jean cocteau takes off his glasses: joining derek jarman at his death bed
by Douglas Messerli
Derek Jarman (screenwriter and director) Blue
/ 1993
It is difficult to actually describe what
Derek Jarman’s important work of 1993, Blue, actually is. It is most
certainly not a “motion picture,” since there is no motion with only one image
that does not move projected on the screen: a screen-sized field of the color
International Yves Klein Blue.
It
probably doesn’t really matter how we label this masterwork, since its impact
is so immense there is no need for labels. Yet, even in its narration by actors
and friends such as John Quentin, Nigel Terry, and Tilda Swinton, along with
its score by Simon Fisher Turner with fragments of music by John Balance, Karol
Szymanowski, Erik Satie, Brian Eno (who would later score Jarman’s Glitterbug),
and others, it does quite behave like a work of cinema.
One
reviewer pondered why this work had become Jarman’s most popular. I cannot
attest that it is actually is his most popular work, but if so, I’d argue it is
because in its numerous shifts from simple everyday accounts of the what a
dying man has to suffer in the hands of doctors and nurses (Jarman complains of
having to take nearly 30 pills each day, some bitter, some way too large,
shares the optician’s chant of “turn eyes to the left, up, down, to the right,”
and repeats his terror of “the constant drip” to blood and body fluids) to his
intense sarcasm about the British attitudes towards gays, to those suffering
from AIDS, and towards the environment in general (“Charity allows the uncaring
to appear to care,” “The earth is dying and we do not notice it.”); from his
brief returns to childhood (at one point he poetically calls up his childhood
romance with India, at another moment he recalls the names by which he called
his Grannie, Mosel, Rueben, etc.) to Jarman’s comic commentaries about his condition
(“I caught myself looking at shoes in a shop window. The shoes I have on me
should be enough to walk me out of life.”); from his passionate recollections
of his wild sexual experiences in London of the 1960s and 70s (“I was a
cock-sucking slave, a size queen,” “We were cum-splattered nuclear breeders.
What a time it was!”) to the dying director’s poetic musings (“O blue come
forth, O blue arise, O blue ascend, O blue come in”); and finally in his
repetition of the names of his past lovers, all now lost to AIDS (“David,
Howard, Graham, Terry, Paul”)—through our one hour and nineteen minute
immersion in these various aspects of a single human being, it is almost as if
we too had been invited to sit by the side of this dying man’s bed, to hold his
hand, and simply listen.
For those of us who never had the horrible joy of mattering deeply to
someone on their AIDS death beds as well as for to those who were there far too
often, Blue asks similarly for us to share the life of an astonishingly
gifted human being who had fully loved and lived his life so that we might help
him to find the peace to die. “We all know tomorrow will end after sunrise.”
In
making this film Jarman once more sacrifices the most private moments to invite
us into his life.
He
died only 4 months after finishing this work. By experiencing it, he permitted
his audience to feel that they had shared those last days. And just as he
describes imagining an encounter with Jean Cocteau in the visage of a little
gray man in a doctor’s waiting room, by the time this work ends we too feel as
if we have witnessed greatness first hand.
In
accomplishing this, finally, we realize that, like one of the earliest of such
films, Arthur J. Bressan’s Buddies of 1985—which also asked us to sit at
the bedside of a dying gay man—Blue was one of the most significant of
the many dozens of AIDS movies.
Los Angeles, July 31, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July
2023).
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