tell us, perhaps far better than any other colour would've done. We cannot help but listen, and take in one very gifted man's grim yet positive perspective on gay life, and a slow death through AIDS.

Brian Eno's musical score is stark and haunting, with passages of female vocal harmony that are strongly influenced by contempory sacred music from Eastern Europe.

Watch this film with an open mind: Force yourself to keep staring into the blue yonder, and it will empower you with a new level of vision and perspective.

An interesting and intimate avant garde account of Derek Jarman's life. Together with his closest collaborators, they'll tell the story of blue, a story of a man and a story of what he could have been. It was primarily inspired of the last color Jarman was able to see by this time. HIV has pretty much left him blind and a former shell of himself.

I only rated it as three out of five since I think while affecting it is not something I believe raises the bar of filmmaking. It will be forever memorialized for being one of cinema's greatest memento mori AND a monument of 90's HIV-LGBTQ+ Storytelling. It will be admired in circles AND I respect that. BUT I view films against others in terms of how it will affect the medium. I think its brute honesty is admirable, its concept unique BUT overall, it is just that A Statement.

Still Recommended.

Jarman's "Blue," a feature consisting entirely of a blue screen with voice-overs, has succeeded in annoying viewers with its seemingly uninventive approach to the cinematic personal narative. As so much of what we have come to consider "good" filmaking relies primarily on our sense of sight and our ability to absorb and process hundreds of CGI critters flashing before our eyes, it is easy to forget that a "good film" relies as much if not more so on the story than it does on the visuals.

Jarman's story is one that does not need visuals to support it. Reflecting upon his life in the face of his rapidly approaching death, Jarman's memories and meditations offer the viewer (listener, really) a window into the soul of a director who is losing the most important sense he could posses: his sight. Blue was the last color available to him before AIDS related complications robbed him of his sight. As he stands before death and stares it straight in the face, Jarman's writings put forth a suprising feeling of calmness, as he has accepted his own finitude and shares his meditations with us in this, his last masterpiece.