Fleshing Out the Image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman’s Blue

Abstract

In what follows, I want to address the reciprocity between two questions: What might a particular philosophical tradition bring to the study of film? and What might film studies bring to the practice of philosophy? Here, explored from a pedagogical perspective, my exemplar is existential phenomenological philosophy as it illuminates — and is illuminated by — Derek Jarman’s seemingly ‘monochromatic’ film, Blue (UK, 1993). Made when the filmmaker was almost completely blind and dying of AIDS and theatrically released in 1993, Blue is an instance of cinematic perception and expression at their extremity. Seemingly without figures, the screen rectangle is filled with a field of cobalt blue (except for a flash of white light at the end) as a soundtrack of voices, sound effects, and music weaves a poetic and fragmented first-person narrative of Jarman’s observations, memories, and emotions in relation to his failing eyesight, horrific medical experiences, and approaching death, all in the context of a larger community of lovers, friends, and strangers living with and dying from AIDS. Blue not only elicits extremely positive or negative responses from most of those who experience it but also challenges our ‘natural attitude’ (better termed ‘naturalized attitude’) about the phenomenon we call a ‘film.’

This absolute emptiness is observable only at the moment when it is filled by experience. We do not ever see it, so to speak, except marginally. It is perceptible only on the ground of the world.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1946, p. 41)

Isn’t it the truth of the voice to be hallucinated? Isn’t the entire space of the voice an infinite one?

Roland Barthes (1972, p. 184)