Chroma: A Book of Color

by Derek Jarman

Overview

Chroma: A Book of Color is a meditation on the color spectrum by Britain’s most controversial filmmaker. From the explosions of image and color in Edward II, The Last of England, The Garden, and Wittgenstein, to the somber blacks of his collages and tar paintings, Derek Jarman has consistently used color in unprecedented ways. In his signature style, a lyrical combination of classic theory, anecdote and poetry, Jarman takes the reader through the spectrum, introducing each color as an embodiment of an emotion, evoking memories or dreams.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816665938
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	03/18/2010
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

One of England’s foremost filmmakers, Derek Jarman (1942-1994) wrote and directed several feature films, including Sebastiane, Jubilee, Caravaggio, and Blue, as well as numerous short films and music videos. He was a stage designer, artist, writer, gardener, and an outspoken AIDS and queer rights activist in the UK and the United States. He is the author of several books, among them Modern Nature, available from the University of Minnesota Press.

Table of Contents

Introduction, White Lies, Shadow is the Queen of Colour, On Seeing Red, The Romance of the Rose and the Sleep of Colour, Grey Matter, Marsilio Ficino, Green Fingers, Alchemical Colour, How Now Brown Cow, The Perils of YellowOrange, TipLeonardo, Into the Blue, Isaac Newton, Purple Passage, Black Arts: O Mia Anima Nera, Silver and Gold, Iridescence, Translucence

Editorial Reviews

England's brashest independent filmmaker (Edward II, Wittgenstein), Jarman, who died of AIDS last February, draws on personal anecdote, literature and the work of Wittgenstein, Leonardo, Pliny and Kandinsky in this sketchy and highly idiosyncratic series of meditations on color. Focusing chapters on individual colors or on qualities like iridescence, Jarman moves freely from one passage, be it a quotation from Isaac Newton or a nursery rhyme, to another: a memory of his aloof father, a list of prices for brands of white oil paint. Jarman's pictorially lush films are vivid testimony to his sensitivity to the subject, but the fragments assembled here are not consistently informative or eloquent enough to reward any but the most ardent fans of the filmmaker. (Mar.)

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