Tag: Nicolas Roeg

Films are chapters of my life

Posted on by Paul Risker

Two young siblings, 16-year-old Girl (Jenny Agutter) and six-year-old boy (Luc Roeg), are stranded in the blistering heat of the Australian Outback. A picnic with their father turns violent when he tries to shoot them, before shooting himself. Seeing that he has set the car on fire, the Girl tells her brother that he will rejoin them later, as they try to find their way back to the city. Exhausted and starving, the pair cross paths with an Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) on ‘walkabout’, a ritual in which at the age of sixteen, a Aborigine man-child is sent out to survive off the land. Accompanying him on his ritual, he teaches the pair how to survive in the wilderness.

While Walkabout is Roeg’s only acting credit, he has produced Mr. Nice (Rose, 2010), We Need to Talk about Kevin (Ramsay, 2011), and Carol Morley’s The Falling and Out of Blue (2018), as well as music videos for bands including, Simple Minds and Tears for Fears.

In conversation with DMovies, Roeg discussed his memories of Walkabout, his relationship with his father, the late Nicolas Roeg, and films as chapters of one’s life.

Paul Risker – What are your memories of the experience and has your response to the film changed with time?

Luc Roeg – On a personal level I have very fond and warm memories of making the film – of being in that beautiful natural environment, and sharing that experience with my brothers and mother, and obviously my father who was directing and photographing the movie. In terms of how I look at the film now compared to when I was younger, even as a child and an adolescent, and through the various chapters of my life when I’ve had the pleasure of revisiting it, I still appreciate it in different ways.

As a child you see it and maybe all you see is yourself. Then as you get older and you’re making the chapters in your own life, you come to see more of the film and get more out of it. I think I’m distanced enough now to be able to look at it and see that young person in the film in an almost disconnected way, although I’ll never be disconnected – the film will always be a very personal and intimate experience.

PR – We often view the artist through their work, but as Nic’s son, did you learn anything about your father through his work?

LR – The reality is that I’ve never interrogated my father or my relationship with him through his work. I guess I’m as much of a fan as I am a son, because I have watched his films and appreciated, and enjoyed them as much as the next person who has enjoyed Nic’s work, without thinking that I’m in any way seeing the man through the work. I think that’s partly because he was so much about his work.

Everything in our lives and everything about Nic was always about his work, and I don’t say that in a negative way. It’s not uncommon with artists for their work and their life to be one. The moments of making films for him felt like chapters of his life. If I’m reading anything into his work, it’s the chapters of his life, and I’ve experienced that myself. It takes such a long period of time to make a film that they become chapters of your life. You can watch the film at a later stage in your life and remember that time, and it brings back certain feelings with it.

PR – Would you agree that Walkabout as a timeless quality because of the way in which Nic used image and sound, the camera and the edit to provoke an emotional response?

LR – Where all of his skill as a filmmaker comes to bear is in the way it makes you feel. It’s one of the hardest things to do as a filmmaker, not to make you laugh or feel happy or sad, but to make you interrogate your own feelings and to ask questions. Or to reveal feelings in yourself and to make you feel something. It’s a very difficult thing to do as a filmmaker, but personally in my opinion, it’s the holy grail. What makes your work timeless are those feelings.

Why Walkabout still feels contemporary is that it’s not caught in any decade because it’s set in a natural environment, and there are only three people in it. But all the attitudes and feelings of those three people could be as relevant today, and all of the ways it makes you feel are as relevant today as it was then.

You’re absolutely right, those are the qualities that makes a filmmaker stand out. He [Nic] had that ability through his work, and that came from his deep understanding of the technical process, and how to make a film. To be a great contemporary artist, you have to understand the absolute fundamentals of the art to deconstruct it.

PR – Do you perceive there to be a transformative aspect to the filmmaking process, and should the audience also be transformed through their experience of a film?

LR – If you’ve created a piece of work in cinema that is a transformative piece of work, then you’ve achieved a big goal. It’s a very difficult thing to do and it comes back to your previous question about feeling. I think if you provoke feeling in an audience, or you make them interrogate their feelings in a way that they’re not used to or isn’t expected, then that’s a transformative moment in itself, and that’s a great thing to have achieved.

In terms of my own experiences of making films, yes, it’s linked to that element of them being chapters of your life. They take you to some extraordinary places, and just the challenge of making them, the creative partnerships you have with filmmakers, actors and technicians is in its own way as transformative as any learning and life experience is.

