Pity the child who grows up experiencing loneliness alone. Who listens to Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” in earbuds instead of the full theater while Cohen performs. Who reads W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues” alone in a library instead of hearing it amongst others at the graveside service.
Pity the child, too, who watches Derek Jarman’s Blue, chopped into 10-minute increments, on a three-and-a-half inch screen.
Berkeley’s BAM/PFA closes out its retrospective of the filmmaker Derek Jarman this week, and appropriately, organizers have chosen Jarman’s final, heartbreaking film, Blue. The film is an immersive experience of solitude that begs to be shared with others, and whether one has seen the film or not, the rare screening offers that very fruit of communion.
Visually, Blue is solely a blue screen, for 79 minutes. But the film’s discordant score and evocative narration—by Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry, John Quinton and Jarman himself—create lasting, intimate images of the British filmmaker’s final days wrestling with complications from AIDS. The disease had rendered him blind, blue was all he saw, and thus blue is all the audience sees.
Short, sharp vignettes of frustrating visits to the hospital, to the optometerist, to the café—these are interwoven with Jarman’s commentary on the disease and the uselessness of AIDS-awareness campaigns. “I shall not win the battle against the virus, in spite of the slogans like ‘Living With AIDS,’” he intones at one point. “The virus was appropriated by the well, so we have to live with AIDS while they spread The Quilt for the moths of Ithaca across the wine dark sea.”
