Nicolas Roeg 1928-2018

Don't Look Now, 1973

1. 

How exciting and confounding it was to be a teen cinephile in 1976, when Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth was released. I was sixteen going on seventeen that spring and Roeg's movies were not for kids, but I fought to see them anyway, and worked to understand them after I saw them, and Man proved to be the toughest picture yet. My small circle and I thought this was largely because the cut that was dumped into the U.S. market was two hours, and the cut Roeg delivered was twenty minutes longer. As utterly dazzled as we were by the two hour version, we were unusually thrown off by it too.

I particularly recall being flummoxed by the introduction of Bernie Casey's character, Mr. Peters. Yes, I understood the internal rhyming of the shots — how the defenestration of Buck Henry's Oliver, the kidnapping of David Bowie's Newton after an abortive space launch, and the silhouette of Casey's perfect body in the sky, an Icarus without wings, coming down to earth (or rather, water) of his own volition, made beautiful poetic sense. What I didn't get was why this was the character's introduction; in most English language films I knew of at the time, a new character entering the story was dealt with as exposition, not poetic metaphor. (I suppose you can guess that I saw The Man Who Fell To Earth well before I ever saw Shane.)  I thought, well, in the longer cut I'm sure this will be spelled out in a more conventional way. 

It is not. 

More than any other English-language narrative filmmaker, Roeg apprehended Tarkovsky's notion of "sculpting in time" with the same radical freedom as the Russian director himself did. Roeg came into filmmaking as a cinematographer, and two of the directors he worked for, David Lean and Richard Lester, both had as astute a grasp of editing as any filmmaker you can name. During his most creatively fecund time as a director, Roeg made temporal leaps and jumps that were exhilarating provided you could keep up, which was sometimes a challenge. After Mr. Peters enters the movie, diving naked into his swimming pool and lifting his equally naked poolside wife (Claudia Jennings) to take her to the bedroom for some philosophizing, he turns up again a short time later, this time with gray in his hair; Rip Torn's Judas, here named Bryce, has aged as well. Roeg was not the kind of director to put up a title card saying "X Years Later" or whatnot; to do so in this film in particular would have been especially inimical to the whole project. With respect to the idea of film poetry, if Tarkovsky worked the long, flowing line, Roeg worked in jagged sometimes anti-linear lines, the better to evoke the dissociative effects the modern world has on individuals and their ideas of love and freedom. But not just that — it evoked something beyond the modern world, something eternal, the suddenness of what we still call fate, the potential suddenness of the end of it all. 

2.

This music began to emerge in Venice, during the winter of 1972, on the tiny island of Giudecca in a huge old house overlooking the lagoon.

For a couple of months I spent the days alone, while Alfie and a bunch of friends spent their days working on a film. After years of constant work, in groups and on the road, I was uneasy about doing nothing all day. To keep me occupied, Alfie bought me a very basic little keyboard with a particular vibrato, that shimmered like the water that surrounded us. The basic structure of the music was written there, in between watching the lizards on the walls of the house and visiting the local bar to listen to out-of-work gondoliers practicing 'O Sole Mio.'

'Don't Look Now,' the film that my friends were working on, centred around a series of unforseen disasters in the life of a couple. Venice itself featured as a sinister presence in the film. Alfie always remembered Nic Roeg, the director, reiterating the theme of the film: WE ARE NOT PREPARED.

That's Robert Wyatt, writing in 1998, for the liner notes of a reissue of his 1974 album Rock Bottom, which he recorded after a long recovery from a fall from a window in June of 1973, which cost him the use of his legs. In 2015 I wrote about the connections between these two great works for the Criterion Collection website; the piece is here. 

3.

"[T]heatrical acting, in the course of the last centuries, has led to incredible refinements of stylized pantomime in the representation of, say, a person eating, or getting deliciously drunk, or looking for his spectacles, or making a proposal of marriage. Not so in regard to the imitation of the sexual act which on the stage has absolutely no tradition behind it. The Swedes and we have to start from scratch and what I have witnessed up to now on the screen — the blotchy male shoulder, the false howls of bliss, he four or five mingled feet — all of it is primitive, commonplace, conventional, and therefore disgusting. The lack of art and style in these paltry copulations is particularly brought into evidence by their clashing with the marvelously high level of acting in virtually all other imitations of natural gestures on our stage and screen. This is an attractive topic to ponder further, and directors should take notice of it."

