Blue Derek Jarman Kiss Me Kiss Me Again

"What on world practise you mean, 'a bare blue film'?"

Face to Face up

In an interview with Jeremy Isaacs in 1993, Derek Jarman, wittingly nearing the cease of his chromatic life, claimed that when he would be gone he'd like to evaporate and have his works with him: "to disappear completely."1  During that interview on the BBC series Face up to Face, Jarman describes his then soon to be final feature film Bluish (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 color field – a proposal to which Isaacs cried out, "What on world do you hateful, 'a blank bluish film'?"

Earlier he was diagnosed HIV positive in December 1986, Jarman had been working with the color blueish for some time already. And not just whatsoever blueish, but International Klein Blue (IKB). Klein, remembered for his monochromatic works in ultramarine blue, pinkish or gold had famously said about life in blue: "At first there is nothing, then there is a profound pettiness, afterward that a blue profundity." Like Klein, Jarman was inspired by the paradox of blue:2 the color of blue horizons and bluish lips. Blue, the colour of immateriality, electricity, nuclear warfare – the fright of atomic annihilation that filled Klein's era with dread – of poison and toxins. Bluish, the colour of mysticism, spirituality and transcendence – the colour, vastness and unknowingness of the heavens and seas.

Jarman is said to have kickoff come face to face with Klein'due south blue at London'due south Tate Gallery in 1974, upon seeing his work IKB 79 (1959).3 Struck past its sublime quality, Jarman wanted to replicate this blueish on film, to re-create it every bit an homage to Klein and temporalize the essence of his blue on celluloid – an idea that Jarman hung onto for almost 20 years. Whilst seeking funding for the film, Jarman filled sketch books and note pads with blue sketches and notes. And in order to proceeds support for his concept, he even created live, spoken word performances – Dadaistic listings of all things blue: "blue helmets, blueish movies, blueish whales, bluish stories, blue poems…"four But, as Jarman's health deteriorated, his dance with IKB took a sharp turn. His blue homage to Klein eventually turned into his own blue swan song, and he passed away, aged 52, on nineteen February 1994.

Colour is the absence of man

When Blueish was released in 1993, after appearing at the Venice and Edinburgh film festivals, it was simulcast on boob tube and radio. In a rare collaboration between BBC and Channel 4, Channel 4 transmitted the blank blue picture show and BBC Radio iii transmitted its stereo soundtrack. When Jarman talked most the television release of Blue on Confront to Face, he joked virtually how it would most probable only be screened late at night. However, the moving picture was in fact heavily supported by television. A peachy deal of the film's funding was raised by Channel 4 and it was, of form, given a prime number-time slot. Remarkably, the then commissioning editor of Channel iv, Alan Fountain, blocked whatsoever commercial advertisements appearing during the film.five It was to exist screened in its entirety – uninterrupted for 76 minutes straight.6 The broadcasters had further primed their audiences to look the blank bluish film through announcements and articles published in TV guides and newspapers. And if you didn't have a tv set, y'all could ask Radio 3 to send you an especially made blue card, like a moving-picture show still in postcard format, and so you lot could meditate on the transmitted performance of words, the grains of voice, whilst holding a soft focus on the lapis bluish card.

Dealing with the finite, Jarman chose to work in the colour of the infinite and permit for information technology to exist replicated in various media and (his life and death) relived. As detailed in John Winn's thought-provoking essay, 'Performing Decease: Derek Jarman'southward Medial Blues', on the "transmedial performance" of Bluish, Jarman made Blueish transmedial from the get-go: he transferred celluloid – a metaphoric carrier of death and an apotheosis of a torso that becomes weakened by disease, as a celluloid filmstrip becomes scratched, damaged and eventually worn out with use – to digital media, for it to be reborn time and again, brought to life by pulsating frequencies and vibrating electrons; he further fabricated information technology every bit an democratic audio piece, performance, and text. Winn states that "[t]his reconsideration of the media-specificity of Blue is essential to agreement how the piece is itself a multivalent mediatized body, doubling not only for Jarman's body – or for the innumerable lives lost to AIDS – but besides generating a collective feel betwixt the other bodies presenced before it."seven In other words, as an audience bathes, blinded, in blue calorie-free, it shares in the commonage feel of Blueish – and its losses.

