“The Archaeology of Sound”: Derek Jarman'sBlueand Queer Audiovisuality in the Time ofaids

Abstract

This article concentrates on the substance of audition in Derek Jarman's Blue. In his last feature film, Jarman makes a decisive ethical and aesthetic break: he shifts value away from the overdetermined cultural premiums associated with the visual ``spectacle'' and onto the indeterminate event of aurality that reconceptualizes queer belonging in terms of the erotics of the ear. Tracing the impact of Jarman's audiovisual project, the essay begins with the argument that the relationship of sound to image in Blue is defined by an entropic or unvisualized audition. This relationship in turn corresponds to a technical nonproductivity inscribing certain constructions of the aural spectacle in philosophies and theories of film sound. Blue's model of aural spectacularization is then linked to Michel Foucault's remarks on speakability/unspeakability, voice, and listening in The History of Sexuality and The Hermeneutics of the Subject. What lies unthought in these texts, this article contends, is something Foucault can only imply: a groundwork for a mode of audition that poses a moving counterweight to the ocular- and logocentric assumptions that often underwrite queer theory.

“If You’re Out There, Please Listen to Me…”: Voices of Mourning Through the Wind Phone (Kaze no Denwa)

“…This screen is accompanied by an elaborate two-part narrative soundscape, a surreal meditation on his life, as he is dying of AIDS. 18 Hearing, listening, address, and mourning are integral to Blue and coalesce similarly in the wind phone. Khalip, via Jean-Luc Nancy, explains that "to listen (écouter) is decidedly not the same as to hear (entendre)."…”

Crossing over with Tilda Swinton—the Mistress of “Flat Affect”

“…These moments are organised around the disruption of conventional generic encounters: the ruthless betrayal of a betrothed, in the match that (Orlando announces directly to camera) "would never have worked" in Orlando (Potter 1992); the heterosexual pick-up moment in which "Joyce the scientist" (Swinton plays two characters called Joyce in the film) is more engaged by her newspaper than by a stranger's chat-up lines in Possible Worlds (Lepage 2000); the "beginning of the affair" moment in which Swinton announces the strict rules upon which it may proceed 22 For a discussion of how the past might be heard in the present through the sonic in Blue, see Khalip (2010). 23 For an interesting analysis of We Need to Talk About Kevin as a contemporary reworking of the maternal melodrama, see Thornham (2013).…”