Blue is in effect, Jarman's last will and testament. He made this excruciating, brilliant, liberating film with full consciousness of his impending death. The soundtrack, intensely sculpted, is an assemblage of noises, music, and multiple voices reading philosophical reflections, anecdotes, and diaristic ruminations on the progress of the filmmaker's illness, including his progressive blindness. Visually, the film is simply a blue screen, subjects to the imperfections of color stock and the projections of viewers' retinas. With this lack of visual engagement, the soundtrack becomes eerily precise, distended, disembodied. Jarman had formulated the idea of a blue film years before, in response to the alchemical concepts of the French painter Yves Klein, for whom blue was a sacred and transcendent color. “What need of so much news from abroad when all that concerns life and death is all transacting and at work with me?” Jarman asks. . . . Blue is his way of saying farewell, of inscribing himself into history.-Thomas Frick, LA Weekly