Walkabout is out now on Blu-ray

The image at the top is of Luc Roeg (sourced from The Criterion Channel); the image in the middle is a still from ‘Walkabout’.

Don’t Look Now

Posted on by victorfraga

Warning: this review contains spoilers

Cinema, perhaps better than any other medium, has the ability to completely collapse time through the power of editing. Think the epic transition between the prehistoric era and space travel in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), the non-linear structures of Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), allowing viewers to experience cinema in terms of thematic connection and not simply A-to-B storytelling. Don’t Look Now is another classic example of how editing can transform material into something truly haunting and marvellous. Yet here, instead of freeing the story, Don’t Look Now’s editing chokes it, creating a sense of dread that is palpable from the very first frame to the last.

Nicolas Roeg had experimented with fragmented storytelling techniques before with editor Antony Gibbs with Performance (1970) and Walkabout (1971), yet this collaboration with Graeme Clifford represented a major step up in form; its use of fast-forwards, flashbacks and frequent, sometimes lightning-quick insert shots a true masterclass in form.

Everything is set from the very first frame, entombed in stone like Venice’s churches. While John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura Baxter’s (Julie Christie) daughter — clad in an iconic red mackintosh — is playing with a red ball outside a pond, John is working through some slides. As he spills water on the slide of a church, the scene turns completely red, linking his daughter’s drowning with his own eventual bloody demise.

They move to Venice, where John works on restoring a church. The city is treated as one giant mausoleum, emptied out and shrouded in mist. It’s wintertime, everyone is wrapped up in hats, scarves and coats, and there are endless shadows emanating from its tiny, winding alleyways. As the psychic blind woman says, expressing her sister’s view: “it’s like a city in aspic, wrapped over from a dinner party, where all the guests are dead or gone.” It’s a place, like John and Laura, stuck in time, seemingly unable to move forwards or backwards.

Their relationship suffers, as demonstrated by its now iconic sex scene. It is still rare to see a film use sex as a thematic point rather than simply plot advancement, Laura and John desperately writhing together as a means to cling on to the little spark of life they have left. Intercut with scenes of them getting dressed afterwards, it stresses both their togetherness and estrangement, showing the difficulty of maintaining passion after suffering such a momentous loss. Grief has this power to rent people apart, giving them little to cling onto other than the memory of their daughter.

When Laura meets fellow British tourists Heather (Hilary Mason) and Wendy (Clelia Matania) and Heather explains how she can communicate with her daughter, she is naturally intrigued by these odd yet mystical duo. In a common horror theme from Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polasnki, 1968) to Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018), her husband doesn’t believe a word she says. But when he starts seeing a little hooded figure in a red mackintosh who looks just like his daughter, mysterious happenings start to question his grounded and skeptical beliefs. Perhaps he has the ability to see things too.

The technicolour cinematography allows the red of his daughter’s jacket to really pop out, contrasting violently with all the other muted colours. It is perhaps one of the most famous uses of the colour in cinematic history, alongside the little girl in a red coat in the otherwise black-and-white Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993). To stress the murderous aspect of the colour, Roeg often uses dissolves, allowing red objects to bleed into one another with nightmarish regularity.

Things double and double, the use of repetition and doppelgängers constricting the narrative to its deadly eventuality. John’s hubris is in thinking he can make sense of what he sees in front of him. With bodies fished out of the river at regular intervals, and a sighting of his wife on a boat with the two women, John frantically searches for his wife despite the fact she has gone back to England to see her son, who has had a mysterious accident. What he has in fact seen is a premonition of his own funeral. The ending — which is either haunting or oddly bathetic depending on who you ask — then reveals that the red cloaked figure is not a phantom but a murderous dwarf, who quickly dispatches him with a knife. Then in a remarkably edited sequence, the whole film seems to pass before his eyes, revealing its narrative to be almost completely circuitous.

There is a religious component to the dazzling editing. If God exists, then He would not see the world in a linear fashion, but everything that has ever happened and everything that will ever happen simultaneously. Everything is predetermined, nothing happens by chance. This is the true horror: not jump scares or bloody mutilations, but the idea that nothing you can do can ever change your fate. Only the gifted such as Heather and John can see parts of the future, but this doesn’t mean they can do anything about it. A truly terrifying prospect indeed.

A 4k restoration of Don’t Look Now hits UK cinemas on Friday, July 5th (nearly half a century after its original release in 1973)