WHITE OF THE EYE

Celebrated, complicated and fractured auteur Donald Cammell (PERFORMANCE, DEMON SEED) only made a handful of films in his lifetime, and they’re all fodder for cinephiles to endlessly turn over and reconsider like a Rubik’s Cube. Cammell’s lone Eighties film WHITE OF THE EYE is a high-gloss, Arizona-lensed giallo that’s unreal and unbelievable from start to finish, and wouldn’t be out of place in Argento’s later filmography. David Keith (FIRESTARTER) and Cathy Moriarty (RAGING BULL) star as a serial killer and his unknowing wife…but plot here takes a backseat to Cammell’s expansive stylization and elliptical, hallucinatory editing as well as Pink Floyd-ite Nick Mason’s wild music score. Like Antonioni, Wenders and Jacques Demy before him, Cammell’s European take on the American southwest through his unflinching eye is what’s truly important here.