Derek Jarman
Blue (soundtrack)

"Music is the true pillar upon which the entire cinematic phenomenon has developed, what of the film replaces and constitutes the depth"

The phrase quoted in quotes, taken from the book "Paura e Desiderio" by E. Ghezzi, seems to capture the essence of many reflections on the relationship between music and images in film. First of all, it talks about music (and images) in the film, thus within the film, understood quite differently from a "soundtrack" or "soundtrack" (technically the magnetic reading strip placed alongside the frames in the film), a side comment or in any case external to the images. What happens in films such as for example "A Clockwork Orange" by S. Kubrick, "Wings of Desire" by W. Wenders, or "Zabriskie Point" by M. Antonioni (and countless others), the music is not only perfectly integrated within the moving images, but it is itself an image, even if not visual, an image in a broad sense, an acoustic image, which however, by creating suggestions of all kinds (even visual), becomes a sort of "fourth dimension," in addition to the spatial dimensions (known to be three, even if represented on a two-dimensional screen). In the case of Derek Jarman, a brilliant director (unfortunately) who passed away at a very young age, the work consisting of image-sound is enriched by a further density: "Blue," in fact, is an absolutely unique film for its characteristic, in that it consists for the entire duration (76 min) in a single frame in a saturation of blue, and the voices of Derek Jarman, John Quentin, Nigel Terry, and Tilda Swinton, lent to the single albeit invisible character in the film, and protagonist through vocal performance alone. Therefore, we should talk about image-music-voice, even if in hindsight (or hearing) these three words are ultimately practically equivalent.

Jarman's recitative, and those of the other performers, is music; the blue of the background can be understood in different ways: the color attributed in romantic culture to sadness, melancholia; being a backdrop, it evocatively recalls visual associations with an oceanic depth, or metaphorically with the emotional deep of the narrator's soul who introspectively looks within himself and "sees" precisely all that can be linked to such color.

"Pearl fishers
In azure seas
Deep waters
Washing the isle of the dead
In coral harbours
Amphora
Spill
Gold
Across the still seabed
We lie there"

"Pescatori di perle
nei mari azzurri
Acque profonde
che si infrangono sul(?)l'isola dei morti
Un'anfora
Caduta
Dorata
Nella barriera corallina
Sull'eterno letto d'acqua
Qui noi riposiamo"

The more strictly "musical" component, that is, in a conventional sense, more "structured" in canonical and codified forms, is lost and resurfaces from this broader, blue, sad oceanic context, like the painful and resigned self-portrait of the soul of its Author, assuming the spectral shapes of a ghost ship, the physiognomy of a beloved face, of a doctor inspecting the protagonist's eye base in a hospital bed, and is inseparable from the poetic stream of consciousness of the Author-Protagonist.

Entrusted to Simon Fisher Turner, Coil, Brian Eno, Balanescu Quartet, Miranda Sex Garden, the musical component of these "Waves" (vaguely similar in affinity to those of Virginia Woolf) is characterized as the most icastically clear of responses to the many questions that might arise about the relationships between music and images within the cinematic text. In the heartbreaking and desperate beauty of these words, in the music that now dresses, now highlights them, now slides away from them like a wave receding from a desolate beach, there is practically everything: poetry, beauty, image, and sound, culminating in a refined, simple, and grand textual architecture in which every component, limited within the confines of its own role (sounds, words, music, meanings...), ultimately disappears, or takes a back seat to allow emotion to emerge as the pure essence of the whole work, as if it were what has been dressed by music, words, images, be it a splendid sculpture, a female body, a male body, or simply our very own soul.

"Cinema is bigger than life"? Probably yes, like Art, in all its forms and sensory directions (the senses to which they speak: that is, visual, cinematic, classical music art and otherwise...) is a mirror in which humankind has always, since it exists, observed itself to see itself more clearly and better understand itself, forgetting, at times, that it first constructed it. Unless such a mirror is the sea, in which the sky is reflected, an illusory surface that disguises, like a veil, the cosmic and infinite space. Cold and inexhaustible as what goes beyond ourselves. Splendid and eternally transient as what is within ourselves.

And in the same way, even the words, (those of the writer) should step aside, to leave the conclusion to the Author's Words of this Work:

"Our lives will pass like the traces of a cloud
And be scattered like
Mist that is chased by the
Rays of the sun
For our time is the passing of a shadow
And our lives will run like
Sparks through the stubble
I place a delphinium, Blue, upon your grave"