Sight and Sound in Derek Jarman’s film Blue

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject Communications - Movies and Television, grade: 1,0, Concordia University Montreal, language: English, abstract: At the outset of this paper, I will examine the development of the film’s aesthetic form, its place in the director’s oeuvre and the cultural and historical context of its release. Thereafter, I will take a closer look at the static cinema and re-evaluate the essential qualities of film. Elaborating on the theoretical considerations of Michel Chion (1994; 1999; 2003), I aim to gain a better understanding of the importance of sound in Blue . In the subsequent chapter, I will explore the concept of invisibility and the film’s political significance with regard to the AIDS epidemic and its effects on the LGBT community. Taking into account Vivian Sobchacks’s (2011) phenomenological reading of the film, I will finally analyse the audio-visual experience of Blue and the peculiar relation between its images, its sounds and its spectator.