Derek Jarman’s Blue follows Jarman’s personal battle with AIDS, centering especially on his journey toward a total loss of vision. Blue is told through Jarman’s personal narration accompanied by the sole, unchanging image of a blue screen. Through this experimental form, Blue is able to shift our perception of “traditional” cinematic forms and understanding of voice, audience, and image, while simultaneously providing both a personal and political image of the experience of living in the AIDS pandemic in the 1990s. It was through the emphasis on Jarman’s (literal) voice and his many direct addresses to Blue’s audience, that I was able to reflect on my personal relationship to the AIDS pandemic specifically regarding AIDS-related vision loss. My mother is an ophthalmologist who treated AIDS patients in London in 1995. It is from these two archives — Jarman’s work and stories related to me by my mother throughout my life — that I found my own distinct, subjective position as an audience member in relation to Blue.
There are several different forms of voice a documentary can utilize, but in this film the inclusion of direct address is notable. In Nichols and Baron’s, “What Characterizes the Voice of Documentary and its Relation to Storytelling?” the duo define direct address as, “a voice that speaks directly to us; it lays out its point of view explicitly”. Throughout Blue, there are several different voices that are heard, both figuratively in terms of how Jarman speaks and who he speaks to and also literally in terms of the inclusion of other people’s voices as well. One of the most striking moments of direct address in Blue occurs when Jarman acts as if he has just turned on a recorder, asking the audience, “Can you hear me?” Jarman proceeds to describe a man in the hospital waiting room who is as “frail as Belsen”, with his pajamas hanging off of him. Jarman’s voice describes the hospital as extra quiet that morning, save for the distant coughing. Jarman tells us that dying from this disease can take longer than length of the Second World War, and that a bullet to the back of the head would be easier. Jarman’s direct address to us at this moment places us in this hospital with him. It almost feels that we, too, can hear the silence, see the frail man. This clear direct address to the audience brings us into the film, even places us into this space with him. The feeling of that hospital waiting room overcomes all else.
This specific iteration of voice is not the only method used throughout Blue. Jarman uses multiple formal techniques to tell a story, his experience, his daily life. Referring back to Nichols and Baron, they identify a form of narrative documentaries that “activate[s] our memory.” They write, “We must put it to work in relation to the film’s progress. Most stories expect us to draw on what we have already seen to interpret what we presently see.”
Blue’s incredible use of voice, its capacity to provoke these activations and these memories, was immediately striking. When I began watching Blue, I presumed and felt I was an audience member far separated from any of the experiences Jarman details. But, as Jarman recalls a conversation with his doctor, specifically as he describes the retina, my own personal memory is activated. My mother, known to her patients as Dr. Hopkins, is an ophthalmologist who treated AIDS patients in London during the mid-1990s. At my frequent request, she has told me numerous stories of her career experience, many of which come from her time treating patients with AIDS at the near height of the pandemic. At one point in Blue, Jarman says he thinks the retina looks like a planet. His doctor responds that he believes it looks like a pizza. At that moment, I thought back to my mom: this was the exact way she described the retinas she treated during the pandemic. I realized then that although I am still in separation from this era in history, I may be much closer than I originally thought to the lived experience of Jarman and others who suffered.
Much of the film’s address to the audience is direct, powerful, emotional, and often painful to listen to. But, as we consider the emotions it is meant to evoke, we must consider who the imagined audience may have been. This film has likely been watched by AIDS patients as they go through similar experiences, spending days in hospitals and losing their vision. It has likely been watched by people who have never meaningfully learned about the AIDS pandemic, or perhaps by the people who hold prejudice against people with HIV/AIDS. One way to look at documentary and audience when considering Blue is through Dylan Nelson’s piece, “Assembling Nanking: Archival Filmmaking in the Popular Historical Documentary”. At one point, Nelson mentions the professor Michael Renov and his suggestion that, “documentary can perform the ‘work of mourning’—not for the film subject who relates a harrowing story, or for the filmmaker who documents it, but for an audience whose own experience is sufficiently distant from the event.” This notion of a “work of mourning” feels deeply relevant to Blue and the potential impact it leaves on the audience through its practice of personal narrative archive.
Throughout the entirety of Blue, this work of mourning is palpable. Not only do we, as audience, start to mourn for Jarman and his inevitable death, but we also mourn for the others in the same situation. At one point in the film, we are (auditorily, at least) on the beach, listening to the wind howl and waves crash. Jarman admits to hearing his friends’ already deceased voices in the waves. Three times does Jarman repeat, “David, Howard, Graham, Terry, Paul”, and with each repetition do these names slowly fade out into the distance, into a memory. The audience does not personally know these people, but this moment of mourning and remembrance is designed for us, even for an audience that is distanced from this time and this event. Blue allows the audience to hold vigil for the memory of Jarman’s friends with him. As a young woman in America in the 21st century, I get the sensation that I am providing “fresh eyes” for the story, archive, and memorial held in Blue.. Through my “fresh”eyes and the story Jarman provides, it becomes possible to meaningfully grieve Jarman and his friends in a way that may have been entirely different during the height of this pandemic. Through this combination of temporal and cultural distance, but rapidly curated emotional closeness, I am able to mourn for Jarman and for his friends, and for me, it’s for the first time. We are confronted by the death and disease that is AIDS from a contemporary perspective, creating new perceptions and feelings.
