Sensual Obsession

BAD TIMING (1980)
ARENA: NICOLAS ROEG - IT'S ABOUT TIME... (2015)

Never confuse BAD TIMING as a date movie; Nicolas Roeg's extraordinary picture showcases a love affair long after the hearts stop beating, a piece that rivals Andrzej Zulawski's POSSESSION as the most toxic and intense break-up film of all time.

NICOLAS Roeg's motion pictures are time machines that test the cinematic medium as much as their character's journeys. Like Ken Russell, Roeg is a genre by himself, riding against the British norm of dour realism to create art-house visions for the masses. BAD TIMING is Roeg at his most vicious, where scenes of sexual perversion upset backers Rank so much ("a sick film made by sick people for sick people") they removed their gong logo and refused to screen it in their own Odeon chain. In fact, Psychiatrist Alex Linden (Art Garfunkel) and Milena Flaherty (Theresa Russell)'s destructive relationship was almost brought to the point of both stars walking off the film. Set in Cold War Vienna, the opening has a catatonic Milena rushed to hospital after taking an overdose, accompanied by her former lover Linden. Police Inspector Netusil (Harvey Keitel, in a strangely forced performance) suspects foul play and questions Linden; through flashbacks we see the events leading up to the suicide attempt, documenting Milena's experiences with Alex, her heavy drinking, and estrangement from much-older Czech husband Stefan (Denholm Elliott).

Abandoning any chronology or clarity, scenes take cues from objects, music and art, with the controversial sex scenes un-erotic and un-sexy. BAD TIMING is impossible to classify; is it a love story, psychological thriller, or even a horror movie? If it is a detective mystery it certainly isn't a good one, as Netusil is no Sherlock Holmes (promotion dubbed the film "a terrifying love story" and carried the subtitle A SENSUAL OBSESSION in American theatres). Linden's methodical mind control clashes with the free-spirited and impulsive Flaherty through jealousy, bitterness, disenchantment and permanent lack of commitment. Russell shines in her first lead role, and Garfunkel is believable as his misinformation and misconceptions unravel; what is most extraordinary is how two mainstream actors could elude to the final revelation (erroneously dubbed necrophilia by many sources) and that Roeg and Russell fell in love during the production and married soon after.

86-year-old Nicolas Roeg, photographed in his study, to promote David Thompson's  entrancing ARENA documentary.

As Nathaniel Thompson notes in Video Watchdog (#103, January 2004), "[BAD TIMING] could be considered the first sexual warfare film to explore the concept of two people literally exhausting themselves to death (or at least coming perilously close)." Roeg's film would make an unbearable double bill with Andrej Zulawski's POSSESSION - released a year later - where the Polish director draws heavily on the breakdown of his marriage to create a work lead actress Isabelle Adjani described as "emotional pornography." POSSESSION is a discordant piece that is filled with excesses borne out of sheer desperation, as it veers towards its phallus-headed amphibian monster. A less bludgeoning companion piece would be Jean-Luc Godard's PIERROT LE FOU, where its hero must balance his pursuit of aesthetic perfection and yearning for stability against the shallow desires of his lover.

ARENA's heralded first in-depth documentary on Roeg's career ultimately leaves much of the meat to a series of talking heads, while Roeg himself acts as a puppet master, often with a whimsical grin while reading poetry ("There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye" from Auden's At Last the Secret is Out). Taking its title from his obsession with scrambling and reassembling frames, NICOLAS ROEG - IT'S ABOUT TIME... is an array of entertaining and insightful comments, from Danny Boyle's wonderment of Roeg's treatment of sex in his films, to Ben Wheatley's point of how his casting of music stars (Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Art Garfunkel) somehow provide tendrils within the movies that reach out and co-exist with the moving image. Theresa Russell champions the use of dislocation in BAD TIMING as particularly apt when considering relationships ("people do not think linearly") and Roeg is quite pleased that his birth year was 1928, when sight and sound were first merged.

Moonage Daydreams

OMNIBUS - CRACKED ACTOR: A FILM ABOUT DAVID BOWIE (1975)
THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)

"I'm just a space cadet, he's the commander." CRACKED ACTOR is a poignant portrayal of David Bowie's infatuated audience, as he attempts to escape from his Ziggy Stardust persona and discover American soul.

