A Voice Comes Out of the Blue: Derek Jarman’s Final Film

In 1993, British artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman released a film called Blue, a 75-minute projection of an unchanging monochrome that stretches across a darkened screen—a rectangular symbol of Jarman’s slow descent into death from AIDS-related illnesses. Out of the glow of International Klein Blue, Jarman’s voice emerges as if from behind this eerie scrim, accompanied intermittently by the sounds of monastic bells, environmental noises, and composed music. In both narrated prose and poetic verse, Jarman tells the story of the interminable wait between his suspended life and his impending death, while his body is consumed by the virus. At the fore of the disease’s relentless attack is the slow diminishment of his sight, relegating his ocular vision to mere shadows and shades of blue.

My sight seems to have closed in. I feel defeated. My mind bright as a button but my body falling apart—a naked light bulb in a dark and ruined room. There is death in the air but we are not talking about it. (Jarman, 1993)

My first viewing of Blue occurred late in the evening, in my darkened living room. I began watching the movie “blind,” so to speak; I knew nothing of the film nor the filmmaker aside from the short blurb provided on the film-page’s description. After a few moments of feeling perplexed by the motionless image of a single, vibrant color that showed no sign of mutating, I found myself pulled into a sort of dream-world, rich with vivid flashes of unknown faces and distant places—pictures, sensations, and emotions that I could not account for by the static blue screen in front of me.

In the pandemonium of image

I present you with the universal Blue

Blue an open door to soul

An infinite possibility

Becoming tangible. (Jarman, 1993)

Drifting in and out of sleep, I dwelled in the hypnagogic experience of feeling dragged through the haunting, terrifying process of someone else’s dying, witnessing not only Jarman’s death, but participating, in some symbolic way, in my own. An imaginal cascade of archetypal images (ghouls with green faces, flapper girls with strange hairdos and too-pink lipstick, strange animals with long horns pushing their way into the gauzy screen) was unleashed within my psyche, prompted by the interplay between the stark blueness, the sonic soundscape, and the masterful unraveling of Jarman’s words:

The virus rages fierce. I have no friends now who are not dead or dying.

Like a blue frost it caught them.

I shall not win the battle against the virus.

Awareness is heightened by this, but something else is lost. A sense of reality drowned in theatre. The Gautama Buddha instructs me to walk away from illness. But he wasn’t attached to a drip. (Jarman, 1993)

Jarman’s Blue is simultaneously one man’s final elegy to his dying self, and everyman’s vicarious lament. For, we all are aware of our own dying, whether literally or metaphorically, consciously or unconsciously, immediately or abstractly; the only unknown is precisely how, and when, this death will overtake us. Jarman brings to us our dying so that we can acquaint ourselves with its immanence before it is time. The still life blueness of the screen that never changes evokes both the comforting sense of being firmly rooted in earthly time, and also the sense of being held in mystical transcendence—the paradoxical discomfort of being neither here nor there—neither fully embodied nor completely disappeared from this world.

In a psychological sense this polarity between the illusion of embodied constancy (I will wake up tomorrow and live another day) and the acute awareness of our impermanence (tomorrow, I may not wake up at all) holds the tension of the opposites, and blue is the transcendent third. Blue is neither asleep nor awake, living nor dying, white nor black. It is in the liminal space of blueness that the soul finds its portal to eternity. Jarman’s text continually plays between polarities, uniting them in a kind of parallel expression in which one begins to question the reality of tangible existence, while resting in, and being terrified by, the void of non-existence.

Jarman accomplishes through his innovative use of text, sound, and a single color on a screen what Swedish filmmaker and Jungian analyst Ingela Romare (2005) suggests is the aim of all artistic expression: it is “a way to search for and try to reveal—to [oneself] and [one’s] fellow beings—something about the very conditions of human existence” (p. 92). Jarman seems to find through his art both personal catharsis and universal resonance in patterns of the collective unconscious as he describes his descent into darkness through the unifying symbolism of blue. By inviting the viewer to stare into a blue void for the duration of a feature-length film, with the anchoring effects of voice, sound, and text beneath it, Jarman helps the viewer to experience the paradox of living while dying, thereby fulfilling the very purpose of art.

