The Academy Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art present Derek Jarman’s Blue
The Academy Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art present Derek Jarman’s Blue
Derek Jarman
A prominent figure in avant-garde and queer London circles from the 1970s to the 1990s, filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942–1994) trained as a painter at the city’s Slade School of Fine Art from 1963 to 1967, and went on to develop a wide-ranging practice encompassing painting, writing, stage and costume design, filmmaking, and gardening. In 1986, after testing positive for HIV, Jarman became a leading voice of AIDS activism. Premiered at the Venice Biennale in June 1993, Blue was made after an AIDS-related infection rendered Jarman temporarily blind. As a result of the lesions discovered on his eyes, the artist suffered a condition whereby vivid flashes of blue light interrupted his vision. The film rejects images because, according to the artist, they “hinder the imagination and beg a narrative and suffocate with arbitrary charm, the admirable austerity of the void.” Blue not only recounts Jarman’s corporeal experiences with the virus, but also demands that viewers meditate viscerally on color, the void, and the somatic experience of living with AIDS. On the occasion of World AIDS Day / Day Without Art, the Academy Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art present Jarman’s final feature, completed just months before his death in 1994 at age 52.
Programmed by the Academy Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Note from David Zwirner Gallery.
DIRECTED/WRITTEN BY: Derek Jarman. WITH: John Quentin, Nigel Terry, Derek Jarman, Tilda Swinton. 1993. 79 min. UK/Japan. Technicolor. English. DCP. Print courtesy of David Zwirner.
Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.
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