BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Nic Roeg (Spoilers)

  
 
jeff
21:08 / 10.10.02
There's recently been a glut of Roeg's films on the bbc, and this has given me the first opportunity to see them. This topic possibly has more worth in the magick section, but I was wondering if anyone could tell me where the power in these films are. I cant pin it down, but films don't normally parasite my dreams like his have mine lately.
The thing is, when I watched them, I didnt go away thinking,'What a great movie', I was more in a WTF! mood, and now in hindsight, Im finding myself being utterly overwhelmed.
Perhaps I'm just easily pleased, who knows.
 
 
The Strobe
22:32 / 10.10.02
Well, from what I've seen of them, it ain't magick, mate.

He's doing lots of clever stuff WRT the way the unconscious works; especially in his editing - note the cuts by aspect (ie from one similar action to another; the ball becoming the pack of cigarettes in DLN, for instance). He's very interesting to discuss with respect to psychoanalysis - I had a paper on Writing and the Unconscious last year and my supervisor enjoyed discussing Roeg, because he picks up (and I'm sure it's deliberate) on the way the unconscious works - the unconscious assosciation in DLN, of things such as (eg) the colour red is created very carefully by him. Also: he flips things around a lot; DLN is set in Venice, but it's not the traditional movie Venice - it's Venice by night, in winter, the dark alleys and side streets, and not San Marco and the Rialto.

Cut-by-aspect is even more evident in Bad Timing (which I haven't finished watching simply because I felt ill at one point and never got around to finishing it) - the one where the girl in orgasm jumpcuts to essentially the same image, but writhing, coughing up blood on the operating table, really takes you by surprise and is pretty nasty - but it's entirely appropriate. The body in ecstacy/agony - and it's pulling the same face.

The fact he appreciates the unconscious so well is why it permeates your dreams - it works like them. Similarly, the way Lynch throws bizarre stuff into mundanity is the way dreams work - you know, ordinary situations, people you know, and then one really tiny but FUCKING SURREAL thing on the side.

First time through Don't Look Now, I came away thinking "what a great movie!" at the same time as "yikes!" and "WTF!" and "I need to see that again" and "hey, great editing". There's a lot in them. Get them on tape/DVD, and watchwatchwatch. From my perspective, having seen a few (and having seen DLN several times, as it's one of my favourite movies), I love them. There's masses of Freudian and post-Freudian stuff in there. And Roeg's editing is second to none. Also check out Walkabout, whilst you're at it, for something calmer, more meditative, but with a similar "power" as you put it.

I hope that's of some use; check the older Roeg threads (because I'm sure there are some) as well. Sorry if I dampened any of your aspirations there for a more mystical, magickal, bunkum explanation; to me, they're great films with a strong understanding of the way the mind works, and with a good background in psychoanalysis. And they're deeply, deeply wonderful, if more than a little strange.
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
22:42 / 10.10.02
Paleface: Walkabout as a calmer film? I certainly thought that - for something that doesn't have the occult/fucked up trappings of DLN, it was more unsettling and odd. Though that could be from an Australian perspective, more than anything else.
 
 
The Natural Way
07:52 / 11.10.02
No, no...Walkabout's very unsettling and odd from an english perspective too.

Oh, and it's excellent.

And, yes, editing and, yes, magic. Roeg makes everything numinous....full of meaning. DNL's vibe of inevitable, impending doom resonates on the same frequency as yr favourite nightmare.
 
 
yawn - thing's buddy
08:49 / 11.10.02
Its Julies Christie's first scream in DNL which wakes the darkness in yer dna.
 
 
illmatic
09:51 / 11.10.02
With Performance, I think a lot the power is in the subject matter. It has a lot of occult themes and seems to have strong undercurrents of the 60's occult revival- the constellation of Kenneth Anger, Crowley's Confessions etc etc. - with it's blurring of identities, mind expansion, drug use, psychic feedback etc. It seems to capture the post-Altamont, Manson era when the 60's dream began to sour and relase a little madness.

That's the power in the film for me, anyway - it creates a vision of a time when consensus reality gives way, and the "veil between the worlds" becomes thin...

One of the films major themes is this collision between worlds, I suppose..

Someone in Donald Cammel's (Roeg's co-director)family was an accquaintance of Crowley's. Can't rember who - might have been Crowley's biographer Charles Cammel? - anyhow he was bounced around on Crowley's knee when he was a nipper, so it seems fitting that he should express the 93 current in this film. There was a brilliant, really moving, bio. of him on the Beeb about 2 years ago, filmed just before he committed suicide.
Most accounts of the making of that film state that it had an uncanny atomosphere, was haunted by odd cincidences etc. - can't recall more detail, sorry.
 
 
illmatic
09:58 / 11.10.02
There's a briee biography of Cammell here:
http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hc&id=1800056240&cf=biog&intl=us

"The only performance that makes it, that really makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness."
 
