Deathblog: Nicolas Roeg (1928-2018)

At the present moment, I’m not sure have a lot to say about Nicolas Roeg that can’t be easily gleaned from the numerous, no doubt heart-felt, obits that are circulating online and in print, but nonetheless, it wouldn’t be right to let his passing go un-noted here.

Back in the non-linear, flashback past however, my younger self probably had quite a lot to say about him. Having grown up at around the time Roeg’s cult/critical reputation was really starting to glow, ‘Walkabout’, ‘Don’t Look Now’, ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’, and, once I scored a copy, ‘Performance’ were all regular fixtures back in the late VHS era, just as they must have been for many others, screened in student bedrooms or on commandeered parental TVs, held up as peerless exemplars of “intelligent”, “risk-taking” cinema, smuggling full-on, perception-warping weirdness into ostensibly popular narrative modes.

Roeg’s famously fragmented editing and eye for powerful imagery always seemed to add a frisson of occult conjuration to proceedings back in the day, as we stared at distant, square screens, doggedly trying to follow the flow of the washed out, tape-fuzzed presentations that, in retrospect, must have made these grandly photographed, visually nuanced ventures seem almost incomprehensible.

Indeed, for his achievements as a cinematographer alone, Roeg could be considered a legend. Who else can you imagine helping to define the aesthetic of movies as diverse as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, ‘The Servant’ and ‘The Masque of the Red Death’..? More-so than many other household name directors in fact, it strikes me that it was his sheer technical prowess that played a significant role in establishing the cult that has grown around him.

Whereas his never-quite-as-widely-acclaimed contemporaries in what I suppose you might call the more fantastique / out-there wing of post-1960 British cinema (Russell, Boorman, Anderson, and indeed Donald Cammell) have all been defined by the strength of their personalities, leaving their personal obsessions clearly stamped on just about everything they shot, Roeg by contrast was a more subtle, more low key brand of auteur, his vision defined more through form and technique than repeated imagery or subject matter.

Unlike the aforementioned directors, I have very little idea what kind of person Nicolas Roeg was, or of what he believed in. His work, on the surface at least, gives us few clues. At the risk of drifting into pretention, his films feel like exercises in letting cinema speak to itself, rather than of a filmmaker speaking down to his/her audience from on-high.

As such, they are exploratory (rather than didactic) works, in which on-screen characters have an independent life of their own, impossible to reduce to mere symbols or archetypes, even as the jarring, discontinuous editing similtaneously draws our attention to the artifice of the medium.

Having ‘done’ the greatest hits of all of the filmmakers referenced above at an early age, revisiting and reappraising their work has been on my long list of ‘things to do’ for some time. In Roeg’s case, the process has already begun, in that last month I watched ‘Don’t Look Now’ for the first time in years, and appreciated it more than ever.

Rather than all the clever-clever stuff about fragmented timelines and premonitions that used to fixate me as a teenager/student, I can now follow the film more as the purely emotional narrative that Roeg presumably intended, seeing how instinctively his outré technique serves to enhance the rather more prosaic, but no less horrifying, story Sutherland and Christie are telling through their remarkable performances.

(Having become an aficionado of giallo cinema since my last viewing, I also enjoyed exploring the strange notion that Donald and Julie’s story seems to be taking place in parallel with some sort of Umberto Lenzi movie about a killer dwarf, in which they appear as mere cannon fodder/supporting characters.)

The film still has that intangible air of magic(k) about it, that Kenneth Anger-esque sense of the editor’s scissors casting some dark spell, placing a curse as tangible as anything in M.R. James upon the characters (and, consequently, upon the audience)… but now perhaps, I’m old and boring enough to understand that that is not really the point.

I can only hope that revisiting Roeg’s other key works over the next few years might prove similarly rewarding, and rest assured, I also have both ‘Bad Timing’ and ‘Eureka’ sitting unwatched on the shelf, awaiting some quiet evening when I’ve got both the time and energy required to take on such (presumably fairly challenging) viewing experiences.

Perhaps at that point, I’ll have something a bit more insightful to say about Mr. Roeg, but for now, I’m simply happy just to have turned in what I’m fairly certain must be the only obituary to have name-checked Umberto Lenzi.

#17 The Masque of the Red Death(Roger Corman, 1964)

“The doctor dances in the white room… but I passed close by him. Truly Prospero, do you not know me?”

Until I acquired a new copy on DVD last year, I’d built up “Masque of the Red Death” to near-mythical status in my own mind, based on catching it randomly on TV a few years ago – an event that was perhaps responsible for triggering my whole love of ‘60s gothic horror. The rich, overwhelming colours, the swirling shapes of the dancers, the suffocating, decadent evilness of the whole venture – Corman’s vision may have had little to do with the blacks and blues and empty, echoing stone chambers that Poe’s writing has always communicated to me, but on its own terms it was a real aesthetic mind-blower – a mixture of psychotropic ‘60s excess and esoteric medieval grue in Hollywood drag, fusing the core themes of Poe’s story to the more extreme accruements of its own era, like, I dunno, Kenneth Anger meets Torquemada on the set of a ‘Robin of Sherwood’ movie or something.

So naturally when it came to revisiting it, my expectations were high. And as ever with high expectations, I was slightly disappointed. Having familiarised myself in the meantime with the work of Mario Bava and Terrence Fisher, of Rollin and Margerheti and all the other masters of weird cinematic gothic, “..Red Death” made less of an impact on me than it did the first time ‘round. Nicolas Roeg’s dazzling colour-coded cinematography and Daniel Haller’s otherworldly art direction seemed somewhat less dazzling and otherworldly. Having decided that I tend to prefer Vincent Price in tragic/sympathetic roles, his portrayal of the amoral Prince Prospero, though still excellent, seemed to lack that certain something that characterises his very best performances. The metaphysical pronouncements of the emissary of the Red Death began to sound less eerily profound, more like some of yr hastily pulled together AIP mumbo-jumbo.

Of course, that’s what happens when you build things up to gigantic proportions over time. If not approached as a life-changing masterpiece, “Masque..” is merely a really, really excellent example of a technicolor era gothic, with a first class cast incorporating at least four members of the official Breakfast in the Ruins Weirdo Horror Hall of Fame, a heavy, oneiric atmosphere, an luridly imaginative script and superb production design. The film’s big set pieces – Prospero’s opening visit to the village, Juliana’s dream-sequence and blood-pledge to Satan, the manifestation of the Red Death and the closing Dance of Death – are all breathtaking.

And, all other considerations aside, we should remember: this is a film in which Patrick Magee is hung from the ceiling dressed in a gorilla suit and set on fire by a dwarf. If that doesn’t guarantee a film a place in my top 20, what would?