Nicolas Roeg, who died Friday at the age of 90, didn’t just bend the medium of film to his will. He broke it, splintered it, and sutured it back together. He was a like a surgeon gifted with second sight, and his movies would have probably died on the operating table with anybody else in charge. A former cinematographer who left his mark in several different areas of 1960s cinema—doing unit work for David Lean on Lawrence of Arabia; shooting Fahrenheit 451 for François Truffaut and The Masque of the Red Death for Roger Corman—Roeg had an undeniable eye for color and composition. But it was his attention to editing that made him a legend. His movies were jagged jigsaw puzzles that the viewer had to try to put together in real time; at their best, the pieces added up not to a complete picture but a kind of Rorschach test. “I prefer it,” he said once, “when the familiar is made to feel strange.”
Strange was Roeg’s sweet spot, and his run of five films from 1970 to 1980—Performance, Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Bad Timing—has yet to be equalled in terms of consistently virtuoso weirdness. (The only real contender: Roeg superfan Ben Wheatley, whose Kill List is deeply indebted to Don’t Look Now, and who put an admiring quote from Roeg on the poster for his midnight-mindfuck comedy A Field in England). Because he was initially drawn to genres like gothic horror and sci-fi, Roeg attracted a cult audience, and the way that he used movie stars and rock stars guaranteed studio backing, although more often than not his financiers hated the final product: Even in 1990, when he scored a gig directing an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches for Jim Henson’s production company, he freaked out his collaborators by making Anjelica Huston’s witch queen too flamboyantly sexy for a kids movie—and pissed off Dahl by changing the book’s ending, leading to the author’s attempt to take his name off the movie.
The 1990s and beyond weren’t a particularly proud period for Roeg, who mostly fell off the map without ever losing his legendary status; in recent years, he’s been canonized on lists (Don’t Look Now was voted the eighth greatest British movie of all time) and on home video (with five titles on Criterion). Like a lot of genuine innovators, he was criticized for being incoherent. But retrospectively, he looks to have been ahead of his time—the perfect compliment for a filmmaker who could collapse space and time into a single edit. These are his six masterworks.
Performance (1970)
When Warner Bros. agreed to subsidize the Scottish painter-turned-screenwriter Donald Cammell’s screenplay in the late 1960s, it was because they thought they were getting their own version of A Hard Day’s Night. After moving to London, Cammell had become friendly with the Rolling Stones and convinced Mick Jagger to sign on to the film in the role of a reclusive rock star harboring a desperate gangster (James Fox) in his Notting Hill flat. What they got, however, was closer to the cinematic equivalent of Their Satanic Majesties Request—a daring, commercially dicey experiment in creepy psychedelia.
Cammell’s plan was to juxtapose two different models of British masculinity—Fox’s terse, Kray-style hoodlum Chas and Jagger’s ambisexual singer Turner, who moans that he’s “lost his demon”—and in doing so, reconcile them. To realize his vision, he called in Roeg, coming off shooting Richard Lester’s hyperactive hippie-romance Petulia and took a co-director credit to supervise the technical aspects of the production. It’s fitting that a movie about two men whose personalities gradually bleed together was itself the work of two minds, but while it’s impossible to separate out Cammell’s contributions, the visual signature is Roeg’s all the way, from the palpably grimy texture of the images to the envelope-pushing sexuality to a kaleidoscopic editing scheme combining elements of French New Wave and American underground cinema.
Critics hated it, and Warner Bros. barely saw fit to release it, but Performance has endured as a cult favorite. It’s also arguably the greatest-ever big-screen showcase for Jagger, who lords over the climax in a proto-music-video sequence scored to a song written specifically for the film. “Memo From Turner” is the moment when Jagger’s character “gets his demon back,” merging psychically with his guest and recreating himself in the gangster’s suave image, and no filmmaker—not Jean-Luc Godard, Martin Scorsese, or David Fincher—ever captured the singer’s liquid, insidious charisma as well as Roeg.
Walkabout (1971)
Few films begin as terrifyingly as Roeg’s second feature, which observes the sudden psychological breakdown of a seemingly prosperous man (John Meillon)—maybe a metaphor for the middle class, or maybe just a lone broken soul. Having driven his teenage daughter (Jenny Agutter) and young son (Luc Roeg) into the Australian outback for a day trip and picnic, Dad tries to murder them with a shotgun before setting their car on fire and blowing his own brains out instead. The sheer, inexplicable horror of this prologue gives way to a more existential sort of dread as the kids try to survive on their own in the desert, aided by an Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) whose silent, benevolent presence puts him perilously close to “noble savage” territory.
These cultural and racial tensions are embodied in a series of cryptic, symbolic sequences referencing class difference, strained communication, colonial violence, and sexual coming-of-age; because it’s Roeg behind the camera, the imagery takes on the feverish intensity of a vision quest. A box office flop, Walkabout courted controversy for its depictions of animal murder and the fact that Agutter was only 17 when she filmed her nude scenes; it has since been reevaluated as a signal film for the Australian New Wave and one of the great art house freak-outs of the 1970s.
