Derek Jarman - Blue

BLUE
1993 / 78' / 35mm / coul. / son.
de Derek Jarman
voix : John Quentin, Nigel Terry, Derek Jarman et Tilda Swinton

Blue est le dernier film du réalisateur anglais Derek Jarman, décédé du Sida en 1994. Dans ce long métrage ("expérimental" a t-on dit, "parfaitement classique" à mon avis), le regard du spectateur plonge dans un unique plan bleu de 78 minutes, à l'écoute d'une bande sonore fabuleuse, rythmée par la voix du comédien principal John Quentin.
La voix dit le texte de Jarman, son expérience au quotidien face à la maladie et la cécité : Rencontre avec l'ophtalmologue dans la première séquence (en écoute ci-dessous) ; cortège des amis disparus ; avatars des analyses médicales ; lecture de la liste des effets secondaires des médicaments. Car le récit de Jarman n'est pas dénué d'humour, lorsqu'il compare sa pupille ravagée à une planète ; et l'ophtalmologue de corriger "...à une pizza".
La cécité fait de son champ visuel une plage bleu Klein, et ce bleu fixé durant 78 mn devient l'hypnotique exhausteur de l'ambiance sonore du film. Ce qui crée une situation à la fois empathique (le regard rivé à l'écran rend le spectateur également aveugle aux autres couleurs, formes et images) et synesthésique. Grâce au talent du compositeur Simon Fisher Turner, qui file un ensemble de sons environnementaux (illustrant les expériences de Jarman) avec un écheveau d'extraits classiques et ambient, empruntés à Brian Eno, Miranda Sex Garden, John Balance, Momus, Vini Reilly, les Gnossiennes de Satie... et d'autres, avec lesquels il compose une sublîme tapisserie auditive.
Et ce n'est pas la moindre réussite de Jarman d'avoir transfiguré son calvaire en une épure qui touche au mysticisme. Le récit se mue progressivement en élégie ; c'est le ravissement du bleu profond, paisible, annonciateur des grands fonds marins, où l'âme gagne le paradis. "La couleur bleue représente l'amour universel dans lequel baigne l'humanité - c'est le paradis terrestre." Derek Jarman.

Le texte du film Blue, en anglais



This "film" (if film it be), the last to be completed by the painter and diarist Jarman before his death early this year of AIDS, is, I'm pretty sure, the best movie I've ever seen (if it's even "seeable"). One hour and seventeen minutes of luminous blue 35mm glow, unchanging, calming, irritating, numbing, and a soundtrack laboriously collaged out of snippets of sound and music and Jarman's meditations on his encroaching blindness and approaching death, and on the blindness of the world to its own slower but equally inevitable demise.

Jarman, the consummate image-crafter, whose films are quite literally "moving pictures," coming to grips with the disappearance of all images from his field of vision, then the disappearance of his own self-image into the all-transcending blue of death. Realizing that, on the world's screen, he has no image; as a queer, an outsider, none of the images he has midwifed into the world will be allowed to have lives of their own and enter the viral give-and-take of autonomous phantasms that is "culture." So, facing death, he faces not the immediate post-mortem acclaim granted to those who, while unbearably unproductive while alive, were, at least, fertile; but rather the amnesia our society reserves for those whose existence it has never acknowledged in the first place.
"From the bottom of your heart, pray to be released from image."
But of course, none of this stuff is why I wanted to mention it to you; I brought it up because it struck me, like a bolt out of the blue, as an answer to my prayer in my anti-review of Dracula, six months ago. A cinema that has transcended its own images. Eventually the effect of the droning blue screen is that you are inside Derek Jarman's head, seeing what he sees (nothing), hearing what he hears, both outside and inside, and then, when the movie's over...The one truly human experience, death, communicated, by a master artist transcending the materials and limitations of his own art by facing his own nonexistence, and ours.
The film's ancestors would be the monochromies of Yves Klein (the color is actually very similar to International Klein Blue), he of the "leap into the void"; it doesn't take very long before the brain (or the world), like a sponge, soaks up the blue of the screen (the same way it would have fed on the fast food of images, had there been any) and, in the unified blue of the blue world, we attain, as the old Tibetan texts say, the faculty of walking in the sky, if only for this short, magic hour and seventeen minutes of cinematic time.
And so it is that, at the movie's very end, in the midst of an incredibly lyrical and erotically charged love song, Jarman is strangely reassuring about the world's blindness. "Our name will be forgotten, in time, no one will remember our work," he says, as if this is a good thing, because it allows us to concentrate on our love, which is what really matters. Freed from self-conception as artists, queers, or anything else, we are free to become what only death can make us, human, and hence free to realize the true potential of our estate. Beyond words, beyond names, beyond subject and object "In the pandemonium of image, I bring you the universal Blue." Gridley Minima