J. Edgar Bauer:
“Blue” (1993), an imageless film, consists only of a blue screen and sound track. While the terminally ill Derek Jarman thought that “Blue” would be the last of the series of films he created since “Sebastiane” in 1976, he actually completed one more film, “Glitterbug”, before his death of AIDS in 1994. It is “Blue”, however, that most poignantly expresses Jarman's worldview and offers indispensable access to his complex oeuvre. The script shows relevant intertextual connections with his other written works. With regard to its literary form, the text of “Blue” is diary-like with, in some cases, apophthegmatic entries. From the point of view of content, “Blue” conveys a many-sided vision of the life of an artist that is gradually going blind and who, in the face of death, meditates on the ultimate meaning of art in connection with his emancipatory conception of sexuality. Jarman deploys his discursivity against the background of a post-Christian spirituality aiming at personal transcending, though not at objectifiable transcendence. In spite of Jarman's critical attitude towards the theological premisses of Christianity as well as toward the sexual binarism it sanctions, “Blue” resonates with the fundamental triadic structures in the earliest formulations of Christian theology. Indeed, the emblematic figure of “Blue” functions as an instance of mediation and reconciliation with universal Becoming. Although Jarman always stressed the paramount role of non-assimilable differences in new sexual life-styles, when he articulates his own soteriological expectancies, he recurs to a scheme of assimilatory reintegration in Becoming through death. By stressing this metaphysical (self-)assimilation over the finitude of difference, the personal mythology of “Blue” seems to leave behind the élan underlying Jarman's own sexual revolt: “We came to alter the world, not join it”.
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