Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis

In 1955 the French artist Yves Klein worked with a chemist named Edouard Adam to create a new kind of blue pigment, a saturated, otherworldly ultramarine that would suggest infinitude. Once it was perfected, Klein christened the new color IKB (International Klein Blue) and patented it to prevent imitation. The artist presented eleven seemingly identical IKB monochromes at the 1957 Proclamation of the Blue Epoch exhibition in Milan and sold them for different prices. The fact that the works seemed to be perceptually indistinguishable was irrelevant to Klein, who claimed, “Each blue world of each painting, although the same blue and treated in the same way, presented a completely different essence and atmosphere.”¹ The show proved to be pivotal. It was praised by critics and the general public. Piero Manzoni was inspired by the exhibition to renounce figurative painting. And Pierre Restany found himself deeply moved by Klein’s monochromes, seeing them as expressions of an “authentic silence.”²

In 1974 the English artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman encountered an Yves Klein monochrome called IKB 79 (1959) during a visit to the Tate Gallery in London. He was overwhelmed. Jarman imagined temporalizing the work, creating a monochromatic blue film dedicated to Yves Klein. The idea haunted him for decades. During the 1970s and 1980s Jarman made a number of provocative films, including Sebastiane (1976), Jubilee (1976), and Caravaggio (1986). Throughout this period, however, his dream of making a blue film remained unrealized.³

Jarman was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986. In spite of his illness he remained prolific as a poet, painter, and filmmaker, and he became a central figure in the New Queer Cinema movement.⁴ As the disease ravaged his body, the medication he was put on began to dramatically affect his vision. At first, everything he saw became tinted, as if he were looking at the world through a blue filter. Eventually, the medication left him blind. Jarman explored the nature of his illness in a series of aggressive and unsettling paintings laced with black humor, such as Ataxia—Aids Is Fun (1993) and Fuck Me Blind (1993).⁵ He yearned to make a film about the illness, as well, but according to biographer Tony Peake, he was held back, in part, by “the impossibility of visualizing an unseen virus.”⁶ But Jarman began to realize that the film could embody that very impossibility. He was finally ready to make the film he had been imagining for almost twenty years. He had considered numerous titles for his monochrome film: Blueprint, o, Forget-Me-Not, Speedwell Eyes, Bruises, and Blue Protects White from Innocence. The work was completed in 1993, just a few months before Jarman lost his battle with AIDS, and its final title was simply Blue. It is one of the most profound meditations on death in the history of cinema.

Blue is a static film, albeit one that is distinct from those I have discussed so far. The films of Warhol and Fluxus offer motionless objects or individuals, while static textual films like Snow’s So Is This provide immobile typographic text. Blue, however, offers no image at all—or, if there is an image, it is simply the cobalt-blue cinema screen itself. (This is why Vivian Sobchack maintains that, strictly speaking, Blue is “not image-less” but “figure-less.”)⁷ Drained of any visual content or movement, Jarman’s film offers an ostensible void, an absence, a retreat from representation. In other words Blue is a monochrome film, a cinematic work that visually presents nothing more than a field of color. In this chapter I want to consider the implications of remediating monochromatic paintings in cinema, while also exploring the symbolic and affective valences of color itself. Although there are numerous monochrome films worthy of close consideration, I will focus primarily on Blue—not only because it is a poignant and engaging film but also because it raises important questions about the role of cinematic stasis in the digital age.⁸

The rich history of the monochrome in the realm of painting is well known. It is a tradition that has roots in early modernism, such as the work of Kazimir Malevich (Black Square [1915], Suprematist Composition: White on White [1918], and Suprematist Mirror [1923]) and Aleksandr Rodchenko (the Red Yellow Blue triptych [1921]). The monochrome rose to prominence again in the 1950s and 1960s, with works like Barnett Newman’s Eve (1950), Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951), and Yves Klein’s blue monochromes.⁹ However, this tradition has seen cinematic expression far more often than one might expect. For example, Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film consists of a blank white screen and a completely silent sound track.¹⁰ Robert Huot’s Red Stockings (1969) offers three minutes of Kodachrome red, broken up only once by a single frame of a woman’s crotch (although the intensity of Huot’s red produces flickering green afterimages every time the spectator blinks). Ma (Intervals) (1977), a film by Takahiko Iimura, alternates between black and white screens for its twenty-four-minute duration (the purity of the monochromes is intermittently threatened by a single off-center vertical line). And in Dan McLaughlin’s Red/Green (1985) a monochromatic red color field slowly changes to green over the course of about five minutes.¹¹

More radical still is Tony Conrad’s series of Yellow Movies, such as Yellow Movie 2/16-26/73 (1973), which consists only of cheap white paint on paper that is outlined to look like a movie screen. Obviously, these are works that stretch the definition of cinema to its breaking point; however, since the term movie carries with it expectations of duration, one becomes reminded of the temporal dimensions of paint itself (especially cheap paint), the way that it fades over time. (The white paint has yellowed significantly since the work’s inception.) Yellow Movie is organic, meditative, and immersive. It is also a practical joke. One of the most common insults leveled at bad films is, “It’s like watching paint dry.” Here is a film that is not simply like watching paint; one is watching paint. It is little wonder, then, that Conrad calls Yellow Movie “a comedy.”¹² Monochrome films like these would have perhaps provided the ideal cinematic experience for someone like Theodor Adorno, who once quipped, “I love to go to the movies; what I can’t stand are the images.”¹³

