Homosexuality In Derek Jarman's Film Blue

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A filmmaker when boiled down to his purest form is a visual storyteller, and for my money there is no better story of a visual storyteller then Derek Jarman and his masterpiece “Blue.” Jarmen is truly an anomaly of his time. A mashup of subcultures, influences, and surreal visual stylings. Though to the mainstream Jarmen remains obscure his influence can be seen in the early work of Christopher Nolan, the visual style of Gregg Araki, and the atmosphere of Rick Alverson. Jarman to this day remains an interesting radical who pushed the envelope with his uncompromising, erotic, and honest view of sexuality, specifically homosexuality because Jarmen himself was gay. Being a gay man who has homoerotism featured heavily in his film this lead to Jarmen being one of the …show more content…

From his mashup of punk culture and shakespeare in “Jubilee”, to his psychedelic adaptation of the bard with his version of “The Tempest.” Which if I may just make a quick aside and say that Jarman's Tempest takes the extremely risky move of setting The Tempest inside, it’s brilliant you should watch it. However Jarmans true masterpiece wouldn’t come until 1993, the film in question is simply titled “Blue.” On december 22, 1986 Jarman was diagnosed with HIV. This lead to him contracting AIDS. This lead to complications with Jarman, this resulted in Jarman beginning to lose his vision. The ultimate irony, the visual storyteller losing his vision, his passion swept away by an unfortunate illness. The man who started off creating visuals as a set designer for Ken Russell's “The Devils” then worked his way up using his uncompromising attitude and his cinematic eye is no longer able to do what he loves. Well, at least that should be the case. Jarman loved to write, he published an autobiography, a poetry book, and two volumes of diaries. From this Blue was

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