As Kracauer once wrote, cinema is ‘like science, it breaks down material phenomena into tiny particles, thereby sensitizing us to the tremendous energies accumulated in the microscopic configurations of matter’ (50). A pivotal moment in Robin Campillo’s 120BPM is a digital effects sequence depicting tiny particles. The camera pans up from dancefloor and slowly morphs from light and dust to intimate, microbiological representation of HIV. 120 BPM renders the world of plasma as a special effect that hangs like miasma high above the dancefloor; the protean plasmaticity of the exterior and interior life of the activists and the HIV that shapes their external and internal environment, their bodies, and their politics. The microscopic view of the inside always out of view, of the moment when HIV comes into contact with the CD4, implies a different perception and visualisation for ‘the AIDS movie’. The cytological gaze, if we can call it that, is harnessed here in a queer film in ways that challenge the pathological trope of only ever visualizing AIDS as bodily debilitation. Historically, cinema has often defaulted to an analogue register in its mediation of AIDS as the index for what cannot be seen, namely, HIV. The 'AIDS body' became a default trope in identifying gay men 'at the moment of their destruction' through their formerly 'masculine body' in a state of abject ruin, spectacularized, wasted, a corporeal undoing that was easily indexed through practical on-set effects. However, in 120 BPM the digital effect rendering HIV’s imaging and imagining speaks to a broader set of intersections between biopolitics, the indexicality of viruses, and the moving image. More so, this moment of ‘digital miasma’ in Campillo’s film may be gesturing towards a paradigmatic shift from visualizing the syndrome to visualizing the virus – towards an HIV cinema.