Introduction
Let me begin with
a quotation from a poem by the great American poet, Robert Frost ('Desert
Places') that Nicolas Roeg was fond of quoting round about the time he
was making Eureka. It seems to me very suggestive
in relation to what Roeg's films are about:
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars- on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
People are scary,
and what is scary is not necessarily what is out there but what
is in here. But self-knowledge can turn a desert into a garden.
Lecture
'There are three lovely
critical expressions,' Roeg once said, 'pretentious, gratuitous and profound,'
adding slyly, 'none of which I truly understand.' These terms have been
applied to Roeg's films, and indeed in their time, the films have been
called far worse things than that: e.g. John Simon on PERFORMANCE:
'You don't have to be a drug addict, pederast, sado-masochist or nitwit
to enjoy this film, but it could help' ; or Pauline Kael on DON'T
LOOK NOW: 'emblazoned in chic…it's… trash'. Yet, in the
British Film Institute's poll of the greatest 100 British films of the
twentieth century, these same two films came in the Top 15, so they have
their fervent cohort of admirers as well (including me). Roeg's films
generate extreme reactions of love and hate perhaps because they deal
in extremes: they are obsessive studies of raw emotion, feature graphic
displays of sexuality and violence, when people are at their most emotionally
naked, and they shake our complacencies about civilisation and cinema.
At his best he is one of our most adventurous directors, stretching the
expressive potential of the medium through a masterly montage of time
and space and examining characters forced into a journey of self-exploration,
into confronting their own desert spaces, when cut adrift from their usual
physical and moral moorings. His films are visual machines for puncturing
humanity's self-delusions. He has filmed Joseph Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS,
and it was Conrad who said something that I think would resonate with
Roeg: 'A man who believes he has no illusions has at least that one.'
The Background
Roeg has been in
movies for over half a century. He entered the film industry in 1947 as
tea-maker, clapper-boy etc. He became a camera operator on such films
as George Cukor's Bhowani Junction and Fred Zinnemann's Australian
film The Sundowners.,perhaps a foreshadowing of his own Australian film
as a director, WALKABOUT. He worked on the
second unit of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia and was later fired
by Lean as director of photography on Dr Zhivago for telling him
where to put his camera. But it was during the 1960s that Roeg first attracted
critical attention as a brilliant cameraman for directors such as Roger
Corman, Francois Truffaut, John Schlesinger and Richard Lester. I just
want to make three quick points about this phase of his career and its
relation to his future development:
1) It is intriguing how some of these photography assignments anticipate
elements of his feature films. He photographs Roger Corman's THE MASQUE
OF THE RED DEATH which has a 'Red Death' figure who will memorably re-materialise
in an even more sinister guise in DON'T LOOK
NOW. He photographs Richard Lester's PETULIA in San Francisco in 1967,
which is a film that not only foreshadows the complex time-leaps and splintered
narratives of Roeg's future work: its evocation of the disintegration
of the liberated 1960s culture into anger and violence in America will
be echoed in a British setting in PERFORMANCE,
another great 1960s film about the 1960s. The cold futuristic surface
of another of his cinematographic assignments, Francois Truffaut's FAHRENHEIT
451 will re-emerge in THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH,
with its piercing, alien vision of the emptiness of modern life.
2) What is unusual about Roeg's transformation from cameraman to director?
Simply this. A number of fine British cameramen have gone on to become
directors, like Ronald Neame, Guy Green, Jack Cardiff and Freddie Francis,
but none of them has shown the visual stylishness as a director that characterised
their work as cameramen. By contrast, Roeg has gone into direction and
continued to make films of an equivalent visual impact to those films
he photographed and not simply through the photography but also through
the astonishing mastery of editing, one of the defining characteristics
of his work.
3) Roeg photographed Truffaut's FAHRENHEIT 451 and it was around this
time that Truffaut made his famous comment to Alfred Hitchcock that there
was something incompatible between the terms 'British' and 'cinema', that
they were almost a contradiction in terms. For Truffaut, what the word
'British' connoted in film terms was something 'tepid' 'restrained' 'tasteful',
'literary': politely bloodless, lacking in panache and passion. Roeg was
a huge admirer of Truffaut as a great cineaste, but it's almost as if
he went into direction to prove Truffaut wrong. For his films could not
be more unlike what Truffaut described. They pulsate with desire, violence,
bloodshed, death- everything, in fact, as Billy Wilder used to say, that
makes life worth living. He is not in the social realist but the mad poet
stream of British cinema (think of Michael Powell, Ken Russell, John Boorman),
which is characterised by visual and emotional bigness, where passion
counts for more than repression and overstatement is preferable to understatement,
and intensity is better than irony.
Development
I want now to show four brief extracts from Roeg's films. The films are:
PERFORMANCE(1967/70): an encounter between
reclusive pop star and gangster on the run that forms the basis of a bold,
hallucinatory enquiry into identity and power
WALKABOUT(1971): a sensual, overwhelmingly
moving rite-of-passage drama about a traumatic journey back to civilisation
of two children, aided by an Aborigine on walkabout, after they have been
abandoned in the desert- to their own desert spaces - by a suicidal father.
