Description

A giallo set in the parched American southwest, Donald Cammell’s White of the Eye features a protagonist who, paradoxically, possesses the aesthetic sensibility of a gifted artist, but is a brutal killer at the same time, a psychopath who arranges his murder scenes as works of art. Since the beginning of his film career in the early 1960s, Donald Cammell had been interested in the figure of Jack the Ripper - his first known screenplay was titled Just A Jackknife Has MacHeath, Dear (a line from the famous Brecht/Weill song "Mack the Knife") and years later, in 1977, he began working on an unproduced screenplay with Kenneth Tynan titled Jack The Ripper. Of course, the themes of creation and destruction, two sides of the same coin, appear in his most famous film, Performance, in the figures of Chas, the gangster, and Turner, the artist. With his White of the Eye, Cammell realized fully the theme that he once blazoned on his T-shirt: "Murder is a work of art."

The film is also representative of Cammell’s work in its densely allusive quality, with an eclectic yet impressive array of references to Picasso, Apache lore and opera, and Cammell’s tendency to include self-inscriptions from his own bohemian life and tastes as well. Its swirling, mobile camera - it was the first film allegedly shot entirely with the Steadicam - is an homage to Dario Argento. The integration of Leoncavallo’s opera Pagliacci, the music of country singers George Jones and Hank Williams, Jr., and Hot Chocolate’s "You Sexy Thing," the splendid, sterile beauty of the Arizona desert, and a climax inspired by Godard’s Pierrot le fou reveal Cammell’s inimitable style and combine to create a film of high artistry. White of the Eye thus represents one of Donald Cammell’s best films and holds up to multiple viewings - it displays his directorial ability to elicit uniformly fine performances from the actors who, in this enigmatic portrait of a killer with an aesthetic imagination, comprise his tangled threesome: David Keith, Cathy Moriarity and Alan Rosenberg.

—Sam and Rebecca Umland

"The work of a born filmmaker able to capture on celluloid a personal vision of a mad, mystical world lurking behind an ordinary mundane one" – Philip French, THE OBSERVER

"A mesmerizing mosaic of a film" – Nigel Andrews, FINANCIAL TIMES

"A virtuoso piece of filmmaking… by far the most accomplished thriller I have seen this year" – Derek Malcolm, GUARDIAN

Credits

Director: Donald Cammell
Screenplay: Donald Cammell, China Kong
Cast: David Keith, Cathy Moriarty, Art Evans, Alan Rosenberg, Marc Hayashi, William G. Schilling, David Chow, Michael Greene, Alberta Watson, Danielle Smith, Mimi Leiber, Pamela Seamon, Bob Zache, Danko Gurovich
Producers: Cassian Elwes, Brad Wyman
Distributor: Cinema 7