This “work of mourning” offered to the audience by Jarman, however, is just a snippet of the archives associated with AIDS in the 1980s and 90s. In the process of thinking about my mother and the archive she holds within her personal memories, my relationship as an audience has the potential to shift and grow. What, from my mother’s archive, can meaningfully continue this work of mourning and memory? For this piece, I conducted a brief interview with my mother. She frequently referred back to individual patients many times, speaking to the difficulties of seeing the people she was desperately trying to save slowly pass away. She recalls, “It was terrible. It was really terrible. Especially because it was such a young, vibrant population of people that were really in their prime… You definitely struggled with feeling that it was very unfair that there wasn’t more that could help them”. This mourning that weighs so heavily in Blue, that was so present in Jarman’s life, has expanded into and affected my mother’s life, as well, albeit much differently. The hundreds of patients she worked with had lasting effects on her understanding of the world around her — not just professionally but personally, socially, and culturally. By expanding this archive, hearing from Jarman as an AIDS patient and from my mother as a doctor, my position as an audience once again shifts. My own lived experience will likely always be distant from these events, but these archives bring me closer to this time and these people. I find myself grieving for those lost at large , Jarman himself, and even my mother.
To talk about Blue, it feels almost essential to talk about the images, or lack thereof. The entirety of the film is an image of blue. The film is not imageless, but it lacks a moving image: for the entire duration of the film, we look at a single frame of rich and bright blue. When looked at for a prolonged period of time, the blue can nearly become painful on the eye. In Nelson’s piece, he grapples with the relationship between image and violence, asking,
“To what extent does showing violent, disturbing images risk reinforcing that violence, thus contravening the previously stated precept “do no harm”? Do such images sensationalize or fetishize violence—or, worse, trivialize the suffering of those who experienced violence? Do the images themselves inflict violence on the subject or on the viewer?” In Blue, this was a question, and a relationship that continuously felt relevant. What about this film’s use of one image felt so important? Necessary? What is it about this blue?
While this particular shade of blue has much to do explicitly with Jarman’s own personal loss of vision, does it also give us the option to create our own images, spend more time in our experiences alongside his own? Are we spared something by not having to look directly at images of grief and pain and destruction that this pandemic caused? Yet, this shade of blue, at times, does cause pain. It is beautifully rich and bright, but when forced to look at it for 79 minutes, it is only natural for the eyes to begin to fatigue, even ache. We may be spared harsh, graphic visuals, but we are not spared from the pain of this blue, or for Jarman and AIDS patients, the pain that is losing vision.
This is where image and archive can collaborate so meaningfully, guiding us not to a specific or prescriptive answer, but to a potential of what could be, to multiple possible interpretations. This sole image of blue was an element that haunted me as I tried to interpret it. I had manyquestions, but no answers. I asked my mom if the color blue meant anything to her or to our medical understanding of blindness. Immediately, she spoke about the process of imaging, about retinal camera flashes that are, “just so bright that it blues [your vision]”. She also noted that “often people who have lost their vision describe it as this blue. Like people think [it’s all black and dark]. But no, it’s almost like this blue activity. It’s not nothing”. She continued to explain that, “there’s still a lot of activity and light” for those who have gone blind . Is Blue’s singular image a representation of Jarman’s lived reality? The reading of Blue’s image as being “just a blue screen” seems trivial when I am presented with my mother’s archive. The image of blue is active for the seeing audience just as it is for the sight of someone who cannot see. Yet, even this single still of blue is different for everyone. In our discussion held in class, people felt they saw movement in the upper left corner, the blue became darker for some and lighter for others. Through our various perceptions, the image is not a still frame but actually has constant activity. The image in this film is not nothing, nor is it even singular, but shifts as our auditory and even internal perception shifts as well. The combination of viewing Derek Jarman’s Blue and the privilege of having access to an archive like my mother’s has brought me closer to the inner workings and ultimate impact of the AIDS pandemic. It is through the images and voices within the film that my memory is sparked, which allowed me to work closely and more meaningfully with these forms. Working through and dissecting these archives resulted in a shift in my position as an audience. I found myself growing from a passive viewer to an active participant; experiencing and mourning alongside Jarman and my mother, seeing the ultimate impact of the AIDS pandemic.
