Capital Celluloid 2014 - Day 97: Mon Apr 7

Blue (Jarman, 1993): BFI IMAX Cinema, 7pm


Here is the BFI introduction to what sounds like some event: We conclude our two-month Derek Jarman retrospective with a very special presentation: Jarman’s Blue, projected on a truly magnificent scale, in the BFI IMAX. Various musicians provide the highly textured soundscape through which the director and his close friends weave a rich vocal account of his life and loves. Close to his death, Jarman draws the viewer into his vision-impaired world – a vision rendered only in blue. Don’t regret missing this truly one-off event, presented in association with Little Joe Magazine.


Time Out review:
The screen is a perfect blue throughout as Derek Jarman faces up to AIDS, the loss of loved ones, the breakdown of the body, blindness, his own approaching fall into the void. The film embodies the spiritual transcendence which Cyril Collard sought to convey in the last reel of his anguished melodrama Savage Nights, crucially in the serene contemplation of the screen itself, but also in Jarman's beautiful poetry. Extracts from the film-maker's diary supply an ironic commentary on the 'progress' of his illness so that the movie becomes a juxtaposition between the finite and the infinite, the sublime and the ridiculous. Greatly helped by Simon Fisher Turner's soundtrack. Moving beyond words.
Tom Charity

Above and here is the opening.

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