Outside In

(Stephen Dwoskin, UK, 1981)

The first striking impression created by Stephen Dwoskin’s career is the immense variety of modes and forms with which this director works – not only from film to film, but frequently within the same film.

Outside In, for instance, is nominally about the filmmaker’s experience of his disability, stricken with polio in early childhood. But is it a personal reminiscence, a documentary, an essay-film, a fictional recreation, a lyrical abstraction, or a dance/performance piece?

It works through – as is often the case in Dwoskin’s feature-length pieces – a series of self-contained tableaux, each one starkly set against those surrounding it, and each drawing upon a very different style of cinematic representation.

Poetic associations flit from segment to segment, but it is left to the viewer to draw the lines and make the connections: the prosthetic apparatus into which Dwoskin laboriously straps his legs each morning is compared to both the everyday high heels with which women torture themselves, and the bondage-and-discipline gear that forms part of a sophisticated sexual underworld we see much of in his work.

More disconcertingly and provocatively, Outside In offers itself – via a wild prologue that mixes Jean-Luc Godard-style distancing with Benny Hill-style innuendo – as a comedy (“You might find it funny”, he mock-politely advises).

In a burlesque-grotesque combo that goes way beyond the comic self-abasement we find in Luc Moullet’s similarly off-centre comedies, Dwoskin puts himself into scenes where he falls, slips, slides, is helpless, while those around him flounder, compound the problem, or miraculously come to his aid (and such angelic gestures of care often carry an erotic dimension in his work).

This overt self-depiction by Dwoskin, which forms one strand of his career, is very different to the type of more experimental and narratively abstract cinema for which he is best known – that is, if he is known at all, because he is surely among the most criminally overlooked major figures in cinema history.

Outside In is not in the class of his masterpiece, Behindert (1974), but it is well worth tracking down on the 14 Films DVD box set lovingly produced by Les Films du Renard in 2001.

MORE Dwoskin: Intoxicated By My Illness (Part 1), Oblivion, Trying to Kiss the Moon, I’ll Be Your Eyes, You’ll Be Mine

© Adrian Martin July 2007