“Blue, Upon Your Grave”: The Testament of Derek Jarman in Blue (1996)

This article develops an understanding of Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) as a testament film. It considers the filmmaker’s personal philosophy and concept of history, proposing the resonance of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, the epitome of Benjamin’s contention with the ‘continuum of history’ in his final text, Theses on the Philosophy of History. This article considers the testament of Blue as a concept of history, contextualised by Jarman’s reckoning with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and thereby with his own mortality, as Jarman’s attestation of a model of history (both personal and national, or coinhered as ‘memory’), which answers the demand of the ‘tradition of the oppressed.’ Theories of profane illumination, second nature, and the crisis of representation are explicated for the purposes of identifying Jarman’s model of history, and of his refusal of a historicist conception. In addition, it proposes the context of the AIDS crisis, as the ‘state of emergency’, the condition which compels this concept of history.