Bellevue Film1978

"... is just what its title and program note say it is: 'A look at physical therapy, having profited from it. '... Russian formalism associates art with 'making strange'. Gail Camhi seems to be doing just the reverse–showing how ordinary, say, amputees and their stumps and artificial limbs are, making them familiar and banal presences rather than fearfully charged objects. Yet by removing (to some extent) myth and other forms of fantasy from a hospital ward, she may actually be inviting the esthetic imagination to relocate itself elsewhere in the film..." – Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Declarations of Independents," VILLAGE VOICE "BELLEVUE FILM... was made in a rehabilitation ward, and it offers and inventory of patients: a child learning to use crutches, a young man beginning exercise with weights, the old man, the beautiful woman, the middle aged man without legs and one arm. The film settles upon this man, finally, discovering as one might, as a visitor, a pain in a face, the limp pajama over a stump of a leg, the cinches, straps, buckles of prostheses, his happiness and pride, one marvels. Camhi's film manner is without cuteness. Images seemingly are made from whatever vantage point is possible, not from a preconceived angle. Flash frames, light-struck ends are kept if the image beneath is worthy. For it is the image and its information not the style that matters, without sentiment, silently." – Anthony Bannon, BUFFALO EVENING NEWS