Blue is not really a film you watch. That verb doesn’t quite capture the visceral feeling of having your soul obliterated. Nevertheless, this past Sunday I did in fact sit in a theater alongside several dozen others and watch artist Derek Jarman’s relentless chronicle of his own body’s systematic destruction.

Here’s something I’m struggling with: Blue evades any attempt to neatly describe it. While drafting this post, I typed up several partial summaries but discarded them all. Somehow, they felt like betrayals.

For example, Blue’s Wikipedia page asserts that the film is about “the complications of living with AIDS.” Yet this should seem immediately false to anyone who has actually experienced Blue. Jarman attacks this very phrase; he ridicules the people who talk blithely about “living with AIDS.” This was the early 90s, a time when contracting HIV was still effectively a death sentence. To Jarman, who had watched his friends die and was now watching himself die, his vision degraded by the disease, reduced entirely to shades of blue, the phrase must have seemed indescribably cruel.

Maybe the best way to talk about Blue is to say that it’s about dying with AIDS, not living with it.

Blue is also a revolt against cinema. It’s a howl of pain flung in front of audiences who want to carry on as normal. Again, description fails me. I can tell you what Blue literally is: Eighty minutes of a static blue image accompanied by music and voiceovers of what I can only describe as prose poetry. But that’s not really sufficient. It doesn’t capture what Blue really is, what it does to you and how.

Here is perhaps a better, more oblique mode of description: Blue is a film that so utterly consumed me that I didn’t notice how hard I was clenching my fists until I left the theater and saw the red half-circles etched into my palms. It’s a film that I processed physically, rather than intellectually — an experience my body remembers more than my mind.

++++++

I saw Blue last weekend at the True/False Film Fest, along with — checks notes — thirteen other documentaries. Many were excellent; some genuinely stunning. And I don’t really want to measure them against Blue. What it achieves is so distant from even the best new filmmaking featured at the festival that a direct comparison doesn’t feel right — not so much “unfair” as simply a category error.

But when it comes to one particular documentary, I can’t help myself.

Zodiac Killer Project is, like Blue, more anti-cinema than film. Its title is an intentional misdirection: What you get is not a documentary about the Zodiac Killer, but rather a reflection on a film that could-have-been. It asks the audience to imagine the true crime documentary that the director, Charlie Shackleton, might have made, if only he’d managed to secure the rights to a book about the Zodiac Killer. It presents the audience, not with reenactments and talking head interviews, but static shots of empty street corners, “evocative” b-roll so stripped of specificity that it becomes insubstantial, and an (attempted) analysis of true crime storytelling tropes.

But where Blue is earnest, vulnerable, and intimate to a degree that is legitimately painful, Zodiac Killer Project is a smug exercise in cynicism. There is no evidence that Shackleton cares much about true crime documentaries one way or the other. In fact, at the screening I attended, Shackleton stated quite explicitly during a director Q&A that he doesn’t love or hate the genre. And as a result, Zodiac Killer Project presents true crime, not as an interesting subject or even an object of loathing, but simply as something to sneer at.

The film is quite literally a joke — and an expensive one. It was shot on actual film, and when an audience member asked about this decision, Shackleton said he found it funny to waste film shooting images of nothing. You can argue this is a clever subversion of the true crime docu-slop he’s criticizing: That to burn money on 35 mm prints of deserted California streets is just as valuable as whatever Netflix is pumping out this month.

Perhaps that’s true. But at least Lover, Stalker, Killer doesn’t pretend to be the kind of art that plays at Sundance, which is where Shackleton’s film premiered.

Obviously, not every work of radical, deconstructive filmmaking can, or should, accomplish what Blue is doing. Under any other circumstances, I wouldn’t think of weighing these two films together; it’s just an unfortunate accident — unfortunate for Shackleton’s film, anyway — that I saw both within 24 hours.

But the juxtaposition makes a sallow, passionless husk like Zodiac Killer Project seem less like a forgettable vanity project and more like a goddamn crime.