Mahurin, produced by Louise Feldman, Sharon Oreck -- Liberty Theatre, Friday, May 2 The opening frame of `Mugshot' is stunning: The head of a young black man, disembodied, eyes closed, like John the Baptist without the plate. Where is this? A raking light behind the head slowly reveals a shadow on the wall, and as the camera moves back the man comes alive and climbs slowly up out of a stairwell and into the room of a derelict building.

There's a bruised and bloody white man crouching in the corner. Who is he? He cannot remember his name or anything else about his life. He's weak, disoriented and needs help. The black man gave him a new name, Joe, and promises, for a price, to help him find his way back home.

Soon we learn that the black man, Rumor, is deeply implicated in the white man's predicament. He's a gang member, one of a group of five whose intense emotional bonds are publicly flaunted in hip white vinyl jackets. They play an elaborate game, challenging each others' loyalty in the face of violence.

Rumor's part is to record what happens. In private, we see him carefully adding Polaroid shots of Joe's mugging to other, childhood memorabilia in a secret scrapbook. It's how he tries to make sense of his life in Harlem.

The white man, ironically, is also a photographer, but his reality is a very different one, and his struggles have, till now, been more on the order of deadlines and truculent editors.

Captivity deeply troubles Rumor. As a child, he kept a baby sparrow in a shoebox tightly bound with rubber bands; and the film keeps flashing us back to this incident, although we are never shown the fate of that sparrow. We do see what befalls Rumor. He slowly explores Joe's life, his pristine white apartment on Greenwich Street, his darkroom, his relationships. He temporarily inhabits the other man's life, and learns from it the way to free his captive.

And when he finally cuts himself out of his vinyl jacket, now spoiled with Duco cement, his own life is also changed forever.

Matt Mahurin, the writer-editor-cinematographer-director of `Mugshot' has a prior reputation as a photographer. His photos -- he has published two books of them to date -- can be gorgeous, devoid of clutter yet full of information, in the same way that Mapplethorpe's are.

In the summer of 1995 Time magazine used Mahurin's images to illustrate their lead story on cyberporn. The photo (or as the magazine euphemistically puts it, "photo-illustration'') on Time's cover, a computer-manipulated image of a child's face on a computer terminal, was gently distorted to imply horror. It was disturbing for what it hinted at, and it told that story the way the editors wanted it told. (Another Mahurin-altered photograph for Time provoked a media storm -- but that's a different issue).

Photography is a solitary profession. You are constantly alone with the camera or alone in the dark-room. So for about eight years now, Mahurin has also turned his hand (and his very gifted eye) to working with others, making stylish music videos. And now he has made this stylish-looking first-feature film as well.

Its story-line is partly autobiographical. When Mahurin moved to Brooklyn, he told his audience at last Friday-night's screening, he got mugged. He now takes special note of racism and the reversal of power.

Mahurin's film is constructed like a succession of carefully calculated still frames, one quickly following the other. The effect is like fanning through the pages of a book, with a pause every so often at an interesting illustration. The film was shot in New York, surely a cluttered place, yet the settings have a pristine and almost disembodied quality, as if you never quite go there.

Though it is a visually powerful film, I came out of `Mugshot' feeling disturbed. Serious issues, primarily racial ones, are manipulated through stylised imagery, as if cinema as a medium had become all mixed up with MTV.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just that it leaves you floating on the surface of things. Films about photography (Blow-Up is a case in point) often seem to do this, almost wilfully ignoring the implications of what the eye sees.

The move from photojournalism to narrative film-making is not a short hop. It is a series of quantum leaps, and Mr. Mahurin is still in the process of making them. Indications are he will do very nicely. His film has already won one prize -- the Golden Starfish -- at the 1996 Hamptons International Film Festival.

Judging from audience responses in Bermuda, it may well take a popular prize here as well.

SYLVIA SHORTO `Mugshot' will be shown again at the Little Theatre at 7.15 p.m. tonight.

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