Fire In The Eye

The best films allow an audience to ask questions of themselves, and provide a path to an answer. The worst often do the same, but the queries are not those of self or soul or civilisation but more prosaic: less "why am I here?" than "why am I still watching this?". Fire In The Eye is one of the latter.

It deserves a strobe warning, even if it has passed through a flicker box. The film is a series of flashes, electrical impulses or lightning or stroboscopically illuminated diagrams of blood vessels in the iris. There is the sound of wind, and the flashes, and in the monochrome strobing there may be some challenge beyond the ability to endure tedium, but it is well hidden.

It is possible to be distracted by the thought that the cinema appears itself to be taken from a film. As it continues the auditorium becomes a distraction, the audience in the intermittent glare of the screen appear taken from an Atomic-Age B-Movie, a Cronenburg film or some J-Horror due for a turgid Hollywood Remake. This is not allusion, however, but desperation: no film should have its audience casting their minds to other films in the hope of escape.