ABSTRACT
Derek Jarman was well aware of the chromophobic histories of Western art. In his study of color,Chroma, he writes, “As the Roman Empire collapsed, iconoclasts waged war against the graven image. Color became the fount of impurity. A chasm opened up between the terrestrial and celestial world. The dog chased its own tail to bite it off” (Jarman 1995: 45). He also made a direct connection between color and queerness, writing that “Leonardo took the first step into light, and Newton, a notorious bachelor, followed him with Opticks. In this century Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote hisRemarks on Color.Color seems to have a Queer bent!” (58). Jarman was a radical, even iconoclastic, figure in 1980s British art cinema, and scholarship has considered both the queer politics of his feature films and the use of color in his final filmBlue(1993). However, his experimental films were for a long time unavailable, and perhaps for this reason have not been widely analyzed. Ranging from diaristic home-movies to theatrically staged scenes, these films demonstrate the importance of rich, monochromatic color schemes, image layering and surface effects to Jarman’s aesthetics.
