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Will Blue Soon Come Out On Blu-Ray? | Ironically, Derek Jarman’s defiant punk film Jubilee is now part of that ultimate symbol of bourgeois cinephilia, the Criterion Collection.

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Metro Cinema

JARMAN DOES EDMONTON
Curated by Ted Kerr. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel). Fri-Tue, Mar 27-31.

The late English filmmaker Derek Jarman was a man of many talents. He was a writer, director, painter, and stage designer who became famous for his gay rights advocacy as well as his films and music videos (for the likes of The Smiths and Pet Shop Boys). After being diagnosed with AIDS, he built a much-photographed cottage and surrounding garden beside a nuclear power station in Kent, with a lengthy John Donne quote affixed to one of the outside walls.

Ted Kerr’s selection of Jarman’s work, running this week at Metro Cinema, focuses in on some of his feature films, as well as Isaac Julien’s 2008 documentary Derek and Edmontonian Trevor Anderson’s short The Island. With these films, Kerr hopes to show that there’s a little bit of Edmonton reflected in Jarman’s disorienting universe, full of unlikely communities and the political baggage that often comes with making art.

Jarman’s most famous film is probably Jubilee (***), thanks in no small part to its inclusion in the illustrious Criterion Collection. Made in 1978 and set in a grimed-up parallel universe, it’s the story of a ramshackle group of destructive English punks who rage against any machine they can get their hands on. And there are plenty of options to choose from: the police, who all seem to have itchy trigger fingers; the monomaniacal music executive, who tricks punk bands into selling out; and especially those same musicians, who are dumb enough to betray the cause just for a spot on Top of the Pops.

Jubilee has been hailed as a landmark in the punk movement, though, like the movement itself, it hasn’t aged particularly well. It stars some big names from the era — including Adam Ant and Toyah Willcox, as well as Brian Eno, who wrote the score — but has a rudimentary take on power and authenticity that will surprise nobody. (It also borrows quite a lot from A Clockwork Orange: at one point Ant’s character, wearing asymmetrical eyeliner and drinking from a glass bottle of milk, admires a statue of Beethoven.) As a time capsule, the film is enjoyable, but you’d get the same pleasures from reading a book about why the earth is flat. The little details are fascinating; the conclusions are long outdated.

I will, however, give Jarman credit for an ingenious framing device: the film’s action is spurred when Queen Elizabeth I time-travels 400 years into the future to keep tabs on her nominal successor. She then wanders around in the background, in full Elizabethan costume, aghast at the 20th century.

By the time Jarman died of AIDS-related complications in 1994, the superficial bleakness of an early film like Jubilee had been replaced with an intimidating level of honesty. His final feature film, Blue (***), released just six months before his death, consists only of long strings of Jarman’s observations about disease and hospitals read over top of an unchanging, all-blue screen. The vast amounts of medication he took during treatment, more than 30 pills a day, were making him slowly go blind. But that’s about all they were doing — Jarman knew he was going to die, and soon.

Such a formally challenging film may scare off a lot of viewers, but unlike, say, Andy Warhol’s Empire, Blue isn’t making fun of its audience. Jarman wants you to feel frustrated and helpless, but only because he feels frustrated and helpless. Still, as much as I admire and embrace these kinds of experiments, Jarman loses me when his monologues spin off into lofty, impenetrable metaphors — something about the moths of Ithaca, something about bruised hellhounds. With no visual aids, it’s the concrete examples, like how he decides against buying a new pair of shoes, seeing as the ones he has are going to outlive him, that really connect.

But even those times when I lost focus and stared off at my bookshelf ended up working to the film’s advantage. I came back feeling guilty, knowing that I have the luxury of returning to the Technicolor world whenever I feel like it; in that sense, 80 minutes of Blue is getting off rather lightly.