Blue

The most astonishising thing about Blue is that it was made at all. Few filmmakers with an individualistic vision such as Jarman's would succeed in having films like these produced and distributed commercially. However, Jarman has been successful, and shown a large number of his successors the possibility of a highly original aesthetic and intellectual achievement.

Blue is visually simply a blue square, a kind of tabula rasa and a reflection - created with the poet's most ingenious arrogance - over Jarman's own loss of sight during the last stages of his illness. The blue surface represents serenity and contemplation. The obvious inspiration - enthusiastically pointed out by Jarman himself during the creation of Blue - is the French painter Yves Klein, who eagerly experimented with monochromes. Klein's most famous work are probably the paintings he made with nude women who pressed their bodies against the wet paint. The blue colour has its origin in the clear sky of Klein's birthplace Nice, and Jarman explains: ''The monochrome is a kind of alchemy, efficiently devoid of all personality. It articulates the silence itself. It constitutes a fragment of an infinite piece of work with no boundaries. Blue as the landscape of freedom.''

The blue screen is accompanied by Simon Fisher Turner's poetic music and seductive words, sublimely formulated by the actors Nigel Terry, John Quentin and Tilda Swinton, all of them faithful, long-time collaborators of Jarman's.

However, the poetic language comes across as a somewhat ironic piece of self-reflection: Jarman's illness with Aids, his condemned homosexuality, his metaphysical contemplations about death and finally - in the words ''Blue is the colour of the burial place'' - the almost imminent physical death.

At one point during the film the voiceover asks, with a clear reference to Jarman's fear of his increasing blindness: ''If I loose half of my sight, do I also loose half of my vision?'' Blue, a unique creation in the history of cinema, nevertheless clearly shows that that was never the case with Derek Jarman.
ERIK HEDLING