The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, January 13-19
White of the Eye (1987)
Directed by Donald Cammell
Lunatic genius Cammell was supposed to make more films than he was allowed to, but he proved too strange for polite filmgoers and producers to handle. The few films that escaped into the world unscathed are plainly the work of a man who’d burrowed so deep into virgin aesthetic ground he’d grown accustomed to it like a mole. Colors, montage and Freud were all he knew. The rest of the world was alien. White of the Eye is a twisted refraction of the more-is-more aestheticism of Adrian Lyne, Michael Mann and Ridley Scott. A stereo salesman and sound expert Paul White (David Keith, in a performance that should have made him the arthouse Patrick Swayze) is the chief suspect in a rash of horrific murders. Cammell shoots and cuts the murders and ensuing investigation as unhinged abstract. The piercing screams and psychedelic angularity cut through the lie of Reagan’s America. Scout Tafoya (January 14, 23, 25, 10pm at the Spectacle)