Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/25/22

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, October 25, 2022

Performance (Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg, 1970)

Performance (Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg, 1970)

Cast: James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, Michèle Breton, Johnny Shannon, Anthony Valentine, Ann Sidney, John Bindon, Stanley Meadows, Allan Cuthbertson, Anthony Morton. Screenplay: Donald Cammell. Cinematography: Nicolas Roeg. Art direction: John Clark. Film editing: Anthony Gibbs, John Smedley-Aston. Music: Jack Nitzsche.

I’m so used to seeing James Fox as a proper upperclass Brit in films like A Passage to India (David Lean, 1984) and The Remains of the Day (James Ivory, 1993) that it took me a while to identify him with the kinky gangster Chas he plays in Performance. In fact, it’s a role that writer and co-director Donald Cammell intended for Marlon Brando. But Fox, with his veneer of handsome self-assuredness, fits the film perfectly as the foil for MIck Jagger’s sybaritic rock star, Turner. It’s a film about outlaws from two worlds, the criminal Chas and the artist Turner coming together on the artist’s turf. It’s also a kind of Götterdämmerung for the swinging ‘60s, made during the ‘60s but held from release until the selfish ‘70s by a squeamish studio, its sex and nudity edited out but restored, at least partially, later. It’s visually and narratively challenging, with time- and place-switching editing to the point that it still provokes exegesis. It launched co-director and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg’s career, and it may have doomed Cammell’s. In short, it’s some kind of important film, but no one has ever been able to pin down exactly why. The very definition of a cult film.