Having originally trained as a painter, Derek Jarman entered the film industry as production designer on Ken Russell’s The Devils, and the mysterious relationship between painting and cinema was among the many questions he would explore in his questing work as a filmmaker, which abounded in art historical references, and which ended with his Blue, a meditation of color as character released shortly before his death from AIDS-related complications. Alternately a prophet of doom and a poet of pleasure, Jarman made films that put him in conversation with immortal figures such as Shakespeare, Caravaggio, and Wittgenstein. These were conversations among equals.