Blue, Derek Jarman's final film, was made as he was dying of AIDS and blind, his vision hijacked by constant blue light. For its entire duration, the screen is filled with the color blue and nothing more, while Jarman, with voice contributions from frequent collaborators Tilda Swinton, John Quentin, and Nigel Terry, weaves a poetic, angry, wistful, and sometimes humorous account of his illness and impending mortality. He speaks of having become a "walking laboratory," taking up to thirty pills a day, of the chore of hospital waiting rooms, of the brusque indifference of medical personnel, of the hypocrisy of charity, and of the color blue. Jarman's voice is commanding. This is not an informal affair. He often speaks in verse, augmented with music and sound by Jarman's regular composer Simon Fisher-Turner, as well as Brian Eno, Coil, Momus, The King of Luxembourg, and others, forming an atmospheric wall of sound that is the film's imagery and is constructed in a highly cinematic way, with abrupt shifts in texture and tone. (The short-lived ambient sketch-comedy radio program Blue Jam created a similar mood.) Jarman invokes a sense of journey within the viewer, and the effect is hypnotic and moving. You walk away from it with total identification with Jarman, and once your eyes return to the corporeal world, it's as though sight has been restored. In terms of form, this movie is as bold as anything Jarman has done.

If the 1990s was largely defined by the mainstreaming of AIDS, Blue is a key film from that decade. Like Wim Wenders' Lightning Over Water, about the dying of Nicholas Ray, Blue is a naked portrait of a dying artist, although it is perhaps more intimate in that it originates from within. Blue goes further toward demystifying AIDS than straightforward documentary content has done, and Jarman is not nor was ever shy about retaining his sexual identity in spite of the stigma of his disease, the politics of which he address here with frank combativeness. In an ideal world, it is Blue and not the contrived and didactic Kids that would have made a splash as a provocative document of the modern epidemic—although, in an ideal world, neither film would be necessary. The fact that Jarman's final film hardly registered a dent is evidence that the medium of cinema has failed.

Paul Haynes