Ocularist

Ocularist illuminates the techniques used to create acrylic eyes and examines both the physical and psychological repercussions associated with the loss of an eye. The film received an honorable mention for short filmmaking at the Sundance Film Festival - one of only eight films honored from more than 70 entries.

The short film and subsequent industry attention are now starting to focus the national spotlight on this specialized and unusual career, where ocularists must perform the extremely detailed task of matching a prosthetic eye to a real one or even creating an set of eyes from scratch.

"Ocularist" is an odd little movie about an odd little profession. It's a roughly five- ten minute documentary set to an ambient techno score, about a man who makes prosthetic eyes for victims of accidents. It's highly stylized work using a stark color palette, blown-out backgrounds, repetitious cuts, and cuts to black to underscore not only the theme of vision, but also the doctor's balancing act between art and science. The details are fascinating -- we watch as a teenager has a mold taken of his eye socket, and as the ocularist builds, paints, and shapes the final product -- and the filmmaking is both energetic and observant. A perfect marriage of style and subject.

It's an interesting topic, but the movie is so focused on itself *as* a movie that the topic is essentially lost. While the director apparently thinks that the cuts and blackouts and visual stutter reference vision loss, they register only as "tricks," more appropriate to a music video, or possibly a film school project. The children's science show Newton's Apple did a better job of describing what an ocularist does, and at least as good a job of describing the role of prosthetic eyes socially. There's an interesting topic for a movie hidden inside this movie—society's need for disabled people to hide their disability, for example—but if that occurred to the filmmaker, it's obscured by the visual style.