NICOLAS ROEG, ELEGANT DISTORTION
A homage to the filmmaker and a real treat for the public—this year ZINEBI is presenting its Mikeldi Honour Award to Nicolas Roeg. As a result this provides us with the chance to review, or more probably, even see his best films for the first time, as the films that make up his retrospective have been chosen by the Roeg himself. He is a British filmmaker with many years of experience, as before making his debut as a director he started out in the late 1940s as an assistant editor and in the 1950s and 60s he appeared in the credits as a camera operator and later as director of photography. In this facet the splendid images he shot in Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut, 1966) and Far from the Madding Crowd, John Schlesinger, 1967) are well worth mentioning, which, when shown on a big screen, have an unmistakeable feel of that period.
After such a sound apprenticeship as a craftsman, his first film as a director was Performance (1970), co-directed with Donald Cammell, a disturbing extravaganza starring Mick Jagger and James Fox, in which the famous cocktail of Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll attained extreme levels of paranoia. It was an interesting directorial debut that immediately established him as a cult director. And since then he has maintained this status and has made a wide variety of films which have been well worth following with great interest on many occasions. His following film was Walkabout (1971) which, as time goes by, is now considered to be his best film. Shot in Australia, mainly in the desert, it calmly and enigmatically developed a classic initiation theme that also showed a certain penchant for the myth of lost innocence. However, the presence in the narrative of certain disturbing elements defined a film with a broader scope than could perhaps be expected from the adventure of a teenage girl and her brother lost in a desolate land. The imposing physical presence of the Australian Outback where the two schoolchildren come across an aborigine, gave rise to the highly praised cinematography that Roeg was also responsible for. A certain kind of natural or primitive beauty and eccentricity, that is, a distorted vision, were familiar ideas for the London filmmaker. Incidentally, this film’s premiere was botched in Spain, as it came out after an eight-year delay.
His direct involvement in creating images was a determining factor in his elegant style of shooting, but Nicolas Roeg’s choice of narrative was closer to a certain distortion of reality than to a naturalist approach. Falling within the sphere of the art-house cinema that characterised that period, he continued to tackle a wide variety of subjects, on the fringes of mainstream trends but always welcomed by those who had recognised in his films the essential elements of disturbing fiction.
His following films were also along these lines. In a rather ghostly Venice, Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland go through a tortuous experience in Don’t Look Now (1973), a fictional film in which two of the constant features in Roeg’s cinema become especially important: angst and sex. His fragmented style also appears as a driving force behind the narrative, in which the disjointed use of time forms yet another element that creates a sense of unease and even mystery. It is worth mentioning that the film came out in Spain in a version that was heavily cut. Undoubtedly the censors took advantage of the non-linear editing of the film to cut out all the shots they considered to be harmful for the audience. Continuing with his extraordinarily unusual and daring way of filming, he tackled science fiction and cast David Bowie to get inside the skin, so to speak, of an alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth, (1976), which was never released in Spain despite the prestige it acquired on the alternative film circuit. A basically disjointed or disturbing perspective on human relationships and more specifically, sex, was once again the starting point for the disconcertingly appealing Bad Timing, (1980), a bleak drama-thriller set in Vienna starring Art Garfunkel, Harvey Keitel and Theresa Russell, who was to be Roge’s muse in another six films and the woman he married. Inspired by a deliberately provocative attitude, this film was stigmatised as being wretched by its own production company, the Rank Organization, who labelled it as “a film about sick people, made by sick people, for sick people”. With friends like that, who needs enemies? Since it was first released, it has hardly ever been seen, and it is one of those that it would be nice to take a fresh look at.
Not all his films have been steps along the tightrope; let’s just remember two of them: Insignificance (1985) turned out to be an unusual proposition about a hypothetical encounter in a New York hotel between Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio and Senator McCarthy, the man behind the sinister Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s. Although these names were never actually mentioned, the connotations were unmistakeable in this dispassionate comedy. The Witches (1990) revisited the surreptitiously malevolent world of Roald Dahl’s children’s stories, and did so accompanied by an Anjelica Huston who totally identified with her role: and apparently so did Roeg.
It goes without saying that Nicolas Roeg has built up a reputation as an eccentric director because of his narrative proposals and his utterly uncompromising style. Mis career has lasted over sixty years and he has spent more than forty directing films and according to varios sources, in the near future plans to shoot Night Train, based on the novel by Martin Amis with Steven Soderbergh as executive producer. We are waiting expectantly.
Alfonso C. Vallejo
Research fellow, filmmaker
