"Blue" a movie by Derek Jarman

First posted: 08 January 2010

For accustomed to believing in image,

an absolute idea of value,

his world had forgotten the command of essence:

thou shall not create unto thyself any graven Image,

although you know the task is to fill the empty page.

From the bottom of your heart,

pray to be released from image.

A lot of people, speaking about a film, tend to create some categories in which they can place it. The category that I avoid in every way is: “I don’t understand it, ergo I don’t like it” where people place the filmmakers that I love.

This speech comes from my “need” of or, I might say, pleasure in talking about a movie, beyond all these useless classes, using it as a launch pad for a less fatuous conversation.

A film, in my opinion, is beautiful when it can impress me, inspiring in me some impressions: it doesn’t matter whether those that feelings are or not likeable, enjoyable or not. Beside that, I think that the most beautiful and interesting thing is being involved, such as being “pulled” ahead along a inner mental “path”, by the film (a sort of streaming images thrilling our icastic-vertigo): let oneself go skip technical “factors” or or the simple logical comprehension of it… just watch it!

I remember my urging “need” to stop a movie (“unsatisfied”… by something unexplicable…), “No country for Old men” by Coen brothers, due to the tension that I felt, or the psychological nausea created by some scenes of “Antichrist” by Lars Von Trier, or even the rapture I feel every time I contemplate a film by Tarkovsky, or the fear created by “Shining” by Kubrick in which the image and the editing prepare us for what we’ll see but the soundtrack make us fall, suddenly, into a silent terror.

About that, I could present, like an exemplary “pillar” and artistic counterpart of this concept(contained in my article and discussed here from a personal point of view) “Blue” by Derek Jarman.

This movie hasn’t got images, the viewer can only watch a blue screen, symbol and allegory of the beginning and the end of a show, followed by some voices, sounds and songs: all that a blind man can “see”.

The director, through the film, tells us about his dawnfall (his physical and psychological crisis) because of the HIV contraction (commonly know as AIDS). Following, with our closed eyes, this voice, that speaks about himself, through small scraps of memory, taking us through a blindness course and, later struggling, feeling deep sorrow and “agonia”, against the “lithania” of death itself, it pushes us to taste the dramatic, abissal event of the incoming collapse of life forms, tough suggesting a slight sense of infinity, of unending sorrow culminating into the appalling breath of new life (blossoming over the ashes and after the massacre of the ego, of the human psyche, of the mundane body).

The movie is punctuated, tickled (as in a Schopenhauer/Leopardi’s “pendulum” of the life cycle, rounding the edges of the extreme emotional, existential poles of our “dasein”), obsessed by the blue colour, the chromatic scale of every deep blue, static and dynamic, brilliant and pale, clean and rough… this “absorbing” blue palette, gamma is the stage of similarities, conflicts, introspections. (Is the so-called Yves Klein “blue” a sort of specular alter ego of Jarman’s blue…?). The same image is denied because it “is a prison of the soul, your heredity, your education, your vices and aspirations, your qualities, your psychological world” leaving us in an empty incomplete ocean of unlimited opportunities.