Roeg's Gallery

On 30 July 2007, two giants of European cinema, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, died on the same day. Around last weekend, two more great European film directors (I’d never brand Roeg an English filmmaker, that sounds so… provincial) passed away. Nicholas Roeg died on Friday 23 and Bernardo Bertolucci on Monday 26 November.

Both directed a run of extraordinary films in the 1970s (what was it with the seventies when every director from Altman to Scorsese and Ashby to Weir directed a string of great films, then lost the plot?). Bertolucci made The Conformist, The Spider's Stratagem, Last Tango in Paris and 1900. Roeg directed Performance, Walkabout, Don't Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth. Both directors were true originals and irreplaceable. (I've written previously about Roeg, see link below.)

Roeg Gallery from top to bottom: Performance (1970), Walkabout (1971), Don't Look Now (1973), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Bad Timing (1980) and The Witches (1990).

Previously on Barnflakes: 
Top 10 British Film Directors
Skinny dipping in the movies

Elsewhere on the web:
17 rare times when a director made five or more great films in a row

Top ten RIPs in January 2016

1. David Bowie (musician)
2. Jacques Rivette (film director)
3. Terry Wogan (broadcaster)
4. Alan Rickman (actor)
5. Vilmos Zsigmond (cinematographer)
6. Glenn Frey (musician)
7. Frank Armitage (animator)
8. Robert Stigwood (film producer)
9. Black (musician)
10. Peter Powell (kite maker)

God, can we move onto February, please (there’s also all these)? Thanks.

Previously on Barnflakes:
Last of the legends

R.I.P. H.R. Giger, 1940-2014

RIP Lou Reed, 1942-2013

I love Lou Reed so I'm very sad to hear this news. The Velvet Underground are probably my favourite band ever; the meeting of Reed and Cale far more exciting than (say) the meeting of Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards. I love Reed's solo stuff too; I was listening to New York just the other day, and even like his collaboration with Metallica, Lulu. Anyway, another legend gone.

Previously on Barnflakes:
Last of the Legends
Top ten male singers
Nico's top ten lovers
The Velvet Underground Live 1972 & 1993

RIP Stefan 'Nagra' Kudelski, 1929-2013

Bit of a late one this, but I've just found out Stefan Kudelski, the man who invented the Nagra series of audio recorders, died last Saturday aged 83. The Polish Kudelski invented the portable reel-to-reel recording machine whilst studying engineering at a Swiss university in 1951. Nagra is Polish for "will record". It was the Nagra III (above), created in 1958, which revolutionised audio film recording at the same time film cameras were becoming cheaper and more lightweight with the development of 16mm film. This combination was seized upon by French New Wave auteurs such as Godard and Truffaut and documentary filmmakers including DA Pennebaker, who used the Nagra in his classic Dylan documentary Dont Look Back.

The Nagra became obsolete in the 1990s with the introduction of DAT tapes followed by digital recording. I used a Nagra at film school in the first year but by the second year we'd got a few DAT recorders, which were admittedly a lot easier to use. Needless to say, Nagras are now highly collectible, a quick look on eBay reveals several selling for hundreds of pounds. Even if they do look a bit like a tank, they are beautiful machines.

RIP Nagisha Oshima, 1932-2013

Nothing that is expressed is obscene. What is obscene is what is hidden.
– Nagisha Oshima

At work on Friday we were talking about Oshima's most famous, or rather infamous film, 1976's Ai No Corrida (no, we don't just talk football and sex, though the film, translated as In the Realm of the Senses, contains plenty of the latter). I first saw the film with my brother in a double bill with Woman of the Dunes in the old Everyman Cinema in Hampstead. I was about 18 years old, my brother only 14. We had no idea what to expect (we went there mainly for Woman of the Dunes); certainly not a relentlessly sexually explicit exploration of obsession which makes Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972) look like a CBBC production. We emerged from the cinema speechless, mortified and quite possibly blushing profusely. (I was about the say it remains the only time I've seen hardcore pornography (cunningly disguised as art) in a public cinema but then I remembered seeing Thundercrack (nowhere near art), equally sexually relenting, though at least it has some jokes.)

The Japanese director Nagisa Oshima died last week on 15 January, aged 80, in a career spanning fifty years which included films and TV documentaries. His early films exposed the conservatism of Japanese society and politics in which he borrowed stylistic innovations from the French New Wave to suggest the sweeping away of the old order. But it was In the Realm of the Senses which immediately caused worldwide controversy, featuring unsimulated sex, strangulation and castration (sorry for the spoiler). 1978's Empire of Passion was a less explicit Ai No Corrida, and won the best director prize at Cannes. Oshima's most commercial hit and his first in English, Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983), was set in a Japanese prison camp and featured David Bowie and Tom Conti. Oshima's most bizarre and Bunuelian film (notably featuring several Bunuel collaborators) was the 1986 Max, Mon Amour starring Charlotte Rampling and her lover, a chimpanzee (the DVD states it's 'the greatest ape romance since King Kong', obviously not having seen Thundercrack).

