Responses To Derek Jarman's Blue [1993]

[Various Artists]

Responses To Derek Jarman's Blue [1993]

London, UK: Pilot Press, 2022

[unpaginated], 20 x 15 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

I remember reading about Derek Jarman's final film Blue at the time of its release, but if it played in Toronto it came and went quickly, unbeknownst to me. I had seen Edward II in cinemas* and I was a fan of the videos he made for the Smiths, but mostly it was the idea of an all-blue screen for 79 minutes that appealed to me. 

The same way I enjoy camera-less photography, I'm a fan of cinema-less cinema. Works like Tony Conrad's Yellow Movie, for example, or Yoko Ono's film scripts, Jackson Mac Low's Tree Movie, Louise Lawler's A Movie Will Be Shown Without The Picture, etc. etc. 

A few years later a friend who worked at the CFI sent me a bootleg on VHS, but in the meantime I settled for the soundtrack on CD, which more or less provided the bulk of the film, if you stared at its blue cover while listening. 

I suspect more people have experienced the work this way than in cinemas, and I'm just now learning that BBC radio broadcast Blue as an audio piece, and distributed postcards with International Klein Blue, to also approximate the experience of the film. 

The work has become a classic crossover from Arthouse cinema to Artist's Cinema, sitting comfortably alongside structuralist filmmaking like Michael Snow's Wavelength and durational works like Andy Warhol's Sleep or Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho. But Blue is also deeply moving as a portrait of a man living with, and eventually dying from AIDs. 

Jarman publicly declared himself HIV positive in 1987, and referred to a forthcoming response within his practice. “I left it as long as possible, because making a film about illness is jolly difficult,” he later remarked. He began to go blind shortly afterwards, seeing only a hazy dark blue, and would succumb to the illness only a few months after the film's premiere. 

Responses to Derek Jarman’s Blue is the third publication in a series of anthologies from Pilot Press seeking contemporary responses to works of art made during the AIDS crisis.

Contributors include Roelof Bakker, Jared Davis, Becca Albee, Linda Kemp, Ashleigh A. Allen, David Nash, Sam Moore, Anton Stuebner, Gonçalo Lamas, Olivia Laing, Nate Lippens, Jason Lipeles, JP Seabright, Andrew Cummings, Sig Olson, Maria Sledmere, Cleo Henry, Jessie McClaughlin, Lars Meijer, Scott Treleaven, Declan Wiffen, Caitlin Merrett King, Harry Agius, António Manso Preto, Adriana Lazarova, Brooke Palmieri, D Mortimer, Mary Manning and Aaron James Murphy. 

*I mostly remember that it includes a joke borrowed from Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, where the camera pans away from the action to reveals that the soundtrack (in this case an Annie Lennox song) is in fact diegetic.