Blue
In remembrance of the 31st anniversary to the day of the passing Derek Jarman, the From Below will be showing his final film, Blue (1993), on Wednesday, February 19, at 7pm.
Here is the link to reserve a seat. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’re starting the movie at 7:10.
Blue is 76 minutes of a single, unchanging still frame of blue. It features a backing audio track made up of a mixture of poetry, field recordings, and diary entries on life with AIDS read by Derek Jarman himself and a few of his frequent collaborators: Nigel Terry, John Quentin, and, of course, Tilda Swinton. The words are overlaid with noise compositions diversely sourced from Simon Fisher Turner, Coil, Brian Eno, Durutti Column, Current 93 and Kate St. John, all friends of Jarman.
Derek Jarman went partially blind by the end of his life due to complications from AIDS, his visual field altered by the disease to be dominated by hues of blue light and shadows. We love Jarman for his textured cinema, his at turns lush or austere shadowy sets with flickering candles and billowing, ruffly costumes, intimate motifs of skin and water caught on grainy Super 8. From this, Blue departs, a radical experiment in minimalist abstraction, pushing the limits of representation, looking, and listening, diving as deeply as he could into a philosophy and sensual experience of color and sound. Jarman, a painter himself, was inspired by the blue paintings of Yves Klein, whose IKB hue is the blue of the film. We wonder in what ways Jarman’s film meaningfully aligns and dis-identifies with being a painting. Neither of us have watched Blue before; it’s frankly hard to shake the feeling that you need the always-elusive-just-right time for the reverential endeavor. We’re thrilled to use the From Below to finally make that time and undertake it with all of you.
Against my curatorial fretting for the “correct” viewing experience, the reality of the original distribution of Blue was much looser than I imagined. Blue was printed on 35mm and premiered on the film festival circuit, but it also received a more mass, experimental release, too, originally broadcast simultaneously in England as a TV special on Channel 4 and read as a radio play on the BBC. Jarman arranged to have two whole pages in the Radio Times printed with a spread of the blue image so that listeners could look at the blue while listening along to the audio broadcast. The last few weeks I’ve been scouring the internet looking for photos of Blue as an object, imagining a great blue reel, sapphire as a hulking roll of painter’s tape. No luck on the image, but that search did turn up this delightful anecdote from the Walker Art Museum about the challenges of screening and preserving Blue:
“The Walker…houses a pristine 35mm celluloid print of Blue….But when the Walker originally presented the film in the galleries, conservation concerns over wearing down and scratching this 35mm print through months of looped projection led to a different solution: a flickering projector (aided by a piece of kit called “The Flicker-O-Meter,”…) would beam through a projection window coated with a blue gel. This filmless projector would thus throw a perfectly IKB shade, accompanied by a CD dub of the soundtrack. Again, Blue was a film without film.”
“Both then and now, Jarman’s masterpiece raises intriguing technical questions of how to show a film, particularly regarding its digital presentations. While a recent transfer of Blue from 35mm to Blu-Ray has offered a new standard for the digital presentation of the film, questions of display has now turned to the surface on which the work should be projected, most notably with a recent screening of the work at the IMAX in London where the modern screen, which is digital and 3D-ready, was noted in returning a slightly different shade of Blue.”
Long live Derek Jarman! See you in the From Below.