âIn their starkly minimal film, The Awful Backlash, directors Robert Nelson and William Allan, focus solely on a pair of hands as they begin to unravel what appears to be a tangled fishing line. Any further evidence of the titleâs confusing âawfulnessâ â other than the literal disentanglement of the line remains, however, tentative, left as it were, literally, at a loose end. The viewer knows nothing of the incident that led to this backlash or entanglement; nor of the directorsâ initial motive for the title indeed not of any other attempt at blending an additional storyline beyond what is seen. There is, perhaps, one link with a reverse reaction â a sense of gradual recovery taking place, as the thread unfolds from a position of multiplicity back to a singular line.â (Pamela Kember, Rethinking Refunctioning, âAwful Backlashâ catalogue, May 2000) Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2005.
