Outside In

For his eighth feature, Dwoskin focuses on his own disablement by polio, and its hazards to his emotional and sexual life. It's a strange, riveting mixture of Hal Roach slapstick, vivid confessions, open-hearted self-reflexivity, and Dwoskin's own highly formalist aesthetic of the unblinking look (which had some English feminists hopping mad but reached their European sisters). Dwoskin reinvents the cinema from where Straub left off. The cast ranges through Carlisi from Fellini-land to Jordine from TV'sCrossroads. A haunting documentation of a strange, difficult life; its pratfalls and fetishes, triumphs and disasters. Crutches of fire?