Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Against a plain, unchanging blue screen, a densely interwoven soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music attempt to convey a portrait of Derek Jarman's experiences with AIDS, both literally and allegorically, together with an exploration of the meanings associated with the colour blue.
Derek Jarman's Blue is one of cinema's most radical formal experiments: a single, unwavering blue screen for 79 minutes while a layered soundscape of poetry, memoir, music and sound effects carries the entire emotional weight. The cinematography score reflects the audacious conceptual achievement of making a single static colour frame the most visually confrontational and meditative image in arthouse history. Novelty is unambiguously exceptional — no film before or since has so absolutely stripped the image to zero while loading so much onto sound and voice. The ending, coinciding with Jarman's imminent death and delivered as a kind of valediction, is genuinely devastating. Plot and acting are rated more modestly because the work deliberately dissolves narrative and performance into pure lyric address — strong on their own terms but not the film's primary achievement.