Plot summary
Blue is an experimental work built on a single unchanging blue screen. On the soundtrack, voices, music and effects overlap as two strands of narration unfold. One follows Blue as a character and a color, clashing with other colors and traveling to blue mountains. The other follows a gay man in 1990s London who is living with AIDS. He describes his health, his weakening body and his failing eyesight, along with ordinary moments such as meeting friends at a café, talking about the war in Sarajevo, and struggling to dress. More dreamlike passages wonder what lies beyond the sky and what an astronaut might be like. The names David, Howard, Graham, Terry and Paul recur, remembered as lovers and friends. Tibetan bells sound at intervals.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Blue (1993)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Derek Jarman made his final feature while AIDS-related illness was taking his sight: by the time Blue came out he was partly blind and could see only in shades of blue. He died four months after its release.
- There is no photographed image in the film at all. The blue on screen was made in a film laboratory as a single wavelength of light, captured on 35mm stock for the whole 79-minute running time.
- Jarman planned the whole film in notebooks instead of the scripts, treatments or storyboards a film production would normally be built from.
- An early version of the project was conceived as a tribute to the French artist Yves Klein and his blue monochrome paintings. Jarman gave that idea up as his own illness took over the work.
