Step Into a Blue Funk: Transversal Color and Derek Jarman\u27s Blue

Derek Jarman’s Blue has a complicated reception and exhibition history. Stuck between his past representational queer cinema and the inability to represent the suffering and death from AIDS, Jarman crafted a film of radical stylistics. It is in Blue’s striking color that a transversality of form, sensation, and visuality occurs, and in so doing, produces a space for synesthetic affectivity and collective desire. This thesis will use those radical formal elements and the history of Jarman and Blue to position color away from the phobic tradition of color theory and towards a flowing site of political rupture