Donald Cammell's “The Argument”

Part One


Part Two


Part Three

“The next project Cammell managed to get made was a short called The Argument (1971/99) that was shot on location in the Utah desert by Vilmos Zsigmond on the sly. Cammell had obtained the camera on the grounds that Zsigmond was shooting tests for another film. This visually stunning confrontation between a frustrated film director and a goddess (played by Myriam Gibril, Cammell’s lover and Isis to his Osiris in Lucifer Rising) covers many of Cammell’s favorite themes, but does so in an overly obvious way, verbalizing rather than dramatizing the situations with the effect that the comedic dialogue becomes nothing more than an irritating distraction from the images. This is not helped by the inevitable comparisons to the magnificent Lucifer Rising, that arise due to the presence of Gibril as a goddess in a desert. Cammell never completed the film. It was rediscovered and put together by his editor, Frank Mazzola, in 1999.” — Maximilian Le Cain @ Senses of Cinema.