 
The Strobe
10:58 / 11.10.02
Other things I remembered today, especially from DLN:

misdirection. You know, the psychics, who tell John he's got the gift - and of course, he has in a way; he sees himeslf falling in the church, but who hasn't envisaged something like that - and what we think all the way through is visions is just somebody else. The occult as misdirection, rather than something which people OUGHT to have listened to instead of dimissing.

Also: the murders. One reason Roeg's Venice is so unsettling is the background of murder; certainly the first time you watch it, you don't join the dots between the bodies being winched out of the canal and the terrible serial killer and John's visions. Somehow, though, just the idea of people dying in the city you're staying in - especially as a foreigner - is unsettling. So the alleys, dark at night, with a killer on the lose, really unsettle you. But that unsettlement is unconscious - you naturally don't like the idea of a killer on the loose, and though it's tangential and seemingly unrelated, the concepts are stuck in the back of your mind.

Rotkhoid: I see what you mean, but I didn't necessarily suggest "calmer" as "less unsettling". But Walkabout is slow menace compared to the almost Arronosfky-style brainfucking of Bad Timing.

I'll probably be posting again here as more and more comes to me...
 
 
jeff
18:49 / 12.10.02
Cool.
Concerning the end of DLN, and understandably I have to be vague so as not to spoil the ending for anyone who hasn't watched it, but is the figure in the photograph a picture of his daughter, or for some supernatural reason, the 'other' person?
 
 
The Strobe
01:02 / 13.10.02
The photograph at the beginning is his daughter in another church which, at a guess, he probably restored. The ink smearing is evident foreshadowing of her death, but also of what else is to come. It's not of the "other". I'm going to change the topic to say "spoilers", as well; we need them if we're to get anywhere.
 
 
Jack Fear
13:04 / 13.10.02
By coincidence, Roger Ebert is thinking about "Don't Look Now" this week, too.
 
 
jeff
13:38 / 14.10.02
I've been considering my last question, and I wondered whether the church in the photograph is in Venice? If so, the red hooded person could be the dwarf, though maybe not. What implications would this have?
The majority of the film misdirects us, ad Donald Sutherland's character, into thinking the dwarf is in fact his dead daughter, so is the dwarf also a statement concerning his perceptions of her, and her death?
 
 
The Natural Way
14:13 / 14.10.02
Okay...let's talk about some of the subtext here, because this is getting too literalistic and, y'know, PSYCHIC POWERS: POINT VALUE 4.

Quick appraisal: Man trying to come to terms w/ daughter's death. Presented with possibilty of answers, he pursues the apparition of his dead child through the city, but, when cornered, the "child" emerges as the grotesque reflection of his obsession w/ death and the only "answers" she provides are horrific, absurd and deadly (up until the last minute Roeg intended to include Du Maurier's original line "what a ridiculous way to die.."). So...the dwarf and the child are absolutely bound up w/ each other, but the dwarf is what she "becomes" after her parents have scrawled their pain and fear all over her.

Now continue and stop imposing realism on this deeply realism-resistant work.
 
 
A Bigger Boat
18:33 / 16.10.02
Mmm.

It seems that now we've got permission it's no fun anymore.

Let's go into the garden and burn ants with a magnifying glass instead!
 
 
sleazenation
21:43 / 16.10.02
Oh how i love Nic roegs work!

Marriage- I'm sure I don't need to point thi out to you but whole layers of the film are missed if you simply attributed Don't look Now as being a film about a man coming to terms with his daughter's death- Its not, its about a man AND a Woman coming to terms with their daughters death, - part of the misdirectionat work in the film is the audience trying to work out which of the parents is more screwed up.

The other centrally important thing i find in Roeg's work are the subliminal/symbolist images that keep popping up in his films (as alldued to by paleface) the shot of the vagina like knot in the tree in performance, the image of chas' armpit, reminiscent of an arse. As has been said before thereis so much in his films, in fact Bryan talbot cites him as a key narrative influence on his comics.
 
 
The Timaximus, The!
18:21 / 11.02.07
Performance comes out on DVD this week. In the US, at least. I've not seen it, but I've wanted to for ages. I suppose I'm bound for disappointment, but I'm still really looking forward to this.

(And just a month after the Kenneth Anger DVD! Satan Season started early this year.)
 
 
PatrickMM
20:27 / 11.02.07
I haven't loved any of Nic Roeg's movies, but everything I've seen has been fascinating in its own way. The Man Who Fell To Earth has such an alien feel, I watched it because it was homaged in Philip K. Dick's Valis as a film that holds the secrets of the universe hidden within it. It has a truly alien feel, particularly during the odd sex scenes. And I haven't seen it in years, but I remember The Witches really freaking me out as a kid.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
02:49 / 12.02.07
My grandson met Nic Roeg and Theresa Russell's daughter a very long while ago now.

According to him, the terrible degenerate, she's much as you'd expect her to be, really. So, likeable if met.

God kows what she's up to these days though.
 
  
Add Your Reply