So Vladimir Nabokov complained in 1969, apropos Tony Richardson's adaptation of his novel Laughter in the Dark. Let's not kid ourselves — Borges references or no Borges references, VN probably would not have thought much of Performance. But his "attractive topic" was one Roeg clearly gave a good deal of thought to, and his approach to the erotic was always, above all other things, vital; it was anti-Puritan (and hence anti-American) because of its insistence that the erotic life wasn't something to be compartmentalized, it was the thing itself. The narrative function of the Newton/Mary Lou sex scene in The Man Who Fell To Earth is self-evident enough. But to be confounded by the sex scene in Don't Look Now (as many reviewers at the time of its release were, including Rex Reed, who I recall made some very snotty "put your clothes back on" comments about the nudity of its performers) is just to not get Roeg at all. (And the fact that, to this day, almost every time that scene is brought up, it's with some grotesque "did the actors really 'do it'?" eyebrow raising, is the reason Trump is President.)

Comments

[Matthew Blankman]

Great stuff, Glenn, thanks.

In re: section 1 -
Maybe I'm remembering it incorrectly, but I feel like Lester said the idea for the "flash forward" framework of PETULIA was Roeg's suggestion.

[peter Cowie]

Quite agree as to his considerable importance, Glenn, although he did not always hit the targets he targeted. A great cameraman too, in his younger days (I interviewed him on Hackney house location for THE CARETAKER in 1962, with a smug, disdainfully Harold Pinter looking on).

[Redbeard]

This news hurts. Roeg has been my favorite filmmaker since I saw BAD TIMING at 18. Knew he was existing quietly these days and nobody lives forever, but still I expected him to live to 100. He seemed an ancient soul on the few occasions I got to hang with him. Kind, good-humored, quiet-spoken and, not surprisingly, a lascivious wit.

He loved his gin, too. If you listen to the commentary he recorded with Bowie for the old MAN WHO FELL laser disc, you can hear his ice cubes clinking throughout, right next to the mic. By that film's final shot, you could imagine Roeg looked roughly the same. Anyway, he was a generous, avuncular drinker in my company.

About 15 years ago actor/director Michael Sarne told me Roeg was curating art exhibits anonymously in London, having closed the chapter on his movie career. He was probably happier like that, but the news felt tragic -- a world-class artist living in obscurity. Theresa Russell thought the failure of EUREKA, which Nic considered his most personal film, broke his pioneer's spirit. After that he was just killing time on Planet Earth.

All I know for certain is The Movies lost too much luster when Roeg left the scene. He invented a syntax for visual storytelling that could be subliminal and mindblowing in its dexterity. But even at the peak of his fame, very few of us got him. And now his legacy is weak among younger generations. Recently I met several film school nerds who could tell me precisely what lens Kubrick used on every shot in THE SHINING, but they had never heard of Roeg or his filmography. If anything good comes from his death, it will be renewal of his status as one of the 20th century's most creative visionaries.

[STEVEN GAYDOS]

Before I knew his name I programmed "Masque of the Red Death" at my Chaffey College film series in 1969. Then in 1970's the impact really began. My buddy and I snuck in through bathroom window of a movie theater in San Diego to see "Walkabout" in 1971. Met Nick and Candy Clark when they were living in a little West Hollywood bungalow in 1976. Earth is still messing with our heads today. Bad Timing was too personal to even comprehend as we lost Laurie Bird in its wake. In 1988 I think I was the only person in Cannes who liked Track 29! And got to know Nic while living in London at the beginning of this century. Like the impact of Dylan, the Stones, Van Morrison, and others, can't imagine the past 50 years without Nic's beautiful soul leaving footprints to follow toward some infinite insight just beyond time. Thank you Mr. Roeg for bravely painting on our cave walls, for not letting the bastards stop you from creating! They sure tried!

[Andrew Del Monte]

What a sad day.

I was lucky to see a retrospective of his great films on 35mm earlier this year, in Vancouver. Performance has become one of my favourites... actually, they all have. Hard to think of anything that could compare to Walkabout, my mind goes to movies like 2001 when I try to think of films analogous to that one. Is Walkabout considered one of the greatest movies ever? I think it should be. Also, I think Bad Timing is perhaps the greatest piece of film editing I've come across. And Theresa Russell! Even if Roeg's films were more conventional in style, but they gave us those Russell performances, they would still be immortal, in my opinion. Russell's testimony at the end of Eureka is totally bonkers, in the best way possible.

Thanks for your tribute. By the way, are you familiar with any of his films, post-Insignificance (besides The Witches)? any worth checking out? Thanks.

[titch]

That's a fine memorial. There's an interesting interview with him in The Guardian from 2005, where he talks a bit about falling out with David Lean on Zhivago:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/jun/03/hayfilmfestival2005.hayfestival