Jung (1966), in his writing on Picasso (pp. 135-41), comments on the (largely unconscious) psychological symbolism that is conveyed through an artist’s work, pointing to Picasso’s well-known “Blue Period,” which marked a period of significant depression in Picasso’s life following a friend’s suicide (Ravin & Perks, 2004, p. 363). Indeed, the color blue was used by both Picasso and his predecessors “to emphasize the emotional sensations of sadness and despair” (Ravin & Perks, 2004, p. 636). Throughout his Blue Period, “blindness was a theme that played an important role in [Picasso’s] first distinctive style” (Ravin & Perks, 2004, p. 636). Furthermore, the theme of blindness “pursued Picasso throughout life as though reproaching him for his unique gift of vision” (Ravin & Perks, 2004, p. 637). Similar to what one experiences with Jarman’s Blue, the blindness depicted in the characters of Picasso’s Blue Period often reveals “an intensity and an enhancement of other senses” (Ravin & Perks, 2004, p. 638) that compensate for a lack of sight.

Jung (1966) purports not to look at Picasso’s work artistically, but, rather, psychologically, having “occupied himself with the psychology of the pictorial representation of psychic processes, and, therefore, [being] in a position to look at Picasso’s pictures from a professional point of view” (p. 135). In Jung’s (1966) view, the fragmentation in Picasso’s psyche is reflected in his works of art, symbolizing a universal aspect of an artist’s descent into psychic dissolution:

A series of images…whether in drawn or written form, begins as a rule with the symbol of the Nekyia—the journey to Hades, the descent into the unconscious, and the leave-taking from the upper world…Thus Picasso starts with the still objective pictures of the Blue Period—the blue of night, of moonlight and water, the Tuat-blue of the Egyptian underworld…With the change of color, we enter the underworld. (p. 138)

Jung (1966) suggests that the type of descent involved in the work of artists like Picasso reflects the potential for psychic fragmentation, which he observes in the artwork of his patients with schizophrenia. While Jung (1966) is careful not to suggest that Picasso’s work reflects an undiagnosed psychosis (footnote, p. 137), he does suggest the presence of a latent, potential one. This potential for psychological splintering is also alluded to in the images of Jarman’s text:

The road to the city of Aqua Vita is protected by a labyrinth built from crystals and mirrors which in the sunlight causes terrible blindness. The mirrors reflect each of your betrayals, magnify them, and drive you into madness. (Jarman, 1993)

“Blue protects white from innocence
Blue drags black with it
Blue is darkness made visible. ”

— Jarman, 1993

The descent to madness would be understandable in anyone dealing with the difficulties of a prolonged illness such as AIDS. Yet, Jarman does not descend into madness, at least not as evidenced in Blue. Rather than experiencing psychic fragmentation in the face of his slow, terrorizing descent, Jarman brings the light of consciousness to his process in Blue that suggests there is something potentially unifying for the human psyche in expressing tragedy through art, and, specifically, in the color blue:

Blue protects white from innocence

Blue drags black with it

Blue is darkness made visible. (Jarman, 1993)

Blue, existing somewhere between black and white, contains both black and white. By “protecting white from innocence,” blue evidences a paradise lost; purity (symbolized by white) is tainted as it is infiltrated by death and decay (symbolized by black/darkness). The ironic play of “protecting” “white” from “innocence” depicts the psychic pain of this loss, as it is innocence itself that one might vie to protect, rather than the process of degradation by which blue keeps innocence/purity/whiteness from manifesting itself. Yet, not all is lost. As blue “makes darkness visible,” it both hints toward impending death/doom (i.e., reveals that all is devolving into unconsciousness/entropy), and it illuminates that which was previously unseen/unknown (i.e., increases consciousness). Thus, there is light and dark, gain and loss, birth and death, meeting in the medial space of blue. “Blue drags black with it”—always in psyche’s movement toward consciousness is the confrontation with that which ultimately has the power to extinguish it.

This black/white polarity is ubiquitous in themes of art, poetry, and mythology. On the symbolism of black and white, Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz (1995) writes that, in comparative mythology, black generally stands for the nocturnal, the underworldly, the earthly, belonging to what cannot be consciously known…white, on the other hand, stands for daylight, clarity, and order…consciousness has nothing to do except not be in the way; it must not block the positive processes in the unconscious by making plans of its own. (p. 303)