What are the aesthetic and theoretical implications of these experiments? Noël Carroll has persuasively argued that “the point of many still films is reflexive—to point to aspects or elements of film that are often neglected (like narration in the case of Oshima [Band of Ninja] or scripting in the case of Frampton [Poetic Justice]). Subtracting movement from the visual array is a way of leading viewers—or at least certain kinds of viewers—to these reflexive observations.”¹⁴ Along similar lines, by withholding motion, as well as any visual representation, monochrome films like Blue draw attention to color itself. Unlike, say, the 1930s—when black and white was the norm, and films like Rouben Mamoulian’s Becky Sharp (1935) delighted audiences with their bold, assertive palettes—color has for decades been the default in cinema, and as such, it easily becomes invisible. But paradoxically, Blue—a film about the loss of vision—enables us to see a color to which we had previously become blinded. Jarman foregrounds the color blue as a color and thus encourages the viewer to become lost in its affective and associative dimensions.

Jarman’s own homosexuality—as well as his queer politics—designated him an unambiguous cultural Other, particularly in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. The fact that Jarman linked color to his own queerness is seen in many of his writings. For example, in the introduction to his Wittgenstein (1993) script, he writes, “The forward exploration of Colour is Queer,”¹⁷ and in his book Chroma (which features a series of meditations on color), he declares, “Colour seems to have a Queer bent!”¹⁸ Blue is nothing if not an embrace of color itself, and for Jarman this is simultaneously an embrace of his own sexual identity. It is unsurprising, then, that Jarman conceptualizes color as decidedly prelapsarian: “Turfed out of the Garden of Eden for a snack by the unpleasant new God, [Adam and Eve] found themselves in a colourless world. Remember them as you buy a dozen Granny Smiths. There were few colours in the wilderness. At that time God hadn’t even sent a rainbow begging for forgiveness.”¹⁹

The “unpleasant new God” that Jarman alludes to is, of course, the same Old Testament God who advocates the stoning of homosexuals—the God whose stringent moral dualism results in a “black-and-white” universe. For the atheist Jarman, then, color and nonnormative sexuality both exist without shame before the invention of God and sin. Jarman’s longing for this utopian world is evident throughout his films, which consistently seek to counteract fear of the Other (homophobia, chromophobia, etc.). This stretches from his first feature-length film, Sebastiane, with its explicit depictions of homosexuality, to his final film, Blue, with its unrelenting exploration of the chromatic.²⁰

But why does Jarman select blue for his first monochrome film rather than any other color? What does it represent? In a sense this is a misleading question. As Tracy Biga suggests, Jarman deliberately frustrates any attempts to pin blue down to a single symbolic meaning: “It is variously a color, a person or agent, a mood, a concept and a thing.”²¹ Such semiotic slipperiness is central to Jarman’s vision. Yves Klein, too, was wary of attempts to tease a symbolic meaning out of his blue monochromes: “Novices keep asking me: ‘But what does it represent?’ I could answer, and I did so in the beginnings [sic], that it simply represents blue, by itself…. This is not inaccurate; it is, in my opinion, of the greatest importance.”²² In other words there is a sense in which monochromatic blue, both for Klein and Jarman, can be seen as decidedly asymbolic. What is important is not what the color represents but its affective power, its ability to induce serenity and contemplation.

While Klein understandably does not want his art to be reduced to a simplistic symbolic meaning, “blue, by itself,” can never really exist by itself. That is, even blue’s affective dimension is propelled and informed by the various significations that it has acquired over the centuries. (As Henri Bergson notes in Matter and Memory, “Perception is never a mere contact of the mind with the object present; it is impregnated with memory-images which complete it as they interpret it.”)²³ Consequently, an interrogation of the art of Klein and Jarman necessarily entails an analysis of the symbolic and associative dimensions of the color blue, even though neither Klein’s paintings nor Jarman’s film should be interpreted as facile symbolic gestures. In viewing Klein’s art, for example, one’s experience is inevitably colored by blue’s association with tranquility—viewing an IKB monochrome is peaceful and contemplative. Jarman’s Blue evokes this mood, as well (and this sense of calm is often complemented by the soothing ambient tones on the sound track); however, the film’s blue screen simultaneously engenders impatience and frustration. This is partly due to the temporal nature of film, the fact that Jarman (unlike Klein) compels us to look at the color blue for an extended duration. But this sense of frustration is also likely linked to our frequent encounters with blue screens while waiting for a VHS tape or a DVD to begin, an important paratextual element that shapes our affective response to the film. The blue screen marks a period of transition, of waiting for movement to signal that a film has begun. Of course, when viewing Blue, we recognize that this desire to see movement will be denied, but like Vladimir and Estragon, we still somehow anticipate the arrival of something that will never come. Blue becomes a conceptual waiting room, and as the voice-over in the film indicates, “Hell on earth is a waiting room.” Jarman’s own poor health forced him to “come to terms with sightlessness” (another expression from the film’s sound track), and the spectator is forced to come to terms with it as well.²⁴

