The viewer is confronted throughout the film with a blue projection on the screen. The sound-track supports this unchanging image with voices, conversations, music and sound effects. Blue is the result of the fact that Derek Jarman has been seropositive for several years. During the treatment he has undergone to combat the symptoms of AIDS, his sight has been severely affected and the form of the film can be inter¡preted as a literal outcome of this.The colour blue also acquires a major thematic role. The colour of the sea, the image that lingers on the retina after the eye tests, the place of the colour blue in nature, its spiritual qualities and some more prosaic associations; Blue evokes questions about the character of cinema, of perception and not lastly on the character of sexual preferences.The film has already evoked wonderful reflections, such as that of Paul Julian Smith in Sight & Sound: ‘By refusing to image the body, by offering only the blue screen on which spectators project their own images, Jarman brilliantly eludes the double bind of representing AIDS – bearing witness to illness, but avoiding both the narcissism of Collard and (Hervé) Guibert and the invasive intrusions of the documentary gaze. We learn to stop looking and to start listening instead.’
