Critic's notebook: The brilliant visuals and the editing of Nicolas Roeg revolutionized the cinema



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12:43 PST 24/11/2018

by

Neil Young

After being distinguished as director of photography, the British director directed some of the most influential and beloved films of the 1970s.

"Someone I have never met, but in any way I know. / I did not think you could get / as much of an image show. " That's how well Mick Jones sings in the single "E = MC²" of Big Audio Dynamite, published in 1985. It is certainly the most elaborate and sincere tribute to a single kinematic. artwork in the history of music. The detailed works on the many verses of the track were those of Nicolas Roeg, who fully deserved the term "visionary director" when Peter
Jackson, Mr. Night Shyamalan, Guillermo Del Toro, and Zack Snyder always wore short pants.

His first four traits – Performance (1970) Walkabout (1971) Do not look now (1973) The man who fell on Earth (1976) – are among the most notable and significant publications of their protean decade. Their fractional editing techniques and nonlinear narration, which Roeg has perfected with Bad timing (1980) and Eureka (1983) injected experimental methods into commercial cinema. His DNA is visible in the production of many directors: Steven Soderbergh, Del Toro, Terry Gilliam, Todd Haynes, Paul Thomas Anderson, Christopher Nolan and Gaspar Noe have cited it as a crucial formative figure.

Born in London, Roeg climbed the ladder of industry "to the old-fashioned tea boy, cut-focus, focus shooter, director of photography" and shot David Lean & # 39; s Laurence of Arabia. Responsible for what many consider to be the greatest of all horror movies (Do not look now), he realized one of the most distinctive visual objectives: Roger Corman The Mask of the Red Death (1964), a distant symphony in the far-screen Pathécolor. He performs with distinction the same tasks in projects as diverse as the bucolic romanticism of John Schlesinger. Away from the unleashed crowd (1967) and the sad anesthetic of Gallic giant François Truffaut Fahrenheit 451 (1966).

Although English to the sound of patrician in person, his name (French spelling for the first part, Dutch origins for the second) had a foreign ring and from the beginning it transcended national boundaries. Roeg has moved so far away from established fashions that his point of view has often seemed extraterrestrial. Performance, co-directed with and written by Donald Cammell, may be mainly shot in a London townhouse, but this story of a gangster hiding with a rock-star takes place mainly in the frenzied psyche of his protagonists.

Spooky and breathtaking tribute to Argentine neo-fabulist Jose Luis Borges, he is the direct descendant of Richard Lester & # 39; s PETULIA (1968), last photo on which Roeg served only as director of photography. Graduated from the socio-realistic "kitchen sink" school, Antony Gibbs worked on both films as an editor, radically moving away from the erased style that was then the norm; sure Performance and Australia-set Walkabout, Gibbs and Roeg adopted the disorienting and brutal changes associated with the New wave of Truffaut and co. The most successful fruit of this financial and critical approach has been Do not look now, edited by Graeme Clifford, transforms the dreadful new Daphne du Maurier into a breathtaking meditation on love, loss and existence.

Two sequences are spectacular highlights, not only of Roeg's career, but also of British cinema (Do not look now In 1999, according to the BFI survey, it was the country's eighth most famous film: the scene of the tender love between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, regular collaborator of Roeg, and the latest kaleidoscopic montage in As a fatally injured medium visualize every fragment of the picture's place – his life literally blinks in front of his eyes when Pino Donaggio's score reaches a climax. The singer-songwriter Donaggio had never composed for the cinema before; his obsessive themes, which correspond to everything from his venerated compatriot Ennio Morricone, raise Do not look now at the level of the masterpiece.

Roeg's talent for untapped talent also spread to the cast: he did the great job of Mick Jagger in Performance (the duo actually invented the modern video clip with the "Memo From Turner" sequence), realized that David Bowie was already The man who fell on Earth – the most extreme example of Roeg's favorite theme "fish out of the water" – and entrusts Art Garfunkel with the leading role demanding Bad timing. The steamy drama of Vienna was Roeg's first film with Theresa Russell, who forged a fruitful partnership with the director and appeared in most of her films in the decade following their marriage in 1982.

These were on the whole less well received than its production of the 1970s, although that of 1985 Insignificance (Russell as a sort of sort-Marilyn Monroe) is a miniature doozy and Eureka – prefiguring Anderson's There will be blood – has a burning and expanding cult. Roeg continued working in movies and television until the present century, but his latest style was an adaptation of Roald Dahl. The witches (1990). One of the scariest "children's movies" ever made, it has proven to be a very effective entry into the state of Roeg for a myriad of filmmakers, viewers and critics over the years, many of whom had not yet figured out how much they could from an image show. "

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