Blue’s association with waiting is clearly culturally contingent, but even its status as a peaceful color is not necessarily immanent; as Michel Pastoureau points out, the association of blue with peacefulness is a historical phenomenon that can be traced back to the Middle Ages.²⁵ This development is closely related to another association that began around the twelfth century: blue as a marker for the numinous. Before this time, blue was the object of considerable prejudice in the West, “with hardly any role in social life, religious practice, or artistic creation.”²⁶ However, the twelfth century saw the creation of blue stained glass; it was also the time in which blue became the color of the Virgin Mary’s robe in art.²⁷ Ever since, blue has been closely associated with the sacred, the divine. This association is clearly important in understanding Klein’s art. Klein was deeply religious and mystical, and his own belief in Rosicrucianism was a powerful impetus for his blue monochromes. As Jane Alison notes, Klein’s paintings were “a genuine bid for transcendence; an art that attempted to be simultaneously radical and spiritual; an avant gardism of the numinous.”²⁸ For Klein, blue was inextricably linked with the infinite, the immaterial. He took his cue from Kandinsky, who saw blue as the “heavenly colour.”²⁹

It could be argued that Jarman is reaching for something similar. As he confronts his own mortality, Blue could represent a yearning for transcendence, a vision of a spiritual realm freed from “the pandemonium of image” (an expression used in Blue). This is essentially how Kate Higginson interprets the film. While Jarman obviously rejects the hegemonic (and homophobic) forms of religion that were commonplace in Thatcher’s Britain, for Higginson, this is no reason to completely exclude religiosity as a component of his artistic vision. She reads Blue as “Jarman’s attempt to see his way to … a habitable, even pleasurable, after-life,” a “consolatory vision of a queer h(e)aven.”³⁰ The opening lines of Blue are central to Higginson’s reading of the film:

Higginson first notes the erotic content of these lines: “Assuming ‘you’ to be Jarman and the ‘boy’ to be his lover, the ‘light’ which engenders a ‘crying out’ is orgasmic, the ‘arising,’ ‘ascending,’ and ‘coming in’ are phallic and penetrative.” But Higginson also suggests that these lines could have a spiritual dimension, in their evocation of a “boy being bedazzled by a divine blue light.” For Higginson, this intersection of spirituality and homosexuality, a persistent theme in Jarman’s work, constitutes a “queering of the sacred.”³¹

While Higginson’s reading of Blue is innovative and compelling, she seems too intent on salvaging some kind of religious impulse from the film. There is no reason to suppose that IKB has the same spiritual import in Blue that it had in the hands of Klein. As Donald Judd notes, “Colour will always be interpreted in a new way…. Infinite change may be its constant nature.”³² And this sentiment is echoed by Jarman himself in Chroma: “Two colours are never the same, even if they’re from the same tube. Context changes the way we perceive them.”³³ Even though Jarman alludes to “the blue of Divinity” in Blue’s sound track, the contextual significance of the color changes when one remembers that Jarman was an atheist who was deeply suspicious of church doctrines. As William Gass points out, the color blue is often seen as “the godlike hue,” but it can also evoke “the constantly increasing absentness of Heaven … the color of everything that’s empty.”³⁴ I would argue that Klein is interested in the former signification, Jarman the latter. Jarman’s own skepticism regarding the Divine should color a viewer’s response to the film; even though the shade of blue used is essentially the same, its symbolic status has been reversed. Blue no longer connotes heaven but an empty sky, a vacuum that was filled by God in the pre-Nietzschean universe.

This is Steven Dillon’s interpretation of the film. In his book Derek Jarman and Lyric Film: The Mirror and the Sea, Dillon sees in Blue “a deep hopelessness with regard to the possibilities of visualizing another world,” adding that in this new context, blue can be seen as “a visual absence, a nothingness before the abyss of death.”³⁵ This cogent reading helps explain why one of the questions asked in Blue is, “Will the pearly gates slam shut in the faces of the devout?” The heaven of traditional Christianity is not open for business. In its place is a void, a nothingness. This is why, for Jarman, “the way of heaven” can be seen “without looking out of the window.” The only spirituality that Jarman is interested in is an inner, subjective one, not one based on the dogmas of any church. This is further hinted at in his film Caravaggio, in which the eponymous protagonist reflects on his own death: “The gods have become diseases. Thought without image. Lost in the pigment.” This vision of an imageless color field, uncorrupted by Divine presence, is precisely what Jarman brings to fruition in Blue. By reappropriating IKB, Jarman effectively deconstructs the color’s traditional spiritual significance.

Of course, the fact that Jarman uses blue to evoke his impending nonexistence is not only a subversion of traditional religious schema; it simultaneously places itself within a related historical tradition in the West: “the bluish hues of death.”³⁶ This connection has been made by Jarman before. For example, in Caravaggio the artist has a revealing interior monologue on his deathbed: “The room turns slowly. I steady myself, staring into the blue void. Dull metallic flies cluster like rotted grapes.” The idea of death as a “blue void” here is a clear precursor to Blue. Caravaggio’s monologue also echoes Emily Dickinson’s famous poem “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—.” In the poem Dickinson imagines seeing a fly just before her death, which causes her to experience synesthesia, a “Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—,” as her vision begins to fail.³⁷

In Caravaggio and Blue Jarman builds on Dickinson’s rich symbolism, reiterating blue’s association with death, as well as a loss of vision. Further, both Dickinson and Jarman deromanticize death, emphasizing the materiality of the dead body and the absence of an afterlife.³⁸ The fly in Dickinson’s poem can be read as a symbol of the quotidian, accentuating the eerie ordinariness of death. This is also one of the central insights of Blue. The film eschews traditional Hollywood depictions of death, which are often drenched in bathos and faux profundity. Instead, Blue’s sound track emphasizes the ordinary and the mundane, so a film about dying is filled with banal minutiae (e.g., Jarman’s observation that a diminutive man in the waiting room looks like Jean Cocteau, his fleeting desire to purchase a new pair of shoes, etc.).

