Sprint3_Week6#Additional Work: Day 1 suggested reading

That day the sunlight looked more made up than ever. All I really saw was Blue’s absence.

After reading the article about Film and Video Umbrella, in the artist’s view, the damaged retina has started to peel away,’ in Blue, ‘leaving the innumerable black floaters, like a flock of starlings around in the twilight. I will liken the Blue into symbols.

At first, the writer showed that celluloid is a gelatinous layer of silver crystals suspended precariously atop plastic tape. And for those reasons, it would be hard to keep the film intact. A symbolic act that underscores the fragility of all carriers, especially the body.

Blue is also a famous negation of the cinematic demand for an unfolding of moving images. In the writer’s mind’s eye, he/she imagines a version of Blue aggressively cross-hatched by time. In seeing Blue two ways, in a delayed double-take, the loss that Jarman experienced permeates human being. I suppose the double-take of Blue not only happened in the film itself. When we’re watching Blue, the Blue color block and what is showing up in our minds – a double exposure of the visual level in the mind is formed. Then, when we’re hearing the sounds from the film, what the images, memories, feelings, etc, that flash in our brains together with sound make up the second exposure.

By reading the second article, Derek Jarman’s Blue: Negating the Visual. Journal of applied arts & health, color comes to serve as the metaphor through which Jarman guides his viewers through the minefield of the visual, the non-visual, and discourse surrounding AIDS and death. He does so from the position of an ill, dying man fighting with his disease, and most specifically, fighting with his encroaching blindness. He actually draws attention to the problems of a cultural language that is directed by the visual. When the Blue is playing, we enter a world of a world of AIDS patients, the color of the world after we see eye drops dripping into the eyeball, is an indictment through the visual and auditory senses, a call in calm. Blue, then, does not aim to simply recall or represent a scene of pain and suffering, it aims to recreate a sensory experience within the viewer. Jarman’s blue screen excludes images, and in doing so draws attention to those AIDS deaths and narratives not being shown or discussed by society at large.

With his vision failing him, Jarman uses the verbal and the written word to perform the self and the absent body one last time. In removing full vision we are forced into an encounter with the materiality of everyday living through other sensory receptors. And in combining the visual with the auditory Jarman produces something that is both resonant and evident. Blue, we are immersed in listening to the sound of colour, its texture and taste, as we gaze at a hypnotically unchanging screen of thick Yves Klein Blue.

We create and enter a new world of senses, through the endless and calming blue. The sounds around Blue give us a space for surrounding, sometimes you have to think about it even though you’re doing something not connecting. And the Blue will be a symbol, a kind of emotion, and a way of narrating.
When I am watching Blue, I hear the sounds of life.