nicolas roeg

Nicolas Roeg died yesterday at the age of 90. There was a time when he was my favorite director. His first three films as a director (Performance, co-directed with Donald Cammell, Walkabout, and Don't Look Now) remain tremendous. I didn't like his next two, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Bad Timing, as much, and then I mostly lost track of him, although he directed for another 27 years

I wrote about Performance a couple of months ago: "Revisiting Performance". I ranked it #10 on my 50 Favorite Films list back in 2012. In an earlier post:

Performance no longer seems like a very complicated movie. I showed it to a friend a few years ago who had never seen it, and he thought it was fairly straightforward. This is because the techniques of Performance, the things that made it seem so remarkable in 1970, are commonplace now. Fractured editing, uncertain chronologies, plots full of puzzles, these are all part of the standard bag of contemporary directors’ tricks.

Walkabout in 2011: "Walkabout is one of my very favorite movies, and is one of the reasons why, as a film major in the early-70s, I thought Nicolas Roeg was the best director. I recommend it highly to pretty much everyone reading this."

I discussed Don't Look Now in 2013:

In Don’t Look Now, there is a sense that nothing is as it seems, alongside a feeling that one could figure out the puzzle if you just gave yourself over to your gifts of second sight. Roeg plays with time … what the film calls “second sight” allows for flash-forwards as premonition, and the past never leaves us, either. John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) sees past events just as often as he sees the future, although he doesn’t believe in those premonitions, only in what happened in the past. The film is full of visual allusions, shapes that occur in multiple settings, motifs of water and broken glass, and the color red, always red. Venice is a character in the film, as well, but it is far from what you might see in a tourist brochure.

Comments

[steve]

Like. Just belated like.