Object of the week: Derek Jarman’s workbook for Blue

For Derek Jarman, the process of filmmaking held as much importance as the end product. He applied this value in his practice by keeping Italian hardbound scrapbooks for each film and filling them with writings, drawings, photographs, designs, press clippings, letters related to production, and all kinds of planning and pre-visualisations. Papers are tucked into the gutter or attached to the pages with a range of adhesives and fasteners. 

In Jarman’s final feature film, Blue (1993), he meditates on the colour and all its cultural, political, historical and, most poignantly, personal reverberations. After visual artist Yves Klein, Jarman reflects on the blue ‘void’, which looms as he considers his own mortality while living with Aids-related illness and as he struggles against state and social failures in response to the Aids crisis. Visually, the film is one continuous, unchanging field of monochrome blue. John Quentin, Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry and Jarman himself feature as narrators in the soundscape alongside the atmospheric sounds of unseen cafés, street scenes and daily life.

Blue is distinguished from the rest of Jarman’s work by its static imagery, and so is its workbook. This object is considerably text heavy. Drafts of the long poem that will later become the script are handwritten on laid papers and adhered to the block. Typed and printed texts are struck through with red ink and annotated. In the industry, films were often funded from the sale of scripts and treatments. As academic Michael Charlesworth recently noted (in a published edition of the film’s script), for Jarman, this de-emphasised the film’s visual nature while privileging plot and narrative. However, the primary focus of this workbook is shaping the poem.

Engaging with the Blue workbook is compelling for its tangibility. It evidences the material labour that produced a deeply immaterial work. At first sight the subject is established with the linen-covered boards and spine of the book washed with paint based on International Klein Blue. A gilded square on the front cover carries a thumbprint – possibly Jarman’s own, but in any case an impression of corporeal contact that anchors the spiritual and abstract work to earthliness and physicality. 

Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.