Blue

Blue (1993) is Derek Jarman's final film, available to watch online on iFILM. The screen stays blue — an unbroken, unchanging blue — for all 79 minutes. There are no images, no cuts. Only voices, music and layered sound: Jarman himself, Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry, and John Quentin reading from his diaries, with a score by composer Simon Fisher Turner.

Jarman made Blue while going blind. HIV-related complications had reduced his vision to a blue field — the colour became his last point of contact with sight. The film is built from that: hospital visits, the names of friends already gone, passages that move between elegy and anger without signalling which is which.

Released in September 1993, it premiered simultaneously on Channel 4 and in cinemas across the UK. Jarman died in February 1994. For a film with no conventional cinematography, it is strangely hard to stop listening to. Stream Blue (1993) on iFILM.