IN 1974, David Bowie embarked on a 70-concert, 6-month American Diamond Dog tour. Midway through, a BBC crew - headed by Alan Yentob - were invited to document proceedings, resulting in the insightful CRACKED ACTOR programme screened under the OMNIBUS arts strand. Opening with a US reporter - Wayne Satz - dissing his Bowie interview as "it would be nice to talk to somebody not being evasive and discussing riddles," the BBC documentary unsurprisingly is more patient, searching and rewarding that such an observation. Taking its title from a track off Aladdin Sane, Bowie aims to distance himself from the overbearing ghost of Ziggy Stardust and conquer America on his own terms, aborbing the United States as a land of myth which could fuel new avenues of his imagination. Yentob paints a picture of an exhausted and undernourished performer surviving on cocaine and milk (many years later, Bowie proclaimed "I was so blocked ... so stoned ... when I see that now I cannot believe I survived it"), but also one that is constantly seeking to discover forms of performance art best suited to the shape of his work beyond the lyrics.

Scenes of Bowie and Carole King in a limo taking in the American west especially fascinated PERFORMANCE and DON'T LOOK NOW director Nicolas Roeg, as the singer talks about a fly inside his milk while listening to an Aretha Franklin song that King co-wrote ('(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman'). This synchronicity must have appealed to Roeg's layered mentality, as a year later the filmmaker would cast Bowie as a fragile alien consumed by humanity in the hallucinatory THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH. In fact, CRACKED ACTOR was shown to the backers of this new project, and the shots of Bowie in the back of the car - especially the wearing of his hat - created a mood that morphed into his title role.

Unlike the body-snatching or maiming mentality of most aliens-on-Earth movies, David Bowie's traveller has his character and mission eroded by human traits in THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH.

Roeg's film exists in a science fiction void between the sterile 2001 and the fantasies unleashed by STAR WARS. Tim Lucas, in his Video Watchdog review (#17, May 1993), offers a more specific place in motion picture history, stating that the production "is the turning point in English-language SF filmmaking that BLADE RUNNER is often assumed to be." Very loosely based on the 1963 novel by American Walter Tevis, THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH was an inversion of the norm: rather than a United States-funded picture filmed in Britain, here was a subversive film that was British-financed and made largely in New Mexico. Hiding his native hairless, cat's eyed appearance, the visitor takes on the visage of an English electronics entrepreneur in America. Soon under the surveillance of the CIA, the alien uses the name Thomas Jerome Newton, and rapidly amasses a fortune through a number of patents set up as World Enterprises, with the help from attorney Oliver Farnsworth (Buck Henry). It is revealed that with this money, Newton seeks to transport water back to his drought-ridden home world; but even though Newton befriends lonely hotel maid Mary-Lou (Candy Clark), he becomes a recluse corrupted by the Earthly fascinations of sex, alcohol, wealth, television and fame.

The film's use of time lapses and abrupt crosscuts also alludes to different genres: it is a science fiction film without special effects, a drama, western, love story and even satire. This non-linear story also creates a dream mentality, a key sensation in Roeg's visionary and portent-themed style (Farnsworth's line "when Mr Newton entered my apartment, my old life went straight out the window" takes on a literal meaning later). In Joseph Lanza's 1989 book Fragile Geometry: The Films, Philosophy, and Misadventures of Nicolas Roeg, the author mentions a number of manifestations in the director/DPs personal makeup that leave lasting impressions. As a child, Roeg's feverdream of a beach resort decaying into an apocalyptic visa - complete with writhing creatures - is turned into the alien's featureless, desert-like home world (replete with an almost amusement park-type train service); and a white mare that appeared on a grassy knoll but eluded being captured on film as Roeg lensed FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD acts as a recurring motif here and in future work.

"Get out of my mind ... all of you!"; Newton encounters the effects of channel-hopping in one of many prophetic elements of THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH. What is most astonishing is how the narrative anticipates technologies that have shaped our lives: disposable cameras, self-developing film, digital music and multi-channel viewing have all come true since the film's release.

 

By the very nature of Roeg providing an out of sync story, this caused an extraordinary situation with the film's United States distributor. On viewing a rough cut, the newly appointed chairman of Paramount Pictures - Barry Diller - rejected THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH on the grounds that it was not a linear story. The kaleidoscope nature, the chairman argued, was not the film his studio bought, and resulted with producer Michael Deeley instituting a lawsuit where Paramount eventually contributed a modest settlement. The picture was actually picked up by Don Rugoff's New York-based outfit Cinema V, which specialised in unusual European releases. Even though British Lion clawed back two-thirds of their deficit with Paramount, Cinema V didn't have the same weight as the major Hollywood studio, and could not open the film on the same scale.

