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Article Excerpt
Celebrated as a prominent avant-garde director, Derek Jarman quipped that he preferred to be known as "a painter who dabbled in another art form, namely cinema" (qtd. in Lawrence 248). He could also aptly be billed as an innovative gardener; the author of a body of sophisticated, frequently autobiographical writings on art and identity; and, as one of the earliest publicly HIV-positive people in Britain, a confrontational activist for AIDS causes and queer rights. All of these facets are evident in Blue, his emotionally powerful and cinematically experimental final film, made as he gradually lost much of his eyesight to an AIDS-related retinal virus, cytomegalovirus. Jarman's twelfth feature film, Blue, premiered at the 1993 Venice Biennale. Chronicling the progression and ramifications of what Jarman, with characteristic wit, dubbed the "sight oh! megalo virus" (Chroma 42), by way of a collage of narrated medical, personal, spiritual, and political material, it is the visual form of Blue--its radical choice to embrace monochrome, to present an invariably "blank" blue screen, accompanied by rich dialogue and a lush soundscape, throughout its 76 minutes--that has attracted the most comment.
The film's escape into luminous blue from what it memorably terms "the pandemonium of image" not only converts aspects of Jarman's experience of failing eyesight into an artistic product, it also pays tribute to French painter Yves Klein. Drawing on the western tradition of utilizing blue to connote the infinite and spiritual and on Giotto's famously blue sky in the Basilica at Assisi, Klein patented a vibrant shade of ultramarine, dubbed International Klein Blue (IKB), to convey his cherished qualities of boundlessness and immateriality. During the 1950s, Klein utilized IKB to create a well-received monochromatic series. IKB is intended to be a joyful celestial colour that evokes states of reverie and produces ambiences beyond the phenomenology of time. Klein wrote that "colours always lead to associations with concrete, material, and tangible ideas while blue, at the very most, recalls the sea and the sky, which are the most abstract aspects of a tangible and visible nature" (qtd. in Stich 78). Klein strove to defamiliarize content from form, producing books without words and paintings without images; his celebrated Symphonie Monoton comprises one extended chord. It was under the title Symphonie Monotone, and in front of a backdrop of IKB, that the script that became Blue was first performed in 1991. Blue is a multi-layered homage to Klein; not only does Blue, as cinema sans moving image, extend Klein's disruption of conventional pairings of content and form, its screen is saturated IKB, and its consideration of the nature of Blue echoes Klein's in attributing to it qualities of contemplation, joy, spaciousness, immateriality, and the sea. All of these qualities are germane to the meditation on (im)mortality found in Blue's final consolatory vision of a queer h(e)aven, to which this essay devotes itself.
Monochrome abstraction has been deployed by many painters, Klein and Jarman among them, as a strategy to thwart representational expectations; in the case of Blue, the imageless screen, Jarman's refusal to visually document his AIDS-afflicted body, stands as "an urgent, politicised response to other unsatisfactory representations of the AIDS crisis" (Moor 50). Jarman explains that his earlier film, The Garden (1990), failed because "AIDS was too vast a subject to 'film,'" its art becoming "well-intentioned but decorative" (Derek 91). In the decade following the discovery of the disease in 1981, the hegemonic or expected representation of the Person with AIDS (PWA), especially in popular American media sources, generally supported "an inflammatory cultural narrative" that posited "Homosexuality = AIDS = Death" (Lawrence 243-44). Branded in such representations as culpable, disfigured, and depraved, PWAs were caught in a Foucauldian "trap of visibility," the dehumanizing inspection of vulnerable groups considered sick, perverse, or criminal (Smith 18). It was in this context that New York's ACT UP activists asked the public to stop looking at PWAs and start listening to them. A call to which Blue, its static blue screen augmenting the prominence of the accompanying soundscape, arguably responds. Jarman was not the only artist to avert the public's prurient gaze by removing the HIV-positive body from representation: similar in this respect is Felix Gonzalez-Torres's New York billboard project, which features a monochromatic photograph of his and his lover's rumpled bed immediately after the latter had died from AIDS complications. Both Gonzalez-Torres and Jarman produce politicized elegies for AIDS losses, but the lyrical, philosophical, and non-narrative aspects of Blue distinguish it from most "first wave" Anglo-American AIDS art, which is dominated by what Linda Singer terms the "language of the demand" (qtd. in Brophy 7). Hence, Paul Julian Smith's argument that in "switching between politics and metaphysics, Blue serves as a vital link between Anglo-American activism and French abstraction" (19). The politics that inhere in that metaphysics is something we will return to.
Reviewing Blue, Gridley Minima proposes that "eventually the effect of the droning blue screen is that you are inside Jarman's head, seeing what he sees (nothing)." But does Jarman "see" nothing? To the contrary, while he does eventually lose his eyesight, his work testifies to the preservation or augmentation of his insight; this distinction between sight and vision, eyesight and insight, is cited by Jarman in Blue when he asks, "If I lose half my sight will my vision be halved?" (7). Mobilizing IKB's ability to inspire reverie, Blue's renunciation of image actually encourages us to envision more fully, in our mind's eye, what is described in the film's narration. It also allows Jarman to adopt a logic of sacrificial blindness and pose, at various points in Blue, as a "blind bard" (Wymer 176), adapting the queer magus figure he had played in many of his previous productions (Moor 55, 62) to the allied figure of the spiritual seer. It is in the film's concluding vision of an eternal queer sanctuary on the seabed that Jarman's stance as a seer is most pronounced. This paper examines this final scene as a prophecy: Jarman's attempt to mitigate an unassuageable loss by appropriating the ancient Christian paradigm of blindness as spiritual insight to render himself as a seer capable of auguring a queer h(e)aven for himself and his beloved "Lost Boys." Drawing on the Bible and The Tempest, amongst a panoply of intertexts, Blue's finale queers the sacred and relocates the habitat of Bliss from the terrestrial garden, or pharmacopeia, to a more capacious ocean setting. One need not invoke a teleological privileging of late works to argue for the import of this final scene in Jarman's final film--it is one both the director and many of his critics return to, and it serves as an instructive model of one of...
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