Critics reviews

Replacing the canvas with the screen, Jarman’s Blue is alive with our own projections. The purity of colour and its power to evoke true experience allows for the spectator’s presence in the absence of man.

Perhaps by eliminating straightforward representation, one can focus on the soul rather than its vessel. In this regard, it's unique in how it merges experimental and narrative qualities. What may at first seem alienating for viewers unfamiliar with Jarman soon becomes inviting in its courageous closeness. BLUE is the essence of cinema as ontological study, a staggeringly afflictive experience that illuminates film's most transcendent qualities.

A rich memoir of Jarman's formative experiences as a gay man, and of his confrontation with sickness and mortality in the context of the AIDS crisis, an epidemic that disproportionately affected a whole generation of queer people. By inviting audiences to see as he saw, to hear as he heard, Jarman achieves an unparalleled intimacy with his audience in his final film.

A visual representation of the onset of his optical deterioration, the film's succession of single, saturated blue frames provide a canvas for an intimate narrative of great verbal and aural nuance, a chronicle of a life told not through images but imagery itself.

Its rich text filled with details of hospital visits and the side effects of antivirals, and with the multiple metaphors engendered by the eponymous tint, Blue is many things — sober and puckish, elegiac yet intensely alive — but never maudlin. Above all, it is the work of an artist who, even in the last year of his life, was still incandescent.

Derek Jarman's final feature-length film Blue (1993) is a freestanding aesthetic construct, but it is nonetheless determined by its existence as a final, courageous act... The sweeping, subliminal power of color field paintings, like those of Barnett Newman or Mark Rothko, had seldom been captured onscreen until Jarman's film, which successfully translates the paintings' overwhelming experience of captive viewership.

Made when the filmmaker was almost completely blind and dying of AIDS and theatrically released in 1993, Blue is an instance of cinematic perception and expression at their extremity... Blue not only elicits extremely positive or negative responses from most of those who experience it but also challenges our "natural attitude" (better termed "naturalized attitude") about the phenomenon we call a "film.

The film offers the viewer nothing but a saturated blue screen for 76 minutes. Accompanied by voiceover musings read by Tilda Swinton, John Quentin, Nigel Terry, and the filmmaker himself, the image quickly attains both a pulsating vibrancy and obstinate fixedness. It's hypnotic, a little harsh, and there's simply no escaping it.