Chroma

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.)