DON'T LOOK NOW(1973): a dazzling supernatural
tale of grief, guilt and second sight, based on a Daphne du Maurier story,
where a restorer of church mosaics in Venice misreads the mosaic of his
own mind, and particularly the significance of his recurrent vision of
a red-hooded figure who alarmingly resembles his dead daughter.
HEART OF DARKNESS(1994): Roeg's made-for-cable tv adaptation of Joseph
Corad's famous novella about a journey up the Congo by a sailor named
Marlow to meet a man called Kurtz, who is the Company's most successful
ivory trader - a journey that becomes both physical and psychological
when Marlow discovers that Kurtz has, as the saying goes, 'gone native'.
EXTRACTS
These extracts all
illustrate aspects of the extremities of Roeg's cinema, where characters
are moving not simply into another mood or place but a completely new
dimension of experience; where their bodies are in one place but their
minds in another; and whose very identity comes under scrutiny:
PERFORMANCE: an extract about getting inside someone's head, breaking
down his personality defences that he is afraid to expose ( is there a
femaleness under the maleness, a tenderness under the terror?). We're
all performers but the performance that really makes it is the one that
lets go, travels beyond inhibition and restraint, reaches into the depths,
confronts but also challenges the abyss.
Mick Jagger is the pop star significantly called Turner, who turns into
something else before your eyes, who turns the tables on his guest, and
who turns the gangster's framework of values upside down. Jagger at that
time, of course, brought powerful associations to the role: as a symbol
of rebellious counter-culture, Satanism, ambiguous sexuality, alienated
youth.
Roeg's casting of pop stars in his films (like the appropriately otherworldly
David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth)
is always interesting; and his casting is as offbeat and unpredictable
as his films sometimes. As Rip Torn said about the cast of The Man Who…:
'I don't know whether it's a cast for a movie, but it'd make a hell of
a dinner party.'
WALKABOUT: something
unimaginable materialises before the eyes of the two children who are
still, incongruously, wearing the vestiges of their civilisation. They
blink, scarcely able to comprehend what they see (Roeg's films give us
new eyes). Even a lizard turns to look. Is it a mirage? There seems a
slight homage to Lawrence of Arabia where, as in Omar Sharif's
first appearance in that film, a sliver of shadow emerges out of a sun-baked
desert. But how to communicate, make contact- gesture, touch, language?
The older girl- more sophisticated, over-civilised- tries language, and
fails miserably: 'We're English- English… can't you understand? Anyone
can understand that. Where is Adelaide?' But the boy is more down-to-earth,
as it were (and played, incidentally, by Nicolas Roeg's son, Luc), and
exasperated by his sister's grown-up inclination to think ahead rather
than attend to the immediate concern: 'Ask him for water!' And his instinctive,
non-verbal form of communication through gesture is much more effective.
In the novel the writer
has put: 'The three children stood looking at each other in the middle
of the Australian desert. Motionless as the outcrops of granite, they
stared and stared and stared. Between them the distance was less than
the spread of an outstretched arm, but more than a hundred thousand years.'
Again it's an encounter that will transform perceptions and mental frontiers
and offer a glimpse into a different world- exciting, liberating, perhaps,
or then again, dangerous, destructive perhaps.
DON'T LOOK NOW:
'I hope it's not another murder'. We are in the present but threatening
images from the past subliminally invade the hero's head- a near-fatal
fall, his dead daughter- as something frightening is hauled from the depths
to the surface: by now he is giving off such ominous vibes that the Bishop
by his side seems visibly discomfited.
Danger averted? Back to normality, as he packs his things to return home?
Momentarily it seems so, but there are no certainties in Roeg's films
and it's the time when you feel most settled and comfortable that might
catch you out. (One of Roeg's favourite aphorisms: 'What makes God laugh?
People who make plans.') And so Sutherland, on his way home to security,
he thinks, suddenly catches a glimpse of an inexplicable something that
is enough to turn his plans awry, reverse his own intended direction and
destination, and send his destiny scurrying to a completely different
rendezvous…
HEART OF DARKNESS:
John Malkovich as Kurtz and Tim Roth as Marlow. Here again we have
characters at the extreme edge of their being, where boundaries of restraint
and civilisation have been removed and at the heart of man is barbarism.
'I was on the threshold of great things,' says Kurtz, surrounded by the
bric-a-brac of brutality; 'You were the centre of abomination,' says Marlow.
When Kurtz dies and murmurs 'The horror, the horror', Roeg gives an inverted
close-up, making his face look peculiarly mask-like, showing how his life
and ideals have been completely upended by his experience.