In his last years Oshima worked as a translator, translating into Japanese books including John Gray's hugely popular Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. A suitable coda to Ai No Corrida, perhaps.

RIP Chris Marker, 1921-2012

Experimental French filmmaker Chris Marker died a few days ago on his 91st birthday, 29 July. Though he made dozens of films – or film essays – he is most famous for his influential post-apocalyptic time travel cinepoem, La Jetée* (made in 1962), loosely remade by Terry Gilliam as 12 Monkeys (and films such as Inception sharing some common themes). Composed mainly of black and white still images, I remember watching La Jetée at the cinema for the first time many years ago and being mesmerized by it; in particular the only few seconds of moving footage: a woman waking up in bed, opening her eyes (apparently Marker could only borrow a moving film camera for one afternoon). The sudden few seconds of moving footage after all the still images struck me as the art house equivalent of the universe exploding in a blockbuster sci-fi film.

Notoriously private, where he was born remains a mystery and only a few photos of him exist; for publications requesting a picture of him he would supply a photo of a cat. Other notable films by Marker include Sans Soleil (which comes with La Jetée on DVD, a nice introduction to the man's work), AK, Les Astronautes (made with Walerian Borowczyk) and A Grin with a Cat.

*The film has been partly ruined by an ex, who tends to hold no reverence for art house films. She breezed past whilst I was watching it on DVD, and asked why the man (pictured above) had a bra over his eyes. She's also made similar insensitive – but quite amusing – comments about other art house films.

RIP Kaneto Shindô, 1912-2012

A late RIP this, for Japanese film director Kaneto Shindô who died a few weeks ago (May 29), a month after his 100th birthday (on April 22). Born 1912, he directed some 48 films and wrote 238 scripts in a career lasting sixty years (his final film as director was last year's Postcard). He directed films in all genres throughout his long career. When asked in an interview last year by actor Benicio Del Toro what was the most important thing he had learnt from his mentor, the Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi, Shindô replied 'never give up'.

Shindô's most famous film and one of my all-time favourites is Onibaba, made in 1964, the same year as the similarly-themed and just as extraordinary The Woman of the Dunes. In equal parts chilling and erotic, Onibaba is a tale of sexual jealousy with two women, a mother and her daughter-in-law, who make a living by killing passing samurai warriors and selling their armour and weapons. When the mother uses a demon mask to scare her daughter-in-law from her lover, she finds the mask stuck to her face. Set in medieval, rural Japan, and based on a Buddhist parable, the film is notable for its sumptuous black and white photography, constant rustling sounds of the reeds and symbolism – holes, masks – Freud could have written a book about.

• The BFI are currently showing a season of films by Kaneto Shindô and his close collaborator Kozaburo Yoshimura.

Recent RIPs

T.S. Eliot may have written that April is the cruelest month, but it looks like May to me: (clockwise from top left) Adam Yauch, aka MCA of the Beastie Boys, Donna Summer, Robin Gibb and Maurice Sendak.

RIP Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

This is very sad news. I remember first using Apple Macs at college in the early 1990s, but it wasn't until the late 1990s that I used them professionally. Since then I've owned numerous Macs, and currently have two, along with two iPods and an iPhone. For better or worse, I now can't imagine a world without Apple. I've never owned a PC and never willingly used one. Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple and its charismatic leader, will be sorely missed.

RIP Cy Twombly, 1928-2011

Cy Twombly, painter and sculptor, died early last week.

RIP Clarence Clemons, 1942-2011

Goodbye to The Big Man who died yesterday aged 69.

… I was away at the time so didn't mention the death of another great black musician, Gil Scott-Heron, who died last month aged 62.

RIP Captain Beefheart, 1941-2010

'Music to dematerialise the catatonia'; cover of the 1969 surreal masterpiece Trout Mask Replica. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, has died in California, aged 69. Though he sold few records, his influence on other musicians was immense, his increasingly experimental avant-garde rock expanding the parameters of what rock music can be.

In 1982 he gave up music and moved to the Mojave desert to concentrate on his painting and drawing, becoming reclusive. He died from complications of multiple sclerosis.

I'm almost ashamed to admit I've only got two of his albums: Safe as Milk and Trout Mask Replica (which I got last week). Though only two years apart, they sound worlds apart. Safe as Milk (1967) is (almost) traditional rhythm and blues (surreal, psychedelic-sixties, California-style), with a young Ry Cooder playing slide guitar; whereas Trout Mask Replica (1969) is… unclassifiable. I'm not even sure it's music.

Another musical legend gone.

RIP Arthur Penn, 1922-2010

Arthur Penn, American film director, died 28 September. Pictured: The Missouri Breaks; Mickey One; Little Big Man; Bonnie and Clyde; The Chase and Night Moves.

I haven't mentioned the passing of another favourite director, Claude Chabrol, French suspense master, who died 12 September this year, aged 80.