Film screening: Derek Jarman, 'Blue', 1993

As filmmaker Derek Jarman’s health deteriorated due to AIDS-related illness in the early 1990s, he began to lose his vision. Rendered partially blind, his vision interrupted by blue light, Jarman’s last film, 'Blue', gives over to the monochrome colour. His film consists of a static, Yves Klein Blue, with a soundtrack of narrated voiceovers. Featuring the voices of Jarman and friends Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry and John Quentin, the poetic voiceovers tell the story of Blue, as a character and colour, and of Jarman’s day-to-day life as a gay man living in 1990s London.

Boaz Levin, responding to Jarman’s film in his essay ‘On Distance’, considers the colour blue a place of refuge, to him it is “as if Jarman’s monochrome screen becomes a retreat from the danger of overexposure, a cure for the redundancy of figurative representation, a space for affect, perhaps, rather than mere sensation.”

'Blue' will be screened in the gallery and runs for 79 minutes.

All welcome.

This film screening is the last of our series of screenings associated with our current exhibition, 'Crossings'. Like the works in the exhibition, these films have been selected for their relevance as we grapple with the effects of global lockdowns and the heightened anxieties generated by events of 2020, films that register the polarities of inside and outside, illness and health, public and private.