Don’t Look Now (1973)
In Daphne Du Maurier’s 1971 short story Don’t Look Now, the death by drowning of John and Laura Baxter’s daughter Christine is referred to in the past tense; for his adaptation, Roeg depicts the accident in a dazzling, devastating prologue whose seven minutes comprise 102 shots. This sequence is perhaps the apex of the director’s style and functions as a masterpiece-within-a-masterpiece: Every single shot is designed to anticipate, foreshadow, or otherwise allude to characters, locations, or graphic elements (colors, textures, objects, or props) that will figure in the story. The murky depths of the pond will be doubled by Venice’s network of canals when the Baxters arrive in the sunken city to get some distance from the tragedy; a British girl’s plastic ball will reappear in the hands of an Italian boy; broken shards of glass become multiplied; a crimson smear on a photographic slide promises that there will be blood.
That feeling of déjà vu—haven’t I seen this somewhere before?—is the perfect effect for a story that turns on the idea that one or more of its characters are experiencing ESP: In Venice, Laura begins to think that Christine is trying to reach them from beyond the grave, while John refuses to believe her or his eyes and pays the price. A breathtaking marriage of giallo tropes and Borgesian intrigue, featuring one of the hottest sex scenes of its era (cutting back and forth between John and Laura’s naked bodies and the pair dressing for dinner afterwards) and a truly unsettling twist ending, Don’t Look Now was Roeg’s first hit and remains his most famous movie; the image of a small, red-hooded figure darting through Venice inspired everybody from Steven Spielberg in Schindler’s List to Martin Campbell in Casino Royale. It’s one of the great works about being open to the possibility of signs and wonders, and the idea, however comforting (or terrifying, or both) that somebody, somewhere—whether a dearly departed daughter or God recast as a high-modernist movie director—is, in fact, trying to tell you something.
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
For his second rock-megastar collaboration after Jagger and Performance, Roeg enlisted David Bowie—by that point post–Ziggy Stardust and easily one of the most popular singers on the planet—to play Newton, a melancholy alien wandering through an American wasteland (New Mexico, shot by the director to resemble Mars). The casting couldn’t have been more perfect, and yet The Man Who Fell to Earth is about far more than Bowie’s otherworldly persona or elegantly pantomimed despair: He’s great, but he also serves the overall mood of the movie. As a meditation on encroaching spiritual emptiness, set in a society hypnotized by materialism and mass media—the latter captured in the signature image of Newton impassively watching 12 television sets at once—Roeg’s film is so rich and lucid that it could be an essay. The atmosphere is hazy and medicated, and every so often, images emerge from the fog to shock and startle. The revelation of Bowie’s true alien form has a pulpy sci-grandeur; his catlike eyes anticipate Michael Jackson’s contact lenses in the Thriller video; the explicit sex scenes between Newton and Candy Clark’s Mary-Lou (including one bit where the alien deep-throats a pistol) fulfill the director’s mandate for full-frontal eroticism. Artists from Philip K. Dick to Guns N’ Roses to Alan Moore would pay homage over the years to Roeg’s classic in one way or another, and without it, sympathetically stylized sci-fi like Starman, The Brother From Another Planet, and Under the Skin are unthinkable.
Bad Timing (1980)
“A sick film by sick people for sick people” proclaimed a representative from Rank, the U.K. distributor for Bad Timing. That’s one way to try to promote a movie. If anything, the X-rating earned by Roeg’s most notorious thriller was its best selling point, and it’s hard to deny that the film delivers on the ominous promise of its MPAA-branded scarlet letter. If Don’t Look Now melded scariness with sexiness in a new and groundbreaking way, Bad Timing rendered sex itself as a source of unimaginable horror. Told in wildly disorienting—and yet always precisely constructed—flashbacks, the film dramatizes the passionate but dysfunctional relationship of two Americans in Vienna, played—in performances that can only be called brave—by Art Garfunkel and Theresa Russell. Harvey Keitel co-stars as an investigator trying to unravel their tortured backstories.
The centerpiece sequence, which the film builds to with patience and dread, is a nightmare vision of sexual violation that’s easily one of the most uncomfortable scenes of its kind ever filmed; it’s perched right on the edge of tastelessness and yet finally more emotionally powerful than exploitative. The appalled reaction of critics and audiences suggests that not everybody was on Roeg’s wavelength; the film is a serious work of art (and has its champions), but it was also the beginning of the long, slow end of his career. A weird piece of trivia: Bad Timing won the audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival, an honor more recently bestowed on Oscar bait like The King’s Speech and Green Book; I’m not sure that TIFF (or any festival) would even show something like Bad Timing today.
Insignificance (1985)
Big Audio Dynamite’s 1985 club hit “E = MC2” is filled with references to Roeg’s films, starting with samples of Jagger in Performance and lyrics referencing Walkabout (“Don’t like no Aborigine”) and The Man Who Fell to Earth (“Space guy fell from the sky”). But its biggest inspiration was the director’s surreal 1985 comedy Insignificance, starring Theresa Russell (by then Roeg’s wife) as a slinky 1950s starlet modelled on Marilyn Monroe. Each of the film’s four characters are larger-than-life archetypes: the Senator (Tony Curtis) is based on Joseph McCarthy; the Ballplayer (Gary Busey) is a Joe DiMaggio manqué; and the Scientist (Michael Emil) is meant to be Albert Einstein.
Playwright Terry Johnson’s script combines real-life history (e.g., Monroe’s marriage to DiMaggio) with absurdist humour (the scene where Russell’s Actress explains the theory of relativity is hilarious and sexy) and a poetic, potent sense of postwar nostalgia, all filtered through Roeg’s trademark jump-cut style, which explodes the piece’s arch theatrical origins. A true oddity even by the filmmaker’s standards, it’s a minor masterpiece of American counter-mythology, with the most comically apocalyptic finale since Dr. Strangelove.