Nicolas Roeg: It's About Time... (David Thompson, 2015) HD 720p VOSI

[Dardo]

Nicolas Roeg:
"It's About Time..."
Director: David Thompson
Documentary - 28 June 2015 (UK)

“A film is a magical and mysterious combination of reality,
art, science and the supernatural as well as a gateway to the nature of time,
and perhaps even the first clue in solving the puzzle of what we’re doing in this world.”
Nicolas Roeg

IMDB

Arena presents the first major profile of the great British film director Nicolas Roeg as part of the BBC’s The Genius of British Cinema season. Apart from the occasional brief interview, Roeg has always preferred to let his films to speak for themselves. With unprecedented access Arena captured the director, now aged 86, in his London home, examining his unique vision of cinema and his films’ very special language and style.

Roeg’s films have been hugely influential in exploring the darkest aspects of human behaviour and for pushing conventional genres, from horror to fantasy, into new realms. They consistency question human identity and our comprehension of one another,from the terrifying and tragic Don’t Look Now to the violent and psychotic Performance starring Mick Jagger; from the Australian outback adventure Walkabout to David Bowie’s first major role in The Man Who Fell To Earth.

Nicolas Roeg began his film career at the bottom, working as teaboy in cutting rooms and later as a camera assistant at Borehamwood Studios. He was cameraman for the second unit on Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and then graduated to the role of director of photography. Working at first in black and white, he showed his early flair in the film adaptation of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker (1963) before revealing himself a master of colour in Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death (1964), Francois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and John Schlesinger’s Far From The Madding Crowd (1967).

Determined to make the step up to directing, he accepted the proposition of co-directing a film with screenwriter Donald Cammell, the legendary and still shocking Performance (1970), which proved to be a ‘gangster movie’ like no other. In telling its tale of muscle man Chas (James Fox) escaping into the enclosed world of a reclusive rock musician (Mick Jagger), the film is a heady brew of hallucinogenic imagery and dazzling editing, slipping constantly between the real and the surreal. It has now become a classic ‘cult’ film.

Shot in 1968, the film’s boldness gave Warner Brothers an attack of nerves, delaying the release of Performance for two years. By this time Roeg had begun his solo directing career with Walkabout (1970), an eerie tale about a pivotal encounter in Australia’s outback between two white schoolchildren and a young Aboriginal boy going through his initiation into manhood.

Its visual brilliance was immediately recognised, but even greater success followed with Roeg’s adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s horror story Don’t Look Now (1973), in which a married couple (played by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland) lose a daughter in a tragic accident but believe they may have re-discovered her in a wintry, sinister Venice. Don’t Look Now was recently voted by Time Out readers as the best British film of all time, and its power remains undiminished today. It also includes one of most notorious – and tender – sex scenes in the history of cinema.

With his status as a director of great vision now assured, Roeg’s films became even more bold and challenging. In The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), he avoided all the clichés of portraying an alien living in our midst through the casting of David Bowie in his finest screen role.

With the controversial and daring Bad Timing (1980), Roeg examined a tumultuous love affair in a totally unchronological structure, and in Eureka (1982), Gene Hackman plays a gold prospector who once struck rich but decades later is destroyed by rivals while his soul lives on in his free-spirited daughter. These last two films starred Roeg’s second wife and muse for many years, Theresa Russell.

While Roeg’s subsequent career often saw him adapting the work of others – Terry Johnson’s play Insignificance (1985), Dennis Potter’s Track 29 (1987), Roald Dahl’s The Witches (1989), Fay Weldon’s Puffball (2007) – he has always put his personal stamp on everything he does. His discovery at an early age of the manipulative power of editing has often led him to jumble standard chronology, and freely associate between images and ideas. He has taken great risks in casting, being unafraid to use ‘performers’ like Jagger, Bowie and Art Garfunkel rather than seasoned actors.

Mainly using Roeg’s own thoughts and perceptions as our guide, Nicolas Roeg: It’s About Time will explore connections across time and images and features contributions from some of the famous faces who worked with him, including Theresa Russell, Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, Jenny Agutter and directors Danny Boyle and Mike Figgis.

His films reject the conventions of literature and theatre that enslave so much of cinema, presenting a more subjective experience of how characters on screen think and feel. As Donald Sutherland remarks in Don’t Look Now, ‘nothing is as it seems.’

Datos Técnicos

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Capturas























Archivo Emule

BBC.Arena.2015.Nicolas.Roeg.Its.About.Time.720p.HDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org.mkv

@@ Subtítulos en inglés dentro del mkv.

Nicolás Roeg en DXC

Director
Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971) HD 720p VOSE
Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973) HD 720p Dual SE
El Hombre que cayó a la Tierra (1976) DVDRip VOSE + AE
Bad Timing (Nicholas Roeg, 1980) BDRip 720p VOSE
Eureka (Nicolas Roeg, 1983) DVDRip VOSE
Insignificance (Nicolas Roeg, 1985) BDRip VOSE
The Witches (Nicolas Roeg, 1990) DVDRip VOSI

Fotografía
Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut, 1966) DVDRip Dual SE
Far From the Madding Crowd (John Schlesinger, 1967) HD 720p Dual SE
La máscara de la muerte roja (Roger Corman, 1964) HD 720p Dual SE

[Dardo]

De este genial director siempre me ha fascinado su primera etapa, destacando sobre todo Walkabout, Don´t Look Now y Bad Timing, por tanto aprovecho para comentaros que en próximas fechas publicaré un BDRip 720p de Bad Timing y así completo el ciclo que tenía pensado dedicar al bueno de Roeg como director.

[ostrata]

Pues muchas gracias, Dardo. No he visto Bad Timing, así que genial.

Saludos.

[javisambo]

Aibalaostia!