The fly of Dickinson’s poem can also be read in a more macabre vein, as an insect preparing to eat the flesh of the deceased. Thus, the poem subverts theorizations of death as a meaningful, spiritual experience, a passing away to another world. Instead, death is merely an opportunity for necrophagia in an indifferent Darwinian universe, a failing of vision followed by the gruesome decomposition of the body. “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—” is a radically materialist poem, one that confronts the inescapable corporeality of the human body. And an almost identical philosophical stance lies at the heart of Blue. There is certainly an irony here, since for Klein, the monochrome was a means for “attain[ing] the spiritual absolute.”³⁹ Yet the idea of a spiritual absolute is undermined in Blue’s unflinching emphasis on the ravaged and ill body. This idea becomes especially prominent during a passage in the film in which a voice reads off the interminable list of side effects of the drug Jarman is taking, DHPG:

Low white blood cell count, increased risk of infection, low platelet count which may increase the risk of bleeding, low red blood cell count (anemia), fever, rash, abnormal liver function, chills, swelling of the body (edema), infections, malaise, irregular heartbeat, high blood pressure (hypertension), low blood pressure (hypotension), abnormal thoughts or dreams, loss of balance (ataxia), coma, confusion, dizziness, headache, nervousness, damage to nerves (paresthesia), psychosis, sleepiness (somnolence), shaking, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite (anorexia), diarrhea, bleeding from the stomach or intestine (intestinal hemorrhage), abdominal pain, increased number of one type of white blood cell, low blood sugar, shortness of breath, hair loss (alopecia), itching (pruritus), hives, blood in the urine, abnormal kidney functions, increased blood urea, redness (inflammation), pain or irritation (phlebitis).

While this passage from Blue provides an exhaustive (and exhausting) catalogue of the natural shocks that flesh is heir to, similar monologues that dwell on the physicality of the body are ubiquitous in the film’s sound track. Even though Jarman resolutely refuses to give us a visual depiction of the body, the disembodied voice speaks of little else. As Patrizia Lombardo puts it, “With a violent leap, the most bodyless film ever produced projects the human body in its most cruel and unspeakable presence.”⁴⁰

Blue’s cathectic attachment to the human body has palpable effects for the spectator, who becomes increasingly aware of the embodied nature of her own perception. Since one cannot see the film’s protagonist (or anybody else), the verbal descriptions of bodily ills seem to affect (or perhaps afflict) one’s own body. When the voice speaks of “irregular heartbeat,” my attention is suddenly focused on my own heartbeat, which now somehow feels irregular (no doubt a by-product of the power of suggestion). When the voice speaks of “sleepiness,” I am tempted to yawn. And when “shortness of breath” is alluded to, I become increasingly aware of the tempo of my own breathing (not unlike Cage during his famous visit to the anechoic chamber). There is nobody (and no body) on the screen to transfer these sensations to; without onscreen motion to command my attention, I become the observer of my own miniscule bodily movements, and these subsequently become as much a part of the cinematic experience as the color field or the sound track. Eventually, the film’s frequent evocations of death prompt me to imagine all of these movements ceasing; for a brief moment my body freezes in place, I become breathless, my heart stops. The static film immobilizes me. I do not simply imagine my own death; I experience it. However provisional this experience may be, its affective intensity remains profoundly unsettling.

Central to the experience of viewing The Act of Seeing is its complete silence. Somehow, the film would be less disturbing if we could hear the sounds in the morgue: footsteps, breathing, instruments clanging on tables. Instead, we hear what the corpses hear: nothing. In this sense the film is the inverse of Blue. Brakhage captures nonexistence by giving the spectator nothing to hear, while Jarman captures nonexistence by giving the spectator nothing to see. (One is reminded of Christian Metz’s formulation: “Immobility and silence are not only two objective aspects of death, they are also its main symbols, they figure it.”)⁴¹ It is true that Jarman’s blue screen is apprehended visually, and his sound track elicits mental imagery. Nonetheless, the lack of any traditional photographic images on the screen makes clear the film’s raison d’être: as the narrator suggests, Blue offers a space in which the viewer can be “released from image,” which for Jarman represents “a prison of the soul.” Blue and The Act of Seeing are both experiments in sensory deprivation. Yet, in spite of their unrelenting visual and auditory voids, both films use the sparse materials available to conjure up the material body and its confrontation with death.⁴²

