BLUE. 1993 FILM
The screen of this movie remains plain and unchanging during its 72 minutes. Over the blue surface of the screen, the voices of four actors, close friends of the director, the speech of the director himself, the sound effects and the music narrate Derek Jarman's experience with the AIDS virus, alternating the description of the progress of the virus with deep considerations on poetry, art and life. The blue screen is accompanied by Simon Fisher Turner's poetic music and seductive words, sublimely formulated by the actors Nigel Terry, John Quentin and Tilda Swinton, all of them faithful, long-time collaborators of Jarman's.

Leading avant-garde British filmmaker whose visually opulent and stylistically adventurous body of work stands in defiant opposition to the established literary and theatrical traditions of his sometimes staid national cinema. A champion of film art and a dedicated experimentalist, he was a critic of, and at odds with, what he saw as the stifling, repressive commercialism of mainstream cinema. Always struggling for funds, Jarman produced his first seven features for a combined cost of only $3 million. His final film, Blue, was his most unconventional—an unchanging field of blue over which we hear voices and sounds. Blind and mortally ill, Jarman remained a visionary film maverick. He authored a number of books, including a 1984 autobiography, Dancing Ledge. Jarman succumbed to AIDS complications at age 52.