Se me ha habia pasado, pero en cuento haga un hueco en la mula... me llevo.

Las capturas han sido determinantes en esta decisión. Siempre me ha fascinado este director y su obra

Muchas gracias Dardo

[Dardo]

Comentar también que también hay publicado un libro editado a finales de 2013 por Faber & Faber...

How many wannabe movie-makers would look to Nicolas Roeg for counsel? Roeg's career is a textbook example of the disasters that await the film director who aspires to be anything more than a hack. His debut picture, Performance – the best visual record we have of countercultural London – had its release delayed by two years, during which time the moneymen cut it to ribbons. The Man Who Fell to Earth was butchered for its US release, and Rank took its name off Bad Timing, so appalled was it by the picture's near necrophilic sex scenes. In the third of a century since that masterpiece, Roeg has struggled to find work – and little of what he has made has lived up to his early promise. Yet here he is in The World Is Ever Changing offering up what the blurb calls "the wealth of wisdom and experience he has garnered over 50 years of film-making".

Make that 60 years. Roeg came up the old way, starting out in the early 1950s as an MGM clapper boy, and working his way up the technical ladder – focus-puller, cameraman, editor… Like many old-school bosses he is properly proud of the fact that he never asks anyone to do anything he couldn't do himself. Indeed, for a director with such a singular style, Roeg is disarmingly certain that movies are team efforts or they are nothing. The closest he gets to sounding like the dictatorial martinet of Hollywood legend is when he compares making a film to making soup. The director is the person who decides whether it needs more salt.

Roeg's most distinctive seasoning was sprinkled at the casting stage. Having grasped from his long apprenticeship that "great screen acting is more often reacting than performing", he decided he didn't actually need to use trained pros. Performance was built around little more than the presence of Mick Jagger, Bad Timing around Art Garfunkel, and at one point The Man Who Fell to Earth was to have starred the novelist Michael Crichton. Subsequently of course, the part of alien spaceman stranded on Earth went to David Bowie. "Do you think," a worried suit asked Roeg, "his performance will be able to carry the film?" Roeg snorted: couldn't the guy see that since the alien was "pretending to be human" Bowie was a natural?

If only The World Is Ever Changing had a few more such insights. Alas, the bulk of the book does little more than prove that artists are rarely best placed to explicate their work. Roeg's analyses of Don't Look Now and Eureka make these magically allusive movies seem like moralistic potboilers. It's all rather baffling. You don't have to agree with Roeg's highfalutin suggestion that cinema might "hold clues to realities even bigger than Einstein or Darwin's theories" to see that his own movies suggest what it might be like to pierce the Kantian phenomenon.

That said, at least one admirer was distressed by all the mystical mumbo jumbo herein. We all know Roeg loves visual rhymes and synchronicities, the dazzling dialectic of image crashing into image on the editing bench. But away from the studio he finds similar thrills in the banality of coincidence. He makes much of the putatively "marvellous" fact that one of his heroes, Marcel Carné, entered the film industry the same year he was born. Elsewhere we learn that mirrors look at us as much as we look at them, that instead of shooing away a batty pensioner who bumped into him in a supermarket and told him she was a "past-life medium" he welcomed her into his home with open arms, and that Roeg is not only pals with Colin Wilson but also agrees with him when he says that "one day the sixth sense will become part of the purpose of life".

A better editor would have excised such nonsense, but there is little evidence that this book – by one of the movies' flashiest cutters – has been edited at all. At one point Roeg tells us that Lillian Hellman, whose Pentimento he planned to film, told him she thought "we'll get along great because I like the way you know the difference between 'perhaps' and 'maybe'". And maybe he does, though there is no perhaps about the thought that his book would have been better had this otiose story been edited out. And does Roeg's banal explication of the use of reversed footage in Walkabout (during which a slaughtered buffalo seems to come back to life) need to be related twice?

"Film," says Roeg, "can be more of a reality than a page with words can ever be." Since a page with words can take us inside someone else's head in just the way we inhabit our own I can't agree. On the other hand, who wouldn't prefer the reality of rewatching a Roeg classic than working their way through this mess of a book?

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/a ... ing-review

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 06126.html

[professor keller]

Gracias, Dardo. Ya hemos comentado en otro foro nuestra preferencia por el primer Roeg. No obstante, siempre me ha llamado la atención que Track 29 reciba tan poco atención cuando se habla de su "segundo período", porque, sin ser genial, es bastante consistente, y sin dudas muy superior a tostones suyos más considerados, como Castaway o Full Body Massage.

[Dardo]

Gracias, Dardo. Ya hemos comentado en otro foro nuestra preferencia por el primer Roeg. No obstante, siempre me ha llamado la atención que Track 29 reciba tan poco atención cuando se habla de su "segundo período", porque, sin ser genial, es bastante consistente, y sin dudas muy superior a tostones suyos más considerados, como Castaway o Full Body Massage.

Cierto que es una película que no conoce casi nadie, de hecho casi ni los seguidores del propio Roeg...

Yo tengo un DVD de imagen regulona que venía sin subs,

y que ví hace ya un tiempo y si es cierto que por momentos reconoces el cine más interesante de Roeg con pinceladas de las que para mí son sus mejores obras y marcan un poco su estilo, pero tengo el recuerdo que por momentos me hacía salirme de la historia y por eso quizás ese ritmo tan poco constante hace que la tuviese ya medio olvidada pero es cierto que de estos años está mejor que los otros truñacos que filmó.

Desconozco si hay algún tipo de subtítulos por la red pero en fin que igual me animo y hago también un DVDRip más que nada porque la gente que le interese pueda echarle un vistazo. Si sabes de subtítulos y demás pues me avisas

Aibalaostia!

Se me ha habia pasado, pero en