WHO is he?
British cinematographer and film director who has made over 15 feature films since the early seventies. Roeg started out as a cinematographer for A-list director David Lean and B-movie maker Roger Corman before starting to direct films himself. His film Insignificance won the Grand Technical Prize in the Cannes Film Festival in 1985.
WHAT are his films about?
Themes
Roeg’s best films engage directly with traditional genres like crime, horror and thriller, but go on to deconstruct them by undercutting their inherent assumptions and ideology. They deal with the ideas of synthetic nature of identities, the persisting ill influence of colonialism, the inescapable dead weight of history and the kinship of sex and death. The characters in these films attempt to leave behind their past, only to witness its return in unrepressed form wherein insecurities and traumas of the past are given material form and become threatening to the present.
Style
Roeg’s films are characterised by episodic narratives in which disparate threads are spliced together in a kind of Cubist, disjunctive fashion that builds up to a meaning only later in the film. Thoughts are externalised and sound is mixed non-realistically. The editing, though abrupt and rough-edged, is thematically and emotionally associative, and rhymes movement, sensation and compositional elements of otherwise unrelated shots. The contrapuntal approach is also mirrored in the use of soundtrack in which the audio, instead of reinforcing the images, is unhinged from them.
WHY is he of interest?
It would not be unjust to say that Roeg’s early films embody the non-conformist spirit of the seventies and embody the era’s preoccupation with non-ironically deconstructing classical forms. His frenzied editing patterns and use of music serve as a bridge between the niche works of underground cinema and the increasingly experimental mainstream moviemaking and foreshadow the style of music videos that would proliferate in the subsequent decade.
WHERE to discover him?
Co-directed with Donald Cammell, Performance (1970) follows a young, smug hitman who is forced to go on the run after a murder and take refuge in a washed-out musician’s studio. Edited in a nervous, staccato rhythm and scored to an avant-garde soundtrack, the film is a descent down the unconscious in which characters meld into each other and their socially constructed sexual identities crumble to reveal what sexuality has always been — a performance.