Blue is obviously a static film, and The Act of Seeing could be loosely categorized as such, as well—even though it is not as unrelentingly still as the films I have discussed so far (it includes the movements of the coroners and a great deal of camera movement). Nevertheless, the subject (and paradoxically, the object) of the film is the human cadaver, which is entirely still. Since these are obviously real cadavers, the spectator recognizes that there is no chance that they will become animated. (This clearly is an option in fictional films; consider Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet [1955], for example, in which the dead body of Inger is resurrected and begins to move again.) Since both Blue and The Act of Seeing interrogate the nature of mortality, it is fitting that they are essentially drained of movement. As Laura Mulvey points out, movement is “the commonly accepted sign of life,” which suggests that stasis in cinema is uniquely positioned to suggest just the opposite: “the presence of death.”⁴³

While Blue’s voice-over is poignantly evoking the deterioration of Jarman’s body, another kind of deterioration takes place: what I have earlier called (in reference to Warhol’s cinema) the degradation of signification. In the first part of this chapter I emphasized the symbolic valences of Jarman’s blue and how these inform the viewer’s response to the color. But this tells only half of the story. As the film continues, and as the viewer’s sense of time becomes distorted, blue itself begins to lose all meaning. The brain becomes weary of processing blue, and as a result the color as such deteriorates. This breakdown begins early on in the film, when the voices begin to allude to other colors (red, magenta, yellow). The effect of seeing blue while being asked to envision other colors is a bit jarring. It is similar to the Stroop effect, in which the name of a color (like red) is printed with the ink of a completely different color (like green). The results have been well documented: it is difficult for the spectator to ignore the language and simply recite what color she is seeing, almost as if there is an internal psychological battle between perception and language.⁴⁴ This is the tension that Jarman produces throughout his film. Even though the word blue is spoken frequently in the film’s sound track, other words for color dominate as well: the word black occurs ten times, white five times, yellow nine times. Given the constantly changing language in Blue and the unchanging visual field, language begins to win out over perception. Literal sight becomes less and less relevant, and other senses (e.g., hearing) begin to become more attuned than usual, mirroring Jarman’s own experience as someone overcome with blindness. While the static blue originally provoked restlessness, the unrelenting stasis comes to provoke a kind of catatonia.

I have already mentioned several precedents for Jarman’s monochromatic screen in the films of Paik, Huot, McLaughlin, and Conrad (and it is also worth noting that in 1954 Yves Klein himself had conceived of a film that would offer only a series of monochromes: white, yellow, red, and blue.)⁴⁵ As Peter Wollen and Roland Wymer have pointed out, however, Blue’s most important precursor is almost certainly Guy Debord’s first film, Hurlements en faveur de Sade, which simply presents alternating black-and-white voids accompanied by a nonnarrative sound track.⁴⁶ Unlike the silent monochromes of Paik’s Zen for Film and Conrad’s Yellow Movies, one of the most striking components of Hurlements and Blue is the disembodied voice. Both Debord and Jarman exploit the affective intensity of what Michel Chion, in 1982, called the acousmatic: sounds that are heard even though their sources cannot be seen. For Chion, the acousmatic is at its most poignant and haunting when it is a voice, especially one that has not yet been coupled with a face: “When this voice has not yet been visualized—that is, when we cannot yet connect it to a face—we get a special being, a kind of talking and acting shadow to which we attach the name acousmêtre.”⁴⁷ Later, in his 1991 text Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, Chion elaborated on his notion of the cinematic acousmêtre: “In a film an acousmatic situation can develop along two different scenarios: either a sound is visualized first, and subsequently acousmatized, or it is acousmatic to start with, and is visualized only afterward.”⁴⁸ It would appear, however, that the voices in Hurlements and Blue open up a third category: radical acousmêtres. Rather than being voices that have not yet been connected to faces or voices whose connections with their faces have been severed, these are voices that are never connected to faces.

In fact, Chion makes another claim about the acousmêtre that further complicates the status of the voices in Hurlements and Blue. For Chion, the acousmêtre is “neither inside nor outside the image. It is not inside, because the image of the voice’s source—the body, the mouth—is not included. Nor is it outside, since it is not clearly positioned offscreen in an imaginary ‘wing,’ like a master of ceremonies or a witness, and it is implicated in the action, constantly about to be part of it. This is why the voices of clearly detached narrators are not acousmêtres.”⁴⁹ (Chion goes on to provide examples of famous acousmêtres in cinema, including the fake wizard’s voice in The Wizard of Oz and the voice of Norman Bates’s mother in Psycho.) This raises an interesting question: Are the voices of Hurlements and Blue simply “detached narrators”? Perhaps. But if one is tempted to answer this question in the affirmative, what are these narrators detached from, exactly? A voice-over usually implies that a voice is offscreen. Given the unorthodox visual content of Hurlements and Blue, the very distinction between offscreen and onscreen space seems to become meaningless. The voice cannot fully be conceptualized as offscreen, since there is no clear onscreen space from which it could emanate. It simply becomes coextensive with the monochromatic screen. Residing everywhere and nowhere, the voice is disembodied, incorporeal, ghostly.