Jarman’s entire film sustains the liminality of blueness, a holding space somewhere between white and black, living and dying, spirit and soul. He is simultaneously existing in a heightened state of awakened consciousness while also “fading to black.” There is an ethereal quality to blue, a misty, mystical, vaporizing effect that is both of this world and between the worlds. “Blue is the universal love in which man bathes—it is the terrestrial paradise” (Jarman, 1993). The ethereal quality of blue is one aspect of the color that bridges earth and sky, art and mysticism, as artist Wassily Kandinsky (1977) explores in Concerning the Spiritual in Art. He writes:

blue is the typical heavenly color. The ultimate feeling it creates is one of rest. When it sinks to almost black, it echoes a grief that is hardly human. When it rises towards white, a movement little suited to it, its appeal to men grows weaker and more distant. (p. 38)

Here, Kandinsky (1977) suggests that there is an earth-bound (or even a subterranean) quality to blue that resonates with the depths of the human condition, particularly in its suffering. While blue is capable of losing its blackness in its movement toward whiteness, Kandinsky (1977) seems to insinuate that this would result in a loss of something that is of value to the human psyche, to the soul. There is soul-movement in the transitioning from life to death with such meticulous psychic awareness as Jarman demonstrates—the kind of soul-making that archetypal psychologist James Hillman (1980) highlights in his article Alchemical Blue and the Unio Mentalis. Hillman (1980) writes:

Transitions from black to white sometimes go through a series of other colors, notably darker blues, the blues of bruises, sobriety, puritan self-examination; the blues of slow jazz…The blue transit between black and white is like…sadness which emerges from despair as it proceeds towards reflection. Reflection here comes from or takes one into a blue distance, less a concentrated act that we do than something insinuating itself upon us as a cold, isolating inhibition. (p. 1)

In Jarman’s Blue, the “cold, isolating inhibition” is his conscious encounter with death itself—Jarman’s own transition from health and embodied vivacity to a new, protracted existence that is being obliterated by illness and steady decline. The loss of sight literally and metaphorically draws him into a process of a slow dimming that both obscures and illuminates his journey.

If I lose half my sight, will my vision be halved?

If the doors of perception were cleansed then everything would be seen as it is.

(Jarman, 1993)

The psychological clarity that Jarman achieves as he shines the light of consciousness into the darkness of personal and collective suffering is central to the Jungian symbology of alchemy. Von Franz (1980) describes blackness—the nigredo in alchemy—as the

destructive aspect of the unconscious…full of drives and dissociating factors… Enlightenment can come from that dark place; that is, if we direct the ray of consciousness upon it…then something white comes out and that would be the moon, the enlightenment which comes from the unconscious. (p. 147)

In Blue, the nigredo is the material that confronts Jarman in the dark face of literal death and decay, to which he brings the discerning light of consciousness by transforming his suffering into meaningful art. The memories of his past loves (who, ironically, brought upon him this cruel disease) revolve in a sequence of images that weave into and out of the persistent mortification of his decomposing flesh. Beauty and repugnance. Delight and despondency. Vivacity and demise. All goes in to the weighty cauldron containing the mish-mash of disparate parts that ooze together in the formation of a life lived toward conscious awakening and, paradoxically, our dying.

The bright blue that penetrates the blackness of the film screen is itself an illumination that seems to evoke consciousness out of the void. The technique Jarman chooses to express the sequence of events from erotic love to his own dying represents an alchemical process, one that challenges conventional filmmaking, which assumes and expects a successive presentation of visual images on a screen. The images in film are meant to show a viewer what to focus on; the filmmaker illuminates precisely which images the viewer is supposed to allow into consciousness at precisely what time and in which context. Jarman’s focus on a single visual motif with accompanying non-linear storytelling and music creates a unique psychological experience for the viewer in what Romare (2005) describes as a more feminine approach to filmmaking.

In her article The Feminine Principle in Film: Reflections on Film and its Relation to the Human Psyche, Romare (2005) distinguishes between the masculine and feminine principle in film, describing “what is called the ‘Anglo-Saxon Dramaturgy:’ a particular way of telling a story” (p. 95) in which the action of a film, “built on a conflict, is driven forward in a logical chain of events and a linear progressive time” (p. 96). Romare (2005) suggests that this method of filmmaking, which she identifies as adhering to a masculine principle, does not allow for “a way of creating a dialogue with the spectator or an opening for a relation with him” (p. 96). Rather, the masculine principle in filmmaking allows a filmmaker to exercise power over the viewer through “a whole arsenal of deliberate tools of manipulation to catch and bind the audience” (p. 96), which, according to Romare, remains largely unconscious to the audience.