Winn precedes his essay with a quote from Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: "Colour in the absence of man, human who has passed into color." This commendation is taken from their reflections on Yves Klein and his monochromes in What is Philosophy? They state that bluish "takes on the infinite and turns the axiom into 'cosmic sensibility'". This sensibility, every bit it were, is what Jarman tried to grasp on film. Winn points to Deleuze and Guattari's assay that "the area of obviously compatible color vibrates, clenches or cracks open because information technology is the bearer of glimpsed forces" and "mak[es] the invisible forces visible". This opening of space in a colour mass allows for our wandering within the colour field itself. Blue induces what is known equally the Ganzfeld event, a theory that drew on the notion that by seeing absolutely nothing we begin to meet something. As Klein had done away with line and illustration in his paintings, opting for pure brainchild, so too did Jarman. Replacing the canvas with the screen, Jarman'due south Blueish is alive with our ain projections. The purity of colour and its ability to evoke true experience allows for the spectator'southward presence in the absence of man.

Ewig... ewig...

"Everywhere and forever, bluish is the horizon! Forever... Forever…"eight

Klein stated that he was drawn to blueish as the sea and sky, its associations on earth, were the most abstruse things in nature itself:9 incommunicable to grasp and without dimensions. Rebecca Solnit writes in her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost that "[t]he globe is blueish at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost." She explains that we run across blue in transparent matter because of the lite that is scattered through it. In 2018, Monokino, an independent cinema co-op active in the Belgian coastal city of Ostend, marked the 25-twelvemonth jubilee of Bluish past transmitting merely its soundtrack to an audience that was sat on the beach facing the horizon, with the audience projecting their hallucinations onto the low-cal that got lost in the North Ocean and Belgian heaven.10 The make-shift cinema (or radio) perched on the h2o'due south edge imagined the seascape every bit the perfect substitute image for filmed IKB: vast, dazzling, vibrating, unceasing, dynamic, void of detail, full of possibilities. In that location, released from image and earthly dimensions, Jarman, hooked up on drips, slicked his potions, pills and fate. Invisible, he soared and dived, and soared once more in the bluish soundscape.

In Blue, Jarman is released by his resignation to his bullheaded fate, only grounded by his hope. Every bit spectators, we surrender to the bluish reverie. Our sails puff up and sheet through Blue's poetry equally if information technology were great gusts of wind, travelling so smoothly that one tin just close their optics. Just then we crash, from time to time, on the rocks of reality with Jarman's hospital notes and sounds. His roughshod honesty and cut wit are what bruise us most: his blackness and blue humour and the hindsight of his own surrender to illness.

The darkness comes in with the tide

The year slips on the agenda

Your osculation flares

A match struck in the night

Flares and dies

My slumber broken

Kiss me again

Kiss me

Kiss me again

And again

Never enough

Greedy lips

Speedwell eyes

Blueish skies.11

O

Blue's script is a medley of sounds: music, sound effects, monotone-diary like entries intertwined with excited, subdued or sultry readings of fragments of poetry, philosophy, history and current events observations. It'south a sonic experience that refuses to be saccharine. We hear annoying noises such as the clattering of metal hospital pans and the slamming close of a heavy metal door – like a prison door closing on someone sentenced to life; we hear haunting utterings, whispering and chanting when Jarman describes a waiting room every bit "hell on earth" or every bit a domestic dog'due south muffled bark is carried on howling winds; and then we hear the soothing caresses of waves on the shore or a fluttering clarinet, like birdsong in the air. Thunder strikes when he talks of the war in Sarajevo; a cyclist shouts abruptly, "Await where the fuck you lot're going!" when he'due south almost knocked over. The sound effects are perfectly woven into the musical score by the composer Simon Fisher Turner, with fragments of songs, instrumental sounds or vocals past the likes of John Balance, Current 93, Coil, Vini Reilly of The Durutti Column, Brian Eno, Miranda Sex Garden and Kate St. John. And not but practice we hear sounds but Jarman as well describes them so that we can virtually feel them vibrating on our skin, like the intravenous drip of the medicine DHPG12 that "trills like a canary" or his partner'due south, H.B.'s,xiii option sounds: "the washing machine is roaring abroad, and the fridge is defrosting. These are his favourite sounds".14

In Rimbaud's verse form 'Vowels', or 'Voyelles' in French, he describes each vowel as pertaining to a colour: "A Black, E white, I red, U green, O blue". Rimbaud explored synaesthesia by creating dense metaphors that adhered and overlapped multiple sensations (touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing). Furthering Charles Baudelaire's work on sensorial "correspondences", Rimbaud draws associations with the imagery of colour and the lone resonance of each vowel sound; he unites them. He gives to blue the roundness of the vowel o which, as on paper as resounding in the air, draws a full circle, encompassing life and expiry:

O, sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds,

Silences crossed by Worlds and past Angels:

O the Omega, the violet ray of Her Optics!15

This symbolist, synesthetic blueish drawing bursts with the 'piercing sounds' and the ghostly appearances of beings that impregnate Jarman's blue rhapsody. Blue begins with the birth of a bluish-eyed boy who opens his eyes to life and is immediately pained past sight. The boy cries: "O Blue come forth, O blue arise, O blueish arise, O blue come up in." Blue is both life giving and taking. "O Blue come in" simultaneously calls on life and the O for Omega, the end of the alphabet or episodes of life.

The blank blue screen and Jarman's composition of voices combine with his clever use of language to create "hallucinations" in our minds, to infringe Roland Barthes's terminology from his seminal essay 'The Grain of the Vox'. Blue's voice brings u.s.a. a range of tones, for which we are condemned to adjectives in society to recount information technology. It is compassionate, enraged, authoritative, defeated, tickled, mocking, powerful and humiliated; it is complex and unabridged. Blue is a stream of words and significances which can't be pondered individually just are to exist experienced wholly, immediately. Blue's vocalization carries Jarman's feel to the viewer, or listener, as illustrations through the displacement of epitome, the limerick of sounds and music, and the voluptuous and melodic performance of text. To lend from the vocabulary of Barthes once more, one could describe Jarman's script performed by voices as the "sung writing of language".xvi

"O Blueish come up forth, O blueish ascend, O blue arise, O blue come in".17

Blue Disguised Reaper

Jarman'south Blue is as much a literary feat equally it is a cinematic or sonic accomplishment. In writing his ain sick blues, Jarman swims in a reference-drunkard sea of Aqua Vitae; he stirs and wakes ancient Greek myths, biblical characters and masters of literature. In his post-modern use of prose, with a good dash of traditionalist versus modernist vocabulary in his stanzas, he recalls the likes of T.Southward. Eliot's The Waste State in his fragmentary use of literary prose, which he layers on top of shards of sound. He recites the great transcendentalist William Blake'due south famous line from 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell', which, besides, inspired Aldous Huxley'south The Doors of Perception and, in plow, the music group The Doors: "If the doors of perception were apple-pie so everything would exist seen as it is", beckoning united states of america to open our minds and run into from other perspectives. How "it is", according to Blake, is "infinite", which Jarman omitted here but infers throughout the film, as blue is his symbol of the infinite. He states, "Blue is the universal love in which man bathes – it is the terrestrial paradise." This universal love of which Jarman writes is a love for all women and men, free of human being cruelty and unkindness, prejudice and bigotry. Blueish is his metaphor for this infinite, extensive honey.

Blue is about humanity as much equally it is cocky-conscious; information technology is non only well-nigh Jarman's own struggle with illness simply about the wretched in his periphery too: people suffering loss and swell hardship – Rita's lost causes,18 referring to Saint Rita of Cascia: Patron Saint of the impossible, abused wives and widows. In his lifetime, Jarman suffered the loss of many of his loved ones, "David. Howard. Graham. Terry. Paul...", and he observed their succumbing to the disease:

David ran home panicked on the railroad train from Waterloo, brought back exhausted and unconscious to die that night. Terry who mumbled incoherently into his incontinent tears. Others faded similar flowers cut by the scythe of the Blue Disguised Reaper, parched equally the waters of life receded. Howard turned slowly to rock, petrified day by day, his mind imprisoned in a physical fortress until all we could hear were his groans on the telephone circumvoluted the globe.19

This is but one example of Jarman's powerful use of imagery, which floats freely on screen in the vast blue spectral earth of voices. In these portraits of his friends who come to life on screen, out of the blue, and so wilt abroad e'er and then quickly, Jarman captures the variety of human response to encroaching death. Watching those you lot love die effectually you is a expletive of unfathomable hurting. Illness alienates its sufferers from the well just, with it, a new customs is born: i of compassion for your fellow in or out-patient and their families. Together they go "citizens of that other place", as Susan Sontag describes in her introduction to Illness as Metaphor. "Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship", she gives heed.