It is fitting, then, that both Hurlements and Blue are (to a large extent) films about death. The voices of Blue describe the process of dying in vivid detail, while those of Hurlements allude to “the perfection of suicide,” even discussing several actual suicides (those of protosurrealist Jacques Vaché, as well as Madeleine Reineri, a twelve-year-old girl who “threw herself into the Isère River.”)⁵⁰ Not only do these films’ static monochromatic screens suggest the immobility of the cadaver, but the use of bodiless voices evokes death, as well. As Chion has pointed out, in cinema “the voice of the acousmêtre is frequently the voice of one who is dead”—or at least, one who is “almost-dead.”⁵¹

But in addition to interrogating death, the renunciation of imagery in Blue and Hurlements also becomes a means of evoking blindness—both metaphorically and literally. Not only does Debord’s film refuse to give the audience anything to see, but the sound track foregrounds this visual void. For example, Debord’s own voice is heard saying, “Totally dark, eyes closed to the enormity of the disaster,” and another voice later intones, “I don’t think we’ll ever see each other again.” In other words the recurring darkness of the screen is complemented by language that reinforces visual absence. Suggestions of visual absence are also prominent in Blue; however, in Jarman’s hands they are literalized, since he is frequently describing what it feels like to go blind. Because of the impoverishment of images, the audience of each film becomes more aware of the sound track. Consequently, a viewer of Blue can echo Debord’s proclamation in Hurlements: “I lose myself in the hollow archipelagos of language.” The language spoken in Hurlements, however, is often silenced; whenever the screen turns black, all sounds cease. These moments of silence occur momentarily throughout the film, and while they generally only last for a few seconds or, occasionally, a few minutes, the film concludes with a silence that lasts an agonizing twenty-four minutes, and the effect is unsettling. While Jarman’s blue screen and gentle ambient music can momentarily evoke a kind of peacefulness, Debord’s black screen—accompanied by an uncompromising silence—is sinister, threatening, affectively jarring. As Janet Harbord has argued, “To throw an audience into darkness is one of the most powerful, and possibly sadistic, things a film-maker can do”—and here she is discussing the darkness used by Chris Marker in La jetée, which lasts a mere ten seconds!⁵²

Still, in spite of their renunciation of visual movement, most monochromatic films continue to provide some kind of auditory “movement” via the vicissitudes of the sound track. One might wonder, then, what separates works like these from radio broadcasts or, more currently, podcasts? (One is reminded of the voice in Isidore Isou’s Treatise on Slobber and Eternity, which asserts, “Take photography away and cinema becomes radio.”)⁵³ Steven Dillon acknowledges this affinity, noting that “Blue might be thought of as a species of radio, where we would read the film into a tradition of radio plays by Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter.”⁵⁴ In fact, this comparison to radio becomes especially salient in what appears to be the first monochromatic film—and the first static film—ever made: Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend. Ruttmann presents the audience with an audio montage composed of dozens of carefully arranged sounds, including clocks, whistles, dogs, and human voices—a remarkable experiment that anticipates Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète of the 1940s and 1950s. While Weekend is sometimes referred to as a piece for radio, it was in fact designed to be experienced in a movie theater with a static, imageless screen. This is why Ruttmann referred to Weekend as “cinema for the ears”⁵⁵ and “a blind film.”⁵⁶

It seems that such appellations would also be apropos in describing Blue, particularly since (as Roland Wymer points out) Blue was broadcast concomitantly on Channel 4 and Radio 3 in 1993: “Listeners who did not have access to a television were invited to apply for a blue postcard which they could stare at during the transmission.”⁵⁷ Along similar lines those who purchase Blue on compact disc have the option of staring at the monochromatic blue CD jacket while listening to the sound track.⁵⁸ It is unlikely that many have chosen to take advantage of such options. While such an experience might seem superficially analogous to viewing the film, the affective response produced by Blue comes not merely from staring at the color but from the frustration of expectations. No one expects movement when looking at a postcard or a CD jacket, so looking at one for an extended period of time feels absurd, pointless. But movement is more or less ubiquitous on movie screens, so staring at one feels natural, even if a spectator may realize on an intellectual level that the blue screen is going to remain static.⁵⁹

In spite of this intellectual awareness, viewers of monochrome films often experience a level of frustration. Whereas most films use movement to captivate the audience, keeping them entirely still (“glued to their seats”), the stasis of films like Blue and Hurlements inevitably causes restlessness and fidgeting. Since there is no movement on the screen, the spectators’ bodies begin to move to compensate. This is why the experience of just listening to Blue is quite different from seeing it. Listening to Blue is comforting, thoughtful, engaging. One can put on headphones and go about one’s day while becoming immersed in the poetry and music that Jarman provides. But seeing Blue is a much more ambivalent experience. The color itself at first complements the sound track’s sense of peacefulness. But the color’s refusal to change somehow supplements the soothing sound track with an uneasy, almost maddening quality. Cage’s 4’33" is a useful point of reference. We all hear (relative) silence quite frequently and do not even notice it. It is only when we expect to hear sound (when attending a concert, playing a CD, etc.) that silence is striking. Such a subversion of expectations produces an affective shift that causes the body to squirm, sometimes intolerably. This is why the Paris premiere of Hurlements at the Ciné-Club d’Avant-Garde in the Musée de l’Homme elicited a violent reaction from the audience and was terminated after twenty minutes—and why later screenings continued to provoke riots and protests.⁶⁰