Romare (2005) goes on to posit that a feminine approach to filmmaking is associated with “holding, carrying, nourishing, creating space, synthesis, Eros, and, above all, relating—inwards and outwards—towards the psyche and towards your fellow beings” (p. 97). Furthermore, she suggests that feminine filmmaking favors cyclical time over linear time (p. 98). This more feminine approach to filmmaking is precisely what Jarman accomplishes in Blue, by creating a suspension of space and time through the telling of story in a visual medium but without visual images. In a true Jungian sense, Jarman invites the viewer to experience image as psyche, without demanding that the viewer “see” his world, or the world, in any specific way. Jarman acts as a kind of psychopomp, guiding the viewer with his voice into an experience of psyche that is both deeply personal and poignantly universal. Meanwhile, he cautions the viewer to be wary of images,

for, accustomed to believing in image, an absolute idea of value, [the trapped Blue-Eyed Boy’s] world had forgotten the command of essence: Thou Shall Not Create Unto Thyself Any Graven Image, although you know the task is to fill the empty page. From the bottom of your heart, pray to be released from image…The image is a prison of the soul, your heredity, your education, your vices and aspirations, your qualities, your psychological world. (Jarman, 1993)

Here, the paradox of the image and imagelessness is heightened, as Jarman advocates for the liberation of the psyche from the imprisonment of the image, while also acknowledging that image is all we have. Image is the essence of psychic life, and, as Jarman releases himself from visual images (or, more accurately, his fading eyesight vanishes the world from his visual field), the psychic image—through words, through sounds, through memory—remains to fill the empty page: to tell the story of his life. The non-visual images in Jarman’s film all somehow reveal themselves through the archetypal image of blueness. This blueness seems both to ascend from the earthly realm and to descend from the transcendent, infusing mystical sight with its imaginal reality. In The New Gnosis: Heidegger, Hillman, and Angels, Latvian poet and religious studies professor Roberts Avens (2003) writes that, in the symbolism of colors,

blue stands for imagination; blue is the color of imagination and the imaginal psyche… The one who ‘goes under’ is not someone who has simply perished but rather one who ‘looks ahead into the blue of the spiritual night.’ The downfall of the soul is not merely a ‘falling into emptiness and annihilation;’ it is also the arrival ‘at a quieter sojourn in the early morning.’ (p.90)

“Thus blue is the arrival of consciousness itself, and, also, that which is beyond consciousness—blue opens the portal between the worlds of mundane reality and otherworldly transcendence. ”

Thus blue is the arrival of consciousness itself, and, also, that which is beyond consciousness—blue opens the portal between the worlds of mundane reality and otherworldly transcendence. There is something sacred in this liminal blue—a mystical glimpse of god itself. Philosopher Martin Heidegger (1971) illuminates the sacredness of blue in his discussion on the themes of blue that appear in the poetry of Austrian poet Georg Trakl:

The sheaf of blueness gathers the depth of the holy in the depths of its bond. The holy shines out of the blueness, even while veiling itself in the dark of that blueness…Clarity sheltered in the dark is blueness…Blueness resounds in this clarity, ringing. In its resounding clarity shines the blue’s darkness. Blue is not an image to indicate the sense of the holy. Blueness itself is the holy, in virtue of its gathering depth which shines forth only as it veils itself. (pp. 165-6)

Blue is not a film to be watched in the daylight; its depths only become apparent in the dark. Yet, to watch it in darkness is terrifying—the solemn invitation of monastery bells alternating with loud disco beats and the spinning creatures of amusement park carousels all clanking amidst yellow-bellied infections and raving-mad inpatients running from needles through the hospital ward. While Jarman, of course, long ago completed his descent—or ascent, as the case may be (he died in 1994)—the final film he created before his departure now carries those who remain to meet the blue-white spirits, dancing before the edges of a blue-black cave, where shadows emerge as swirls of transcendent light. Blue is the awe that emerges when the maw of the great chasm splits open the darkness of my living room, both ominous and magnificent, holding me in the space between nowhere and nothingness. This labyrinthine place I have entered is one out of which I am unsure how to return. I have no choice but to hold on through the strange darkness of night and await the dawning of a new day. For now, at least, I will continue to trust that the sun will rise again, signaling that, for me, there is yet one more day to live.

References

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www.queerculture.org/Pages/Jarman/JarmanBTx.html

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