Here we have a no budget black and white short film from 1967 that would have possibly been of no interest to anyone beyond being an early curio in the filmography of director Michael Armstrong (future director of The Haunted House of Horror and screenwriter of House of the Long Shadows) but for the casting of a 20yr old David Bowie, still two years away from 'Space Oddity', in his first film role.
The film purports to be "a study of the illusionary reality world within the schizophrenic mind of the artist at his point of creativity" and I have no intention to gainsay it and what we get is a silent, staring Bowie enigmatically tormenting the artist (Michael Byrne) of the painting from which the elegantly beautiful young man seems to have emerged.
The music by Noel Janus (father of actress Samantha Womack (née Janus)) is wonderfully strange but the general sound work is brutally clumsy and far too loud in the mix whilst Bowie who often displayed more enthusiasm than ability in is acting is decidedly, and perhaps deliberately, wooden here. But, it's a fascinatingly hallucinatory and violent slice of 60s arthouse cinema that must have made for a successful ardour dampener in it's original screening at the Jacey Cinema in Piccadilly Circus sandwiched, much to Bowie's delight, between two porn films.*
* (My thanks to Collin Brennan for this article which provided that info)
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