This chapter examines Blue, Derek Jarman’s film dealing with his experience of AIDS in both its clinical and socio-cultural dimensions. It will investigate the ways in which Blue managed to overcome the difficulties of trying to portray AIDS at a peak of the epidemic in the global North in the early 1990s by using rhetorical and poetic strategies recognisable to scholars familiar with the challenges of writing about performance. Thanks to its use of metaphor as a device that enables the artist to allude to AIDS as a reality that is both unlocatable and irreducible to its symptoms, Blue can be read as an instance of performative film, one that re-enacts Jarman’s personal encounter with AIDS in the space of the film theatre, thus translating it from personal experience to public encounter.1Blue is also a film that, by means of metaphor and its affective and evocative powers, successfully bridges the local and global dimensions of the epidemic; therefore, constituting itself as translocal knowledge. It does so in two major ways. Firstly, through the pendular nature of its narrative: one that oscillates between the private and localised experience of an artist living with AIDS, and the global spectacle of the epidemic, produced and reproduced through mass-mediated visual representations and sensationalist rhetoric.