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The screen is a rectangle of raw white light; it would seem to be a projectionist's error were it not for the voice narrating, describing, chanting, musing. After a few minutes the screen switches abruptly to blue and remains so for the rest of the film. We are watching Derek Jarman's Blue his last film, directed while he was going blind as a result of AIDS. The film describes this descent into blindness and death: the repeated visits to the hospital, the memories of friends already claimed by the disease, the attempts to come to terms with what is happening. It is a sadly familiar and nevertheless unassimilable story; the featureless screen reflects our blank incomprehension. Yet by the end of the film, something has come out of this nothing. Out of the narrator's words images have been born, images in the mind's eye. And that imaging process ultimately implies not an easy escapism but a politics of vision. This explains why a film that is explicitly and movingly about AIDS devotes much of its time to meditations on vision, both physical and psychical, and on the mutifoliate significance of a single color, blue.
Blue is, in many senses, an after-image. To begin with, the white light at the film's opening can be identified with a certain diagnostic procedure: 'the shattering bright light of the eye specialist's camera leaves the empty sky-blue after-image.'(f.1) But whereas in reality 'the after-image dissolves in a second' (123), Jarman's film slows down that after-image, moves into it, and muses on all that is consequent to the blinding revelation of his diagnosis. Listening, we soon realize that in a curious way he almost welcomes the loss of images. As Jarman's state becomes one that could indeed be ironically described as 'after image,' he asserts that he is also anti-image. 'From the bottom of your heart, pray to be released from image,' he says. This is because 'The image is a prison of the soul' (115). But this allblue film, which seems to blind the filmgoer's eye, opens the prison door:
In the pandemonium of image I present you with the universal Blue Blue an open door to soul An infinite possibility Becoming tangible. (112)
In what sense, we must...