Even summarised barely like that, it is plain that these are not ordinary
films, and Roeg is not an ordinary film maker. He's a maverick, a misfit,
whose films often fall into a kind of no man's land between mainstream
and minority cinema. He is one of the great British cineastes of the last
half-century who has never won an award from the British Film Academy
(indeed, in a melancholy moment in one interview, he said the only award
he had ever won was a school prize for gym, which was remarkable, he said,
'because the school didn't have a gym.' I took care to rectify that when
he received a well-deserved doctorate at the institution where I work,
Hull University). He has been overlooked possibly because he is too offbeat,
too challenging, alien to popular tastes, the Man Who Fell to Elstree.
His work can terrify timid distributors- the violence of PERFORMANCE,
which delayed its release for three years; the eroticism of DON'T
LOOK NOW, which the BBC tried to cut when it was shown first on tv;
the necrophilia of BAD TIMING, which so appalled Rank that they removed
their man with the gong from the credits; the obscurity of EUREKA,
which so disconcerted MGM that they wouldn't show it unless Roeg agreed
to tour around with the film himself. He deals often with English people
in un-English settings (only one and a bit of his films have actually
been set in England) and this leads to un-English emotion- lack of reason,
passion, obsession, madness, as the characters get a glimpse of an exciting
new world that could liberate them or destroy them. As they get further
away from home, the characters discover a new sense of self. In uprooting
people from the familiar and depositing them in a milieu that is disorienting
and strange ( as he does in films like PERFORMANCE,
WALKABOUT, DON'T
LOOK NOW, CASTAWAY, HEART OF DARKNESS), he watches what happens as
they lose their bearings: not knowing quite where they are, they begin
to question who they are. They cross a border into a strange land, with
a faulty compass, trying to read one world in terms of another, probing
the depth of their souls, reaching a point of no return.
It is not only the
stories themselves: it's the way he tells them. He's the master of lateral
thinking on film: in INSIGNIFICANCE, just
look at what he does in visual, associative terms with a word like 'watch',
which becomes Einstein's watch, permanently stuck at 8.15 when the bomb
went off in Nagaski; Monroe's being 'watched', the permanent price of
fame; and Senator McCarthy's network of watchers, putting a whole country
under surveillance during the anti-Communist witch-hunt. His stories do
not move in a logical, linear, chronological sequence- any more than our
lives do. He prefers puzzles to plots, and these puzzles go sideways,
backwards, upwards, as he revels in the 'time machine' aspect of cinema,
its capacity for moving instantly through time and space, past and future:
one heart-stopping moment in DON'T LOOK NOW
turns on a misreading of an image as being from the present tense when
it is actually from the future. This makes the films difficult but also
profoundly stimulating and profoundly cinematic as narratives fragment,
images are slowed, quickened, repeated in a manner unthinkable in another
medium. He wants to challenge and surprise you. You don't have to tell
a story in the same old way. The script is a blue-print not a definitive
document, something Edward Bond recognised when he handed Roeg 14 pages
of hand-written notes and said that was the script of WALKABOUT
and Roeg was delighted. 'They were exactly what I wanted,' he said. 'The
screenwriter can't complete his job, it's the film itself that will complete
his job.' And, even more than that, it's the audience that will complete
the film. 'Films belong to the spectator as much as the director,' he
says, 'even more so.' They are open structures. His motto as a film-maker,
he has said, is: 'Abandon preconceptions, all ye who enter here…'
In his film, HEART OF DARKNESS, Roeg gives emphasis to a line that is
not in the Conrad original. Kurtz says: 'There is no more empty nor detestable
creature in nature than the man who runs away from his demon…'
One must remember, of course, that this is said by a madman. Nevertheless,
for Kurtz, he has discovered that 'demon' is the heart of darkness, the
jungle, which has found him out, exposed his inner degeneracy, but he's
had the courage to confront it openly to find out who he is…
And for Roeg? 'Demon' is the word that D.H.Lawrence would use as a synonym
for artistic inspiration- this mysterious imp that tormented you, which
somehow you had to follow. It was the demon inside you that brought your
work to life, that gave it its edge and intensity. Donald Sutherland chases
his demon at the end of DON'T LOOK NOW, still
Roeg's greatest film, I think: and what is it Mick Jagger says in PERFORMANCE?:
'the only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is the
one that achieves madness…'
In his burrowing away at the extremes of film expressiveness, at the outer
limits of human personality, there is a poignant madness in Roeg's cinema.
He's still an inspiration for those cineastes and younger film-makers
(like Michael Winterbottom) who see cinema not as a palliative but a provocation,
not simply as a medium for telling stories and relaying reassuring home
truths but as a medium for fresh perceptions and for shedding light on
our dark places. To return to Robert Frost again, this time in his poem
'The Road Not Taken', when he talks about two roads diverging in a yellow
wood and wondering which path to choose:
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Roeg has taken the cinematic road 'less travelled by', and it has made
all the difference. These are not films to sedate your senses; these are
films to blow your mind.
Neil Sinyard is Reader in Film Studies at Hull University.
He has published over twenty books on film, including The Films of Nicolas
Roeg (1991). He is currently co-editor of a series of monographs on British
Film-Makers for Manchester University Press.
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