Burn is a narrative collage, peopled with devils, angels, and allegorical creatures. A house burns from the inside while its occupants focus on the emotional issues of their lives. The inhabitants serve life sentences with no remission in an architecture of insecurity - while impending disaster is ignored.

When traumas and alienation emerge from behind the perfect veneer of TV soaps and cinematic romances, their peaceful, smooth-running idyll turns into catastrophe. The film and video artist Reynold Reynolds uses his experience as a film theorist in order to visualise this collision between the idealised cliché and its opposite in his videos and installations. The language and methods of the cinema are analytical instruments in his work; in a narrative collage, for example, the inhabitants scarcely seem to notice that their house is burning, as they are so caught up in their own emotional states. In "Burn", the people resemble prisoners facing a life sentence with no hope of reprieve, monotonously going about their everyday business quite unaware of the approaching disaster.

In this wildly outlandish film an absent minded couple sit calmly reading as fires erupt in their clothing, books and furniture. They nonchalantly swat at he flames with a stoic inattentiveness. Burn embraces an anti-narrative structure yet intense drama is found in the conflagration about to envelope the couples' abode. Finally a decisive act is taken leading to the possibility of a miraculous event.


Burn is a narrative collage, peopled with devils, angels, and allegorical creatures. A house burns from the inside while its occupants focus on the emotional issues of their lives. The inhabitants serve life sentences with no remission in an architecture of insecurity – while impending disaster is ignored. Absolutearts.com