Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Blue
1993 · Derek Jarman · Blue on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the blue field for shapes or afterimages appearing. (light)
Your eyes tire of the unbroken color and start to invent motion at the edges, faint drifting shapes that vanish when you look straight at them.
Payoff: Nothing changes on screen, yet your own eyes start supplying an image anyway. In the reading: affective color. Deleuze calls a color that absorbs a whole scene rather than just describing it a color-image, and this blue absorbs without settling.
Listen for the same bell tolling between sections of the text. (cutting)
There are no picture cuts anywhere in the film, so the recurring bell does the job a cut would do elsewhere, closing one passage and opening the next.
Payoff: The editing has moved entirely into sound, and the bell is where you can hear it happening.
Listen for how many different voices are reading the same text. (performance)
Nigel Terry, Tilda Swinton, John Quentin, and Jarman himself take turns carrying the narration, moving between formal, dry, and clinical registers without ever becoming separate characters.
Payoff: A single first person voice passes through several bodies, so no one speaker owns the story alone. In the reading: acte de parole. The reading calls this a speech-act: testimony doing the work a visible body would usually do.
Notice how long the film lets silence sit between passages. (sound)
With no picture to hold your attention, a pause of even a few seconds becomes an event, carrying the same weight a hard cut would carry in an ordinary film.
Payoff: Silence stops being empty space and starts doing the work of punctuation.
Track how your own patience with the blue screen changes over time. (structure)
The field never changes, but your response to it moves through stages, provocation, boredom, a kind of hypnosis, then something closer to calm, purely because of how long you have been looking.
Payoff: The film's only real event is happening in you, on a clock the color itself never marks.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Give it all seventy-nine minutes in a dark room. Watch the blue field itself; your eyes will start to do the rest.