In real life Bowie was also a UFO enthusiast - he even contributed to a British UFO journal in the late 60's - belonging to a long list of rock luminaries who were actively involved in saucer investigations. But Bowie is THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, an outsider who - according to Roeg - may or may not actually be of extra-terrestrial origin ("you in the audience think perhaps he's from outer space, I don't think that's definite. All we see is what's in his mind.") At the time of the production Bowie was using around 10gms of cocaine a day, consequently the musician/actor was as alienated as Newton himself.  Deeley - in his 2008 book Blade Runners, Deer Hunters and Blowing the Bloody Doors Off - My Life in Cult Movies, reveals an episode where Bowie was adamant that his beloved glass of skimmed milk was poisoned, making the star unable to work for two days; another where Bowie insisted that his mobile dressing room be moved from a location he considered to be an Indian burial ground. Against the odds, the leading man was allegedly accessible and ready for the extraordinary scenes Roeg asked of him; as Deeley states in his book, "David Bowie lived in his own world, and I'm not sure how many other inhabitants it had."

Dream Documentaries

THE GRAPHIC NOVEL MAN: THE COMICS OF BRYAN TALBOT (2014)
VIDEO NASTIES 2: DRACONIAN DAYS (2014)

John Chambers and Sandra Marrs, aka Scottish comic book novelists Metaphrog, designed this Bryan Talbot illustration for the 'Stripped' strand of the 2013 Edinburgh International Book Festival.

RELEASED by Digital Storage Engine in May, this fascinating three-part, 142-minute DVD documentary showcases the passions and processes of one of the world's most respected and influential comic book creators. Wigan-born writer/artist Bryan Talbot emerged from underground comix in the late-70's with The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, widely labelled as the first British graphic novel. An albino assassin who gets stoned, activates his psychic powers and ends up in a parallel England where Oliver Cromwell’s rule never ended, Arkwright started as a pastiche of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius, but by the time Talbot had completed the series the work provided a template from which the likes of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison started their foreboding careers. As well as Moorcock, Talbot borrowed from the British new wave of science fiction writers and the film techniques of Nicolas Roeg, spawning the whole "mature comics" line that more noticeable figures give themselves far too much credit for.

Featuring interviews with - amongst others - Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, Pat Mills, Charlie Adlard, Paul Gravett, Kim Newman and with an introduction by Moorcock, THE GRAPHIC NOVEL MAN not only puts Talbot's trailblazing developments of sequential storytelling in context, but explores the comic form in relation to other artistic endeavours. At one point novelist Ian Rankin marvels at how Talbot balances his craft - following Rankin's pains with a John Constantine one-shot - and the sequences showing the creator at work with his folders of notes, charts and tireless research even when on walking holidays are marvels to behold. Not only is the attention to detail staggering, Talbot has always maintained an integrity and pride in an often shunned artistic medium. Talbot refers to his scripts as 'Alan Moore style', referencing the detailed writing that the Northampton magus is famous for, thus being typically polite about who actually influenced who.

Talbot's underground Brainstorm Comix premiered psychedelic alchemist Chester P. Hackenbush, a character reworked by Alan Moore as Chester Williams for his run on Swamp Thing.

Over his forty-plus years in the industry, Talbot's talent absorbs a variety of styles to suit their target audiences. He says he is writer, director, costume maker and editor for each of his publications, which helps to explain the quality of detail. Described by Dez Skinn as "The David Bowie" of comics, Talbot's work is as impressive as it is diverse: Nemesis the Warlock for 2000 A.D., a tale of childhood sexual abuse in The Tale of One Bad Rat, the Grandville series which imagines an alternative steampunk reality in which France won the Napoleonic Wars and the world is populated by anthropomorphic animals, the 2013 Costa Award winning Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes co-created with wife Mary, and the existential Metronome - a textless erotically charged poem produced under the pseudonym Véronique Tanaka - illustrate this breadth of vision. His story for Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #39-40 sees Bruce Wayne's dual identity as the caped crusader revealed as just a side-effect of hysterical dissociative disorder. As Talbot states in the documentary, "I'm surprised I got away with that really." 

