DVD Review: Jamil Dehlavi's BORN OF FIRE

Jamil Dehlavi's Born of Fire (1986) received both a theatrical and home video release in the 1980s, but the film has languished in complete obscurity since that time. This obscurity is undeserved because, as revealed by Mondo Macabro's new DVD release, Born of Fire is a rare hybrid of art house cinema and horror that delivers a strong dose of mind-bending surrealism.

In Born of Fire, an astronomer whose name is never given (Suzan Crowley, who is a distant relative of Aleister) observes a disturbance on the sun's surface that she believes is caused by something occurring on Earth. This disturbance manifests itself in numerous ways, including the eruption of a long dormant volcano in Turkey. The mystery woman somehow becomes aware of a concert flautist named Paul Bergson (Peter Firth) who experiences visions of fire in unison with the cosmic occurrences. Bergson heads to Turkey to understand how is flautist father died. Once in Turkey, he meets a man named Bilal (Stefan Kalipha), who informs him that the Master Musician (played by someone called Oh-Tee) has the answers he seeks.

Such a straight-forward description is admittedly deceiving because Jamil Dehlavi's film isn't so much concerned with making narrative sense as it is concerned with style and theme. Born of Fire sheds its narrative confines over time in favor of a hallucinatory visual approach akin to Alejandro Jodorowsky. This emphasis on poetic and surreal imagery links to the film's supernatural themes, which are derived from the Islamic notion of Iblis or Shayṭan (aka the Devil). Iblis manifests himself through nightmarish imagery that keeps spilling over into the narrative until the film is completely drenched in hallucinatory visuals.

Mondo Macabro's DVD presents a widescreen source that was is digitally transferred from a film's negative. The image is really crisp, which accentuates the film's very deliberate cinematography and lighting schemes (some scenes use lots of soft, hazy lighting while others are brightly lit with high contrast colors). The special features, which include interviews with the director, Peter Firth, and Nabil Shaban, are of the high caliber that has come to be expected from Mondo Macabro.

Born of Fire invokes a time period when filmmakers like Nicolas Roeg, Andrzej Zuwalski, and others muddied up the boundaries between art and genre to create vital works with lasting impact. Born of Fire doesn't quite match up with the works of the previously mentioned directors but Jamil Dehlavi was playing the same game and achieving powerful results.