This film will insinuate itself into the images under your closed eyelids. Meat, blood, cuts, scars, wounds, assassinations, executions, dismemberments, car accidents, beatings, and burnings will all rush together in an explosion of pain, longing, and unsatisfied hungers. Homosexual sado-masochism, not gay love. The absolute evil of pure genius. A paint brush slashes the spirit as a razor, the body. The tormented torments; the masochist punishes the sadist. Flesh is set aflame with a cigarette, not a kiss. Francis Bacon is the one true artist of the postwar era. He understood that humanity had irrevocably crossed the barrier between reason and madness. This film casts us into the abyss of the collective unconscious where we may swim or be burned to a crisp. Hold your eyelids open with sharp orange toothpicks and suck on the bloody images. Watch the film five times and then seek out Bacon's work, at least in books, if not in museums. Perhaps then your unspoken thirst may be quenched and you will grasp the 20th Century before you plummet into the 21st.
