NICOLAS ROEG. Premio a la excelencia de los críticos de cine britanicos

NICOLAS ROEG, presiente del jurado del Festival de Sevilla en 2009, recibe este año el premio Dilys Powell  a la excelencia en el cine   del circulo de críticos británicos

Nicolas Roeg

Nationality: British. Born: Nicolas Jack Roeg in London, 15 August 1928. Education: Mercers School. Family: Married 1) Susan Rennie Stephens; 2) actress Theresa Russell. Career: Junior at Marylebone

Nicolas Roeg

Nicolas Roeg

Studio, dubbing French films and making tea, from 1947; hired at MGM's Borehamwood Studios as part of camera crew on The Miniver Story, 1950; camera operator, from 1958; directed first feature (with Donald Cammell), Performance, 1970. Awards: Golden Palm, Cannes Film Festival, for Insignificance, 1985; Lifetime Achievement Award, British Independent Film Awards, 1999. NICOLAS

Films as Director:

1970  Performance (co-d, + ph)

1971 Walkabout (+ ph)

1973 Don't Look Now

1976 The Man Who Fell to Earth

1980 Bad Timing

1981 Dallas through the Looking Glass

1982 Eureka

1985  Insignificance

1986 Castaway

1987  Episode in Aria

1988 Track 29

1989 The Witches; Sweet Bird of Youth (for TV)

1992 Cold Heaven

1993 Heart of Darkness (for TV)

1995 Full Body Massage (for TV); Two Deaths

1996 Samson and Delilah (for TV)

Nicolas Roeg is a visual trickster who plays havoc with conventional screen narratives. Choosing an oblique storytelling formula, he riddles his plots with ambiguous characters, blurred genres, distorted chronologies, and open-ended themes to invite warring interpretations.

Even the most facile Roeg synopsis betrays alienation and incongruity, with characters getting caught in bewildering and hostile situations. His first effort, Performance (with co-director Donald Cammell) offers a dark look at the last days of a pursued gangster (James Fox) who undergoes a psychosexual identity change while hiding out with a has-been rock star (Mick Jagger). This psychedelic cornucopia of androgynous sex, violence, and Borges allusions blessed and cursed Roeg with the lingering label "cult director."

We had already been warned of Roeg's charming peculiarities during his cinematographer days. Such notable films as Far from the Madding Crowd and Fahrenheit 451 had odd, even anachronistic looks that sometimes ran contrary to the story proper. In fact, the latter film barely resembles Truffaut at all and looks more Roegish with its dreamy color schemes and chilly atmospherics.

Even Roeg's relatively tame second feature, Walkabout, based on a novel by James Vance Marshall, has narrative trap doors. Jarring cross-cuts, sensuous photography, and Edward Bond's enigmatic script are more satisfying to mystics than humanists. Marshall's novel is much more clear in its tale of two Australian children (Jenny Agutter and Lucien John) who get lost in the outback and are saved by an aborigine (David Gumpilil). Roeg's version is a more complex and fatalistic expose of people from separate cultures who have no hope of connecting.

Roeg flaunts a talent for shattering a relatively simple story into heady fragments with his adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's Don't Look Now. The tragedy of a couple (Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland) haunted in Venice by a psychic (Hilary Mason) claiming to communicate with their drowned daughter turns into something more than just a proto-Hitchcock thriller. As in most Roegian journeys, we emerge from Don't Look Now more discombobulated than we were at the start. Is the psychic a fraud? Is there foul play among the Venetian authorities? Could the occult implications be just a ruse? Roeg operates on a logic that is more visceral than intellectual. Instead of outright clues, we get recurrent shapes, sounds, colors, and gestures that belie a hidden order linking people and events.

Of all Roeg's work, The Man Who Fell to Earth is the most accomplished and de-centered. A space alien (David Bowie) arrives on Earth, starts a multi-million dollar enterprise and is later captured by a government-corporate collusion. What threatens to be another trite sci-fi plot becomes, in Roeg's hands, a visually stunning mental conundrum. All the continuity gaffes plaguing many an outer-space movie are here intentionally exacerbated to the point where we doubt that the "visitor" is really an alien at all. We see events mostly through the alien's abstruse viewpoint as days, months, years, even decades transpire sporadically and inconsistently. The story is a sleight-of-hand distraction that forces our attention more onto the transitory mood of loneliness and dissociation.

Unlike a purely experimental director who would flout story-lines altogether, Roeg retains the bare bones of old genres only to disfigure them. His controversial Bad Timing could easily have been an updated "Inner Sanctum" spin-off with its pathological lovers (Art Garfunkel and Theresa Russell) and the voyeuristic detective (Harvey Keitel) snooping for foul play. But the film unfolds with vignettes that tell us one thing and show another. Time and motive—the staples of mysteries—are so deviously jumbled that we can only resign ourselves to the Roeg motto that "nothing is what it seems."

Roeg's under-appreciated and least-seen Eureka starts out as an adventure about a Yukon prospector (Gene Hackman) who finds gold and becomes one of the world's richest men. But soon the story splinters into soap opera, romance, murder mystery, and even splatter film—a tortuous, visionary, frustrating, and ultimately mad epic.

Since Eureka, Roeg has been more skittish about re-entering the labyrinth. Films like Insignificance (about a night when the prototypes of Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, and Joe McCarthy meet) and Castaway (based on Lucy Irvine's ordeal with a lover on a deserted island) have shades of the older Roeg films but lack his gift for reckless lust. The "Twilight Zone" teasers reemerge somewhat in Track 29, where he teams with absurdist scriptwriter Dennis Potter in a tale about a woman beleaguered by a man her own age who claims to be her illegitimate son. Once more, Roeg treats us to another story about frustrated love and the fragile border between "reality" and hallucination.

The career of Nicolas Roeg has in recent years been in sad decline. By far his best work in this latter period was the made-for-television feature Heart of Darkness, a moody, shadowy adaptation of the famed Joseph Conrad novella. Cold Heaven is a muddled drama about a husband who may or may not have been killed in a grisly accident just as his wife is set to leave him.

Though a well-intentioned expose of the horror of war, Two Deaths, his 1994 film, shows no evidence of a return to form. It is set during a bloody conflict. Several aristocratic types sit in a room awaiting the start of a dinner party. They complain about trifling matters, while on the streets around them blood flows like the wine they will enjoy with their meal. All too obviously, before the night is over the violence outside will intrude on their lives, with much moralizing and sermonizing along the way. Roeg beats you over the head with unsubtle symbolism: the guests slurp down oysters while a woman bleeds to death outside, and he even uses the clichéd image of a dead dove.

—Joseph Lanza, updated by Rob Edelman