shut up and listen! 2016
Interdisziplinäres Festival für Musik und Klangkunst

 
       
   
ME, MYSELF OR I
 

 

 

 
PROGRAMM
PRESSE
IMPRESSUM
 

 

 

 

             
     

Samstag, 10. Dezember 2016, 11.00

Derek Jarman

Blue — Hörraum


danach: Brunch



Derek Jarman: Blue

[Derek Jarman: Blue]


Blue — Hörraum

The sole visual content of Derek Jarman's film Blue is the color blue projected uninterruptedly and without variation for the movie’s entire 76 minutes. Against this field of color so evocative of sky, ocean, blindness, heaven and eternity unfolds a soundtrack of music, poetry and scalding excerpts from a diary by the English film maker who has been living with AIDS for several years. Blue, which the New York Film Festival is presenting at Alice Tully Hall tomorrow evening at 9:30, is by turns heartbreaking, enraged, boring, pretentious and riveting. The narration, delivered with a stately equanimity by John Quentin, Nigel Terry and Tilda Swinton, is interwoven with music and sound effects to suggest a stream of consciousness that is continually changing levels. There are moments when the film maker’s spirit seems on the verge of taking leave of his body and drifting into the ether. At other times the writing is so incendiary that he seems ready to jump out of his sickbed and burn down the hospital. After a gentle beginning in which bells toll elegiacally and a voice contemplates the color blue and its associations, the screenplay narrows in on the film maker’s physical problems, of which the most acute is failing eyesight. From here, it veers between lulling metaphysical speculation and brutal physical reality. When the language turns vague and dreamy, Blue can seem like an indulgent exercise in languid poeticizing. But when the narrator expresses fear, rage and contempt, the film assumes a ferocious intensity in which the gap between the blankness on the screen and the emotions being expressed becomes the distance between one brilliant, cranky individual and nothingness. In the most pointed passages, the film maker, who is being treated in a public hospice, rails against the very idea of charity and the way it salves the conscience, allowing people to avoid contact with what disturbs them. The recitation of the possible side effects of an experimental drug is horrifying; many sound far worse than the blindness the drug is intended to thwart. In other searing moments the film maker asserts his homosexuality with the vengeful pride of someone for whom it is a badge of integrity in a corrupt, mediocre, inhuman society whose imminent destruction is to be devoutly wished for. […]

[Stephen Holden, The New York Times, 1993]


Derek Jarman

Derek Jarman, wahrscheinlich Großbritanniens visionärster Filmemacher seit Michael Powell, hat sich im Laufe seiner Karriere mehrfach neu erfunden. Ob in seinen intimen, scheu-subversiven Kostümdramen oder in seinen experimentellen Kinogedichten: Jarmans Werk war immer ein Gegen-Entwurf zur englischen Tradition der Meisterwerkverfilmungen und, von einem der wichtigsten schwulen Filmemacher seiner Zeit, eine Inspiration für seine Generation.

[http://www.derek-jarman.de/biografie.html]