In fact, as Barbara Rose has argued, the monochrome painting may initially suggest “simplicity and unity,” but this appearance ultimately “masks a potential for multivalence and paradox.”⁶⁵ Along similar lines, a film like Blue does not use the monochromatic screen to merely posit nihilism and emptiness. Rather, Jarman’s blue screen is a site of multiplicity, limitlessness, eternity. As Jim Ellis puts it, Blue “recalls Klein’s understanding of the void not as an absence, but rather as an infinity.”⁶⁶ Even when the monochromatic screen presents only whiteness or blackness (as in Weekend, Hurlements, and Zen for Film), colors with strong cultural associations of absence, the effect is not merely one of negation but of affirmation. These are films that (like the works of Malevich and Rauschenberg) posit absence as a kind of presence. Susan Sontag’s formulation in “The Aesthetics of Silence” is apposite here: “There is no such thing as empty space. As long as a human eye is looking, there is always something to see. To look at something which is ‘empty’ is still to be looking, still to be seeing something—if only the ghosts of one’s own expectations.”⁶⁷ In other words it is not so much that these films give the spectator nothing to see; rather, the spectator is given something new to see: color as color—a locus of purity, contemplation, and immersion.

In Creative Evolution Henri Bergson attempted to explain how a series of still photographs on a filmstrip could create the impression of movement. His answer was simple: “It is true that if we had to do with photographs alone, however much we might look at them, we should never see them animated: with immobility set beside immobility, even endlessly, we could never make movement. In order that the pictures may be animated, there must be movement somewhere. The movement does indeed exist here; it is in the apparatus.”⁶⁸

Following Bergson’s lead, Tom Gunning has suggested that movement may be essential to cinema “insofar as we are referring to the movement of the apparatus, the film traveling through the projector gate,” and Laura Mulvey has similarly claimed that even the impression of stasis in cinema is paradoxically the result of “the continuous flow of the filmstrip and its individual frames.”⁶⁹ These are worthwhile observations; however, the rise of digital film is quickly making them obsolete. This is an especially important point to remember when discussing Blue, since in its later incarnation the film does not rely on traditional methods of projection. The color field was initially achieved through the use of a blue film loop; however, this was eventually supplanted by a video-generated blue screen. (For ease of expression I will call the celluloid version of the film Blue 1 and the later computer-generated version Blue 2.) In Blue 2 there is no movement on the screen, but there is also no movement in the apparatus. When viewing Blue 1, I see aleatory specks that occasionally punctuate the screen; these specks remind me of the film’s movement through the projector. As Babette Mangolte has pointed out, in traditional cinematic praxis “time is inscribed in the emulsion grain, which constantly trades places and spaces from one frame to the next.”⁷⁰ But in Blue 2 there is no emulsion grain and thus no temporal inscription.

This radically changes my experience of the film. The stasis becomes even purer, since movement is neither directly displayed nor indirectly suggested. Mary Ann Doane’s words about digital film are especially relevant here: “What is lost in the move to the digital is the imprint of time, the visible degradation of the image.”⁷¹ In most of the static films created before Blue, one never really forgets that one is watching a film. In fact, for all its photographic and televisual aspirations, a film like Warhol’s Empire nevertheless draws attention to the medium itself. As the structural filmmaker Paul Sharits puts it, the “prolongations of subject” in Empire and other early Warhol films serve to “deflect attention finally to the material process of recording-projecting,” including “film grain, scratches, and dirt particles.”⁷² (In fact, one of the first tweets during MoMA’s February 19, 2011, screening of Empire was, “That is one fuzzy mother fuckin building.”)⁷³ Much the same can be said of the monochrome films released before Blue. The blank screen of Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film, for example, prompts the viewer to become more attuned to the movements taking place on the film stock itself. John Cage, who has called Zen for Film his favorite cinematic work, describes it this way: “It’s an hour long and you see the dust on the film and on the camera and on the lens of the projector. That dust actually moves and creates different shapes. The specks of dust become, as you look at the film, extremely comic. They take on character and they take on a kind of plot—whether this speck of dust will meet that speck. And if they do, what happens?”⁷⁴

And Blue 1 produces a similar effect, as specks, splotches, and momentary discolorations intermittently stain the color field (see figures 5.1 and 5.2). But in the film’s digital incarnation Jarman offers a new aesthetic: his computer-generated image suggests neither the movement of onscreen images nor the movement of the film stock itself (see figure 5.3). The film’s only temporal signposts are now the “movements” of the sound track. In effect, then, Blue 1 foregrounds the process of Jarman’s bodily decay through the decay of the filmstrip itself. As Mangolte has suggested, silver-based film evokes “degradation” and “entropy” (connotations that are especially pronounced in monochrome films, where there is nothing to look at except the dissolution and disintegration of the film stock).⁷⁵ Blue 1 is a corporeal film about the corporeal body. Blue 2, in contrast, evokes not the process of dying but death itself. Visually, there is no decay, no entropy, no change—only a perpetual, immutable absence.

