Derek Jarman
Blue1993

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Artist or Maker: Derek Jarman
United Kingdom, London, 1942-1994
Title: Blue
Date Made: 1993
Medium: 35mm film, colour and sound
Dimensions: Duration: 1 hrs. 19 minutes
Credit Line: Jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, purchased with funds provided by Graham Steele and Ulysses de Santi, Herb Ritts Foundation, Marietta Wu and Tom Yamamoto, the Ralph M. Parsons Fund, Jay Ezra Nayssan and Dr. Max Dean Goldstein, and an anonymous donor
Accession Number: M.2024.135
Classification: Time Based Media
Collecting Area: Contemporary Art
Curatorial Notes: The concept of Derek Jarman’s Blue is extremely straightforward: the 79-minute film is a continuous monochromatic field of International Klein Blue (IKB). The abstract color projection is accompanied by audio consisting of music composed by Simon Fisher Turner, and spoken text written by Jarman and read by Nigel Terry, John Quentin, Tilda Swinton, and Jarman himself.

Made during the peak years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, Blue debuted in September 1993, five months before Jarman’s AIDS-related death in February 1994. On one hand, Blue was the realization of his longtime interest in making a completely abstract film, bringing together his work as a painter and filmmaker. More poignantly, he made Blue after his own partial vision loss due to complications from HIV/AIDS, during which time he experienced flashes of blue light. Blue, Jarman’s final work, is both a rumination on the artist’s own experience of HIV/AIDS and an elegy for his friends who, by 1993, had already died due to complications of the virus.

Of his own failing eyesight, Jarman voices early in the film:

Look up

Look down

Look up

Look right

Blue flashes in my eyes

Later, carrying the theme of “blue” to the passing of his friends, Jarman says: “How did my friends cross the cobalt river, with what did they pay the ferryman? As they set out for the indigo shore under this jet-black sky—some died on their feet with a backward glance. Did they see Death with the hell hounds pulling a dark chariot, bruised blue-black, growing dark in the absence of light, did they hear the blast of trumpets?”

The first work by Jarman to enter LACMA’s collection, Blue is a co-acquisition with the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. When the film debuted to the public in 1993, in addition to its theatrical screening, it was also broadcast simultaneously on BBC Radio 3 and Channel 4 television in the UK. This acquisition includes two formats, a 35mm celluloid film print (one of only fourteen existing film prints), and a 2K scan of the original film, allowing the work to be projected from celluloid in a theater context or digitally projected in a gallery presentation.

Jennie King

2024

Derek Jarman
Blue1993

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Derek Jarman
Blue1993

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