My review was written in July 1984 after viewing the film on WNET-TV's "Independent Focus" series broadcast.
"Knee Dancing" is a personal dramatic film about a young woman recalling her romantic affairs and childhood traumas. Indie filmmaker Doreen Ross shows promise as a helmer with ideas both visual and structural, but pic's 1960s-style experimental format is a barrier to audience acceptance. Made in 1982, pic has made the indie markets circuit with no domestic theatrical distribution deal, and preemed (unexpurgated and uncut) on WNET-TV's "Independent Focus" series.
Story unfolds in the form of color and black & white flashbacks detailing incidents in the life of Laura Zuckerman (Doreen Ross). Basic setting is a surrealistic white-on-white airport, with Laura hiding in the bathroom recalling her relationships. A key man in her life was Ivan (Terry Logan), a jazz pianist neighbor she met while in college and later married but could not get along with. She also has an affair with a brutish married man David Calloway (also played by Logan).
Earlier period flashbacks show her as a teen (played by Tina Faulkner) gang-raped by a gang of boys in the 1950s, and prior to that, forced to have incestuous sex by her ogre of a father (Logan again). After a long string of troubling scenes and imagery, pic ends on a hopeful note of Laura having relived all of her traumas and expressing an optimistic message of "I'll be fine".
Director Ross' experimental approach is overly gauche at imes, incorporating shock effects (mainly sexual and virtually X-rated) which interfere with the gradually pieced together narrative. Her visual concepts, executed ably by cinematographer Ted V. Mikels, himself a busy indie film director, are arresting and frequently original within the stream-of-consciousness format popularized by Federico Fellini and other influential helmers in the 1960s.
Gimmick of casting lead actors in many multiple roles, definitively used by Lindsay Anderson in "O Lucky Man!" a decade ago, seems an affectation here, though lead player (and coproducer) Terry Logan delivers acceptably different personae as the various men Laura has dealt with in her life. Filmmaker Ross is not well-served by casting herself in the central role, giving a perf that lacks dimension and seems overly influenced by the scr7een work of Ellen Burstyn. Tech credits reflect a very low budget.