Blue 2 departs dramatically from cinematic tradition in almost every way conceivable. It violates the “aesthetic law” that, according to Rudolf Arnheim, requires cinema to move.⁷⁶ But it also resists the indexicality that many have seen as intrinsic to the cinematic medium. It is worth pausing for a moment here to discuss the centrality of indexicality in conventional ontologies of film. This tradition is heavily indebted to the writings of the philosopher and semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce. According to Peirce an index is a sign with “a direct physical connection” to that which it signifies, one that “would, at once, lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed.” He gives as examples a mold with a bullet hole in it (since “without the shot there would have been no hole”), as well as a weathercock, “an index of the direction of the wind.” For Peirce, in all of these cases there is a “real connection” between sign and signifier.⁷⁷ In other words the relationship is not simply conventional, as is the case with the signifiers of language. (The “arbitrary” link between a word and the object it represents was emphasized by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.)⁷⁸ Peirce’s theorization of the indexical has struck many as a useful way to conceptualize photography and, by extension, cinema, given the “direct physical connection” between the image in the world and the photographic (or cinematographic) reproduction of that image. In other words there is no “direct physical connection” between a building and the word building, but there is such a connection between the Empire State Building and Warhol’s Empire.⁷⁹ A number of film theorists have seen this indexicality, this capturing of the physical world, to be at the heart of film’s ontology.⁸⁰ Given its computer-generated ontology, however, Blue 2 appears to bear no indexicality, no trace, no “direct physical connection” to the world. Indeed, there is a sense in which both versions of the film resist filmic indexicality. As Robert Mitchell and Jacques Khalip argue, even in the celluloid version of Blue, “‘to see’ does not mean yielding to an index of a thing or an event that is understood as located in a cinematic beyond; rather, it means reorganizing our assumptions about perception and images.”⁸¹ In its various manifestations Blue challenges the hegemony of both movement and indexicality in cinema.

In spite of such important analogues, however, the immaterial ontology of Blue 2 produces a radically new aesthetic encounter. Blue 1—like the monochrome films of Debord, Paik, Huot, and McLaughlin—foregrounds the materiality of the filmstrip, since its graininess and splotchiness become more salient when our attention is no longer monopolized by moving images. Similarly, the monochrome paintings of Malevich, Rauschenberg, and Klein are all corporeal objects, and as such, they foreground the materiality and flatness of the artwork itself.⁸² But Blue 2 would seem to have no materiality to foreground. Norman Bryson’s musings on the distinctive nature of PC screens are worth considering here: “The PC screen does not behave like the modernist image…. It cannot foreground the materiality of the surface (of pigments on canvas) since it has no materiality to speak of, other than the play of shifting light.”⁸³ Much the same can be said of Blue 2 (although in this case the light is not even shifting). The film becomes a prescient post-Greenbergian meditation on the etherealization that art has undergone in the digital era. Art can no longer draw attention to its own materiality, since it has—to a large extent—become immaterial: films without celluloid; music without records, tapes, or CDs; paintings that exist primarily not as paint and canvas but as ones and zeros.

It is difficult to see a screening of the digital version of Jarman’s final film—all the DVD versions I have encountered display Blue 1, and all the online versions I have found have fallen victim to lossy compression, resulting in a constant pixilation of the blue screen that is both distracting and aesthetically unsatisfying. However, there are numerous temporalized digital monochromes available online that enable an analogous visual experience. To provide just one example: a series of ten videos on YouTube (created by xsetpointer) offer completely silent monochrome screens of various colors for exactly ten minutes. They are given technical names like monochrome blue—RGB 0,0,255—#0000FF (2007) and monochrome green—RGB 0,255,0—#00FF00 (2007).⁸⁴ Of course, since these videos have no sound track, there are now no temporal coordinates—either visual or aural—to ground one’s experience (assuming that one does not move one’s mouse to reveal the slowly moving bar at the bottom of the YouTube screen). But if one simply watches one of these videos without interference, it is perceptually indistinguishable from looking at an actual picture of a monochrome on one’s computer. Like Jarman’s computer-generated version of Blue, these temporalized monochromes are paradoxically free of any traces of temporality.⁸⁵

Films and videos that (like Blue) are entirely monochromatic are relatively rare; however, many works make use of the static blank screen. For example, a substantial amount of Ken Jacobs’s thirty-three-minute Blonde Cobra (1963) consists of a black screen (which is often held for several minutes at a time), accompanied by the acousmêtre of underground film legend Jack Smith telling disturbing stories, singing, and laughing maniacally. (The effect is unsettling; without a visual component the viewer almost feels as if she is hearing voices in her head.) The black screen was also used extensively by Jean-Luc Godard in his Le gai savoir (The Joy of Learning) (1969)—often (as in Hurlements and Blue) as a way of evoking blindness. (During one “blackout,” for example, a voice is heard saying, “Here, the image is missing. The Anglo-Canadian police gouged out the eyes of a cameraman who was filming the landscapes and faces of a free Quebec.”)⁸⁶ And a significant portion of Malcolm Le Grice’s Threshold (1972) consists of monochromatic black, green, red, and yellow screens (accompanied by long stretches of silence punctuated by brief clips of strange, fragmented sounds). While none of these are static or monochromatic films per se, they all exploit the affective intensity of the empty screen. Much the same could be said of flicker films, like Tony Conrad’s The Flicker and Paul Sharits’s Ray Gun Virus (1966). While the lability resulting from the continually flashing frames produces an affective experience that is quite distinct from that engendered by monochrome films, both modalities nevertheless use blank figureless screens of various colors as currency. By remediating the monochrome painting and temporalizing it in diverse ways, all of these films foreground the plenitude of emptiness and the multivalence of the monolithic. They also serve to verify Ivan Chtcheglov’s insight (in his analysis of De Chirico’s paintings) that “an empty space creates a richly filled time.”⁸⁷