In 2007 he released his magnum opus Alice in Sunderland, a "dream documentary" four years in the making that immerses itself with the relationship between Lewis Carroll, Alice Liddell and the Sunderland and Wearside areas. Using Carrollian scholar Michael Bute's book A Town Like Alice's as a springboard, the sprawling work is pitched as a grand entertainment staged at the Sunderland Empire, and contains a dizzying array of historical weight and illustrative collage, from watercolours and Victorian engraving, to spot-on pastiche of boy's own papers and EC horror comics. Talbot places Sunderland - and indeed the folklore of England - within a mythical dreamscape which explores the influence of space similar to the works of Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore. Narrated in the present-tense by Talbot as avatar, the many threads reveal starling connections and stories that become true on the pure basis of tales being told and retold.

“It’s alright for you middle-class cineastes to see this film, but what would happen if a factory worker from Manchester happened to see it?” James Ferman is centre stage for VIDEO NASTIES 2: DRACONIAN DAYS.

Nucleus Films' follow-up to 2010's VIDEO NASTIES: MORAL PANIC, CENSORSHIP AND VIDEOTAPE - VIDEO NASTIES 2: DRACONIAN DAYS - focuses on the years 1984 to 1999 to chart the rise and fall of BBFC supremo James Ferman. A Canadian television hack who felt obliged to think that his background in the cutting room and "social awareness" made him the perfect man for the job, Ferman was particularly obsessed with the theme of sexual violence and the use of nunchucks - he even cut the opening sequence of TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES II because Michelangelo imitates their use by swinging sausages. Ferman infamously not just censored but re-edited films, cutting horror movies to shreds and basterdised HENRY: PORTRAINT OF A SERIAL KILLER to his own dramatic whim. Documenting the Hungerford Massacre, the murder of James Bulger and the antics of MP David Alton, Jake West's documentary absorbingly shows how this bludgeoning practice only served to create a thriving underground movement of fans eager to find and trade complete cuts, consequently forming a vibrant fanzine market for such a social network to thrive. Like its predecessor it is an important historical piece in its own right, contrasting the fight for artistic freedom against the timeless ignorance of the BBFC, MPs and mainstream media.

Everything is Permitted

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL (1968)
PERFORMANCE (1970)

The cover of Fabulous Films/BFI’s 2006 DVD release of SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL.

WHEN Jean-Luc Godard came to London in 1968, fresh from the Paris student riots, he intended to make a pro-abortion movie, but this was abandoned after a change in legislation. The French new wave director then turned to The Rolling Stones for his subject matter, which happened to be their feature film debut. Alternatively boring and mesmerising, SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL would later be re-edited by Godard as ONE PLUS ONE, after being angered by the producer’s attempts to commercialise the work so much, he punched him at the premiere. It is the director’s title version, however, that makes clearer its intention – to put together two discrete elements, rock and revolution. But these do not directly interact, nor do they sit comfortably; the black-power commune, with its eerie passive white female victims covered in blood, and a crazed, Buster Keatonesque final sequence, for example(s), are mixed with footage of the Stones working on 'Sympathy for the Devil' from its ballad beginnings to its final samba-driven form. What most strikes one about SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL is its expressive flatness; Godard’s cameras simply look at things, as though he’d rather not intervene in time’s flow at all. The filming of the Stones, meanwhile, seems to be almost autistic, as if the camera is simultaneously baffled by and unconcerned about what is going on. It doesn’t really work as a piece of cultural politics either, and has always been regarded as a lesser work in the Godard canon.

Quite where the Stones fitted into this scheme must have been beyond them. Their footage is undoubtedly fascinating, containing in itself a separate double-edged sword: the evolution of an infamous song and Brian Jones’ self-destruction. A first-person commentary from a suave and sophisticated Lucifer, 'Sympathy for the Devil' is a song that cemented fears that the band were indeed devil-worshippers and a corrupting influence on youth. It should be noted, however, that one interpretation of this song is that The Devil is in fact mankind. The lyrics are a brief history of some of the most notable atrocities committed by man against man, including wars of religion ("I watched with glee while your Kings and Queens fought for ten decades for the Gods they made"), the 1917 Russian Revolution ("I stuck around St. Petersburg when I saw it was a time for a change, killed the Czar and his ministers"), and WWII ("I rode a tank, held a general's rank while the blitzkrieg raged, and the bodies stank"). In that light, the song would appear to be a criticism of the immorality of mankind. Jones’ estrangement from the group as the song unfolds is unforgivingly portrayed, with him spending much of his time inaudibly strumming behind a sound partition. Indeed, the most uncomfortable moment of the entire film is when Mick Jagger attempts to explain to Jones a basic chord progression, as if humouring a slow child.

