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.)