{"id":9438,"date":"2018-11-25T21:13:44","date_gmt":"2018-11-26T04:13:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=9438"},"modified":"2018-12-16T21:24:35","modified_gmt":"2018-12-17T04:24:35","slug":"nicolas-roeg-gone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2018\/11\/25\/nicolas-roeg-gone\/","title":{"rendered":"Nicolas Roeg Gone"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The Ringer<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

How Nicolas Roeg Broke Movies\u2014and Rebuilt Them in His Own Image<\/h1>\n

At their best, the director\u2019s masterpieces like \u2018Walkabout\u2019 and \u2018Don\u2019t Look Now\u2019 added up not to a complete picture but a kind of Rorschach test<\/h2>\n

By Adam Nayman<\/a> <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/picture><\/span><\/span>Ringer illustration<\/cite><\/span><\/p>\n

Nicolas Roeg, who died Friday at the age of 90, didn\u2019t 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\u2014doing unit work for David Lean on Lawrence of Arabia<\/em>; shooting Fahrenheit 451 <\/em>for Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut and The Masque of the Red Death <\/em>for Roger Corman\u2014Roeg 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. \u201cI prefer it,\u201d he said once, \u201cwhen the familiar is made to feel strange.\u201d<\/p>\n

Strange was Roeg\u2019s sweet spot, and his run of five films from 1970 to 1980\u2014Performance<\/em>, Walkabout<\/em>, Don\u2019t Look Now<\/em>, The Man Who Fell to Earth<\/em>, and Bad Timing\u2014<\/em>has yet to be equalled in terms of consistently virtuoso weirdness. (The only real contender: Roeg superfan Ben Wheatley<\/a>, whose Kill List <\/em>is deeply indebted to Don\u2019t Look Now<\/em>, and who put an admiring quote from Roeg on the poster for his midnight-mindfuck comedy A Field in England<\/em>). Because he was initially drawn to genres like gothic horror and sci-fi, Roeg attracted a cult audience, <\/em>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\u2019s The Witches <\/em>for Jim Henson\u2019s production company, he freaked out his collaborators by making Anjelica Huston\u2019s witch queen too flamboyantly sexy for a kids movie\u2014and pissed off Dahl by changing the book\u2019s ending, leading to the author\u2019s attempt to take his name off the movie.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at The Ringer<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Ringer How Nicolas Roeg Broke Movies\u2014and Rebuilt Them in His Own Image At their best, the director\u2019s masterpieces like \u2018Walkabout\u2019 and \u2018Don\u2019t Look Now\u2019 added up not to a complete picture but a kind of Rorschach test By Adam Nayman Ringer illustration Nicolas Roeg, who died Friday at the age of 90, didn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9438\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}