Mick Jagger’s androgynous, iconic presence
on an Italian lobby card for PERFORMANCE.

Jagger would attempt to become a fully-fledged movie star in PERFORMANCE, a haunting meditation on human identity from co-directors Donald Cammel and Nicolas Roeg. This controversial film is an example of the peculiar effects generated when avant-garde or experimental practises are integrated into the Hollywood mainstream, with its innovative use of montage and mirror shots being imitated by a generation of film students. It is the story of Chas Devlin (James Fox), a sadistic petty gangster who has trouble fitting in, even with his cohorts. Chas clashes with boss Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon) after he carries out a murder for personal - as opposed to business - reasons, and hides out in the Notting Hill basement of "retired" rock star Turner (Jagger). Turner has secluded himself in the house in order to lament the loss of his powers of "incantation," which seems primarily to mean that he indulges in a lot of drug-taking and sex with two female companions, Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (the omnisexual Michele Breton). Soon, Turner – whose name can be taken somewhat literally - senses a connection between Chas’ brutally violent nature and his own dried-up creative powers, and he draws the young hood into his world.

Famously characterised by Cammell and Jagger as about "a perverted love affair between homo sapiens and lady violence," PERFORMANCE remains as provocative as ever – and one of the few truly visionary films made in the UK. The explicit sex and brutal violence was a breakthrough for British cinema, such as Chas’s oddly sexualised whipping at the hand of Maddocks (Anthony Valentine). At the time, Fox was Britain’s freshest rising screen star, but was so disturbed by his experiences here that he failed to act again for nearly a decade. Furthermore, 20th Century Fox rejected the film, delaying its release, then ordering a drastic re-edit. As Turner explains, "The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, is the one that achieves madness."

Executives sneered that even PERFORMANCE’s bath water was dirty. At least here, Jagger, Michele Breton and Anita Pallenberg save on some.

Jagger’s portrayal of Turner reinforces his stage image without copying it, and is a comment on his own life and style. Submerging himself with such a hedonistic existence, and surrounding himself with a cloying assortment of Eastern artefacts, almost every shot in his apartment is aimed past incense and tapestries. This is not the environment your everyday white-collar gangster feels at home in, but Fox’s Chas is a character who struggles to feel at home anywhere. The identities of the two men become blurred; in Turner, Chas sees his own desire for adulation, while in Chas, Turner sees his own demon, the violence needed to restore a creative impulse. When he sings Memo from T, Turner brings the two worlds of violence and the cult of rock music together, in a way much more effectively than Godard’s pretentious posturing. This song – which can claim to be the first fully-formed music video – is a sleazy post-modern blues, with Ry Cooder’s slide guitar uncoiling like a predatory snake behind Jagger’s mannered delivery of what was, for him, an unusually Dylanesque lyric, packed with references to characters we’ve never met, including a "misbred grey executive" and a "faggy little leather boy."

In the wake of PERFORMANCE, Roeg directed a number of acclaimed motion pictures, while Cammell’s career appeared to stall. The themes illustrated here – of masculinity in crisis, transformation and extreme violence – would re-appear throughout Cammell’s later work. Indeed, the artist spent four decades in the film business, but his director’s credit only appears on three further films – DEMON SEED, WHITE OF THE EYE and WILD SIDE - all of which were made in America. In their 2006 book Donald Cammell: A Life on the Wild Side, Rebecca and Sam Umland paint a picture of a life in such sexual excess that it may have been that this limited output was because professional considerations seem to take a very second place. PERFORMANCE is a scream against the hierarchy and repression that links the ruling class and the underworld that is Old England; the puzzling fact that Cammell took out French citizenship in the 1960s, and spent most of his later life in Los Angeles, perhaps starved a creativity which produced its best work under the acute observations and groundings of a society he turned his back on.

Fragile Geometry

DON’T LOOK NOW (1973)

John aimlessly clutches Christine in the harrowing opening to the film.

ARGUABLY the most commercial and, in many respects, completely satisfying films by the erratically brilliant Nicolas Roeg, this provocative work has lost little of its power to challenge, shock, and amaze. Roeg is one of Britain’s most adventurous directors, stretching the potential of cinema through a masterly montage of raw emotions, complex time-leaps and splintered narratives, and examining characters forced into a journey of self-exploration when cut adrift from their usual moral and physical milieu. Based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier, DON’T LOOK NOW is a beautifully sensual and restrained horror film, yet it also suggests a world that is perilous, cruel and out of control. Superficially calm, it is an eerie labyrinth that gets under your skin and stays there, underpinned by a constant sense of foreboding that erupts into bloody violence only at the climax; it is a love story with only one love scene, and a study of grief during which nobody cries. This makes the work characteristic of the same peculiar Englishness which informs films as different as BRIEF ENCOUNTER and THE INNOCENTS.

Beginning with every parent’s nightmare – the tragic death of a child – DON’T LOOK NOW examines how grief can overpower emotion, but is cautiously optimistic in its portrayal of how love can transcend death. In the perfectly edited opening sequence, art restorer John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Laura (Julie Christie) find their idyllic English country afternoon shattered by the accidental drowning of their young daughter, Christine (Sharon Williams). John experiences an unsettling psychic vision during the tragedy that proves to be a portent of things to come. During lunch at a restaurant in Venice, where John has been brought in to work on a precious holy fresco, the couple are approached by a blind English medium, Heather (Hilary Mason), who informs them that their daughter is expressing happiness and messages of reassurance from the afterlife. During this time the streets of Venice are haunted by a series of gruesome murders - the bodies found drifting in the canals – and John's further visions may be related to a strange figure in a red coat.

Sharon Williams gives a brief yet memorable
performance as doomed Christine Baxter.

The opening drowning takes place with almost unbearable force and awareness, a series of cuts that contain all the keys to the remainder of the film. Roeg's image system is all important, and this sequence introduces the key motifs of the picture; water, both as a source of life and death and as something which needs to be crossed if two people are to be connected; separation, literal or metaphorical, based on geography, belief or simply the way of seeing things; breaking glass, a potent symbol of an accident; scepticism and belief, how one's refusal to believe what's happening can be a fatal mistake; the difference between appearance and reality, as when John says "Nothing is what it seems"; and, perhaps most memorably, the colour red, whether as a harbinger of danger or a way of focusing on something significant.

Until DON’T LOOK NOW, Venice was always used in films to symbolise romance and passion. But here, Roeg unsettles the viewer right from the start, and the whole movie is suffused with shrouded fog and subliminal clues. The transition from Hertfordshire to the cold, autumnal Venice is achieved with a brilliant jump cut from Laura's scream to the whine of a drill, linking the past to the impending horror of the present. Indeed, Venice, similar to the Victorian London in Alan Moore’s From Hell, is turned into a character itself; gloomy, and other. It clouds John's consciousness, rendering him unable to see exactly what is happening as the maze of streets seems to have been designed specifically in order to make the unwary tourist lose their way. The Eternal City seemed to offer comfort and the hope of redemption from the awful feelings of loss but to John Baxter, it provides only terrifying glimpses of a fate which can be delayed but never avoided. Water is everywhere, acting as a reminder of his daughter, and an unavoidable obstacle to getting where he wants to go.

Possessing a star quality and physical presence rare in British cinema, Julie Christie has survived being the representative of a new generation into political activism and grand dame-hood.

DON’T LOOK NOW is a romantic ghost story, but on a deeper level it is also a meditation on perception and fate, where human destiny can be thwarted by a simple misreading of the signs hidden in everyday reality. The film explores what are too fleetingly only referred to as “coincidences,” yet are defining moments of life. The use of colour is especially notable, with all but red being muted and icy blues and greys becoming prominent as John’s search becomes more frustrating. When Baxter pursues the small red-garbed figure at the end of the film, Roeg offers an unforgettable echo back to Prospero’s pursuit of the Red Death in Roger Corman’s THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, a picture in which Roeg acted as cinematographer. Although the film is about death, it is also about love, making it more than just a clever Gothic puzzle. In Christie and Sutherland, we can believe in the ongoing passion of these two adults for each other. The famous love scene, with its non-linear cutting of the couple dressing for dinner, is not played for the usual cinematic effect of seduction or titillation. Rather, it is a natural scene notable for its candour, and for the fact that it seems to communicate love and not just sex. Without this scene, the story would seem less engaging and the interim between the Baxter’s last devoted moments together and their subsequent alienation would be left unexplored.