Everyone calls 1970’s Performance a Nicolas Roeg film, but he was only half the equation. Yet while skilled cinematographer Roeg went on to be an iconic subversive director, his co-director Donald Cammell was the really weird one. A portrait artist by training and hugely influenced by the Eros and Thanatos of Jorge Luis Borges and the dark magicks of Aleister Crowley, even the limits of a low-budget psychosexual slasher couldn’t contain him. His penultimate film, White of the Eye, has the prosaic setup of a married woman (Cathy Moriarty) suspecting her husband (David Keith), but under the wild gaze of Cammell, it becomes a berserk and stylish examination of identity. – Richard Whittaker