Metaphor every bit Illness

In Jarman's fight with HIV and AIDS, he encountered bluish non only on a metaphysical level, preoccupied with existential questions, transcendence and the fathomless heavens, but also on a physical level. His eyesight was heavily impacted by AIDS-related infections and by medicines. Over fourth dimension his world became dipped in a concealment resin, like a cyanotype, with missing data. He began to see partially bluish. Jarman chose then, in Blue, to bravely step out before united states of america and guide us through the unknown of a film without figures or images, a film about his debilitating disease, and share his reflections on his invisible globe "through eyes that were closing".20

During many interviews that inquired as to his choice to blot out whatsoever moving images Jarman responded that there were no images for HIV and AIDS – this invisible, silent affliction that crept in equally the night. Merely it was important to find a manner to represent his sickness in all its facets of response: struggle, courage, despair, hope, anger, sense of humor, pride, humility and, above all, humanity. In Blueish, questioning the politics of visibility, he asks, "How are we perceived, if nosotros are to be perceived at all?" and states, "For the most office we are invisible".21

Jarman, of course, despite what he said in the Face to Face up interview, didn't actually desire this piece of work to evaporate similar mist or steam. He was an outspoken campaigner for gay rights and, every bit a HIV/AIDS activist, knew the importance of his work. When Jarman was diagnosed, he was living in the Thatcherite-Great britain that hindered AIDS awareness campaigns and tried to mute the apportionment of knowledge in the fear of disturbing "family values" and promoting "risky sex activity",22 creating as a result a civilisation of apathy towards sufferers of the affliction and fostering a climate of shame and stigma amongst the gay community. Throughout his filmic career, Jarman combatted the prejudices towards the gay community by creating positive, unashamed images of homosexuality. He further exposed homophobia in a order that had pronounced his sexuality illegal for the beginning 25 years of his life. Living with AIDS – or as he would oftentimes quip and correct, "Dying with AIDS" – thus bestowed on Jarman a responsibility to put his experience of the affliction on record and relate it to others.

AIDS and its destruction chosen for a radical response in the simplest of forms. On a humanitarian level, what was needed was simply compassion: basic empathy with the suffering of a young man human, which in the elevation of neoliberalism, whose growth coincided with the AIDS epidemic, was scarce and seen as reactionary. When attempting a film on AIDS, Jarman knew he had to plow the camera in in social club to come out. For the personal to become universal, the colour blue then became his metaphor for affliction, a metaphor for transcending it:

In the pandemonium of image

I present you with the universal Blue

Blue an open door to soul

An infinite possibility

Becoming tangible.23

In Blue, Jarman essentially registers us, his audience, blind in guild to heighten our senses and open our doors of perception.

Delphinium, Blue

Jarman forecast: "In time, no one will remember our piece of work. Our life will pass like the traces of a cloud. […] For our time is the passing of a shadow".24 However, in contrast to his solemn prediction, and proving his self-deprecation unjustified, Blue has made a lasting mark upon cinema, and cinema-goers, and can be remembered as an exceptional television and radio consequence. With Bluish'south release, Jarman fantasised about walking through the streets of London and seeing a blueish glow emanating from people'due south television sets. He didn't actually want Blue to only be screened late at night to a niche audition; he wanted to hijack the screens of every Tom, Dick and Harry's domicile! He wanted Blue to be seen outside of the art crowds, the arthouse cinemas, and exterior of his own community. He wanted his blue eyed-male child's story to be an everyday story: to be heard, to be seen, and to be unapologetic.

In the posthumous introduction to the uncut BBC interview with Jarman, Isaacs proclaimed about Jarman: "No i else did so much with such petty resource." Jarman was triumphant in his DIY-filmmaking. His films dared to colour, betrayal, criticise, make fun of and gloat life. Through Jarman's own testaments, nosotros can deduce that making films drove him and making films with friends empowered him. Without worrying near belonging to ane style or some other, merely while denying definitions such as advanced, experimental or underground, he fix out to make films that expressed his politics, sexuality, national heritage, love of language and often pompous and theatrical imagery and to screen them on television set, transmit their audio through the radio, and bring them into the cinema. He made his films with low budgets and high ambitions, in regards to broadcasting. Blue was made to disperse in the air, as widely as possible, and never to be buried in the underground-scene.

Before Blue draws to a blackness end, Jarman leaves a blue delphinium upon a grave. Deep blue delphinium meadow flowers, kin to the yellow buttercup, are often given in remembrance of loved ones. In remembrance of Jarman, and in remembrance of Blue: "I place a delphinium, Blueish, upon your grave".25

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Source: https://www.sabzian.be/article/o-blue-come-in

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