Jarman translates the film Blue into sheer space, a
pure expanse of colour, in which our sense of time and space is lost almost
completely. It is both immersive and repelled into a void of nothingness. There
is no changing image, yet the image is always present, much like there is no
space but there is always this queer blue space that time is suspended in. “A void is not the absence of
any content, but simply the absence of anticipated content” (Susan Sontag),
and with Blue we connect with the space provided, despite it not operating in a
way that fulfils our expectations of space in the film.
In the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, I found the intentions of
Jarman were to replicate the strangeness of existing in a space controlled by
your disease. The film follows no teleological structure, there is no
development in the image we see, this queer use of time and space challenges
the conventions of logic. Subsequently, Blue is a film that uses queer
space, yet supports the notion that there is no queer space as the audience can
be both immersed into and rejected from the image. They can both enter its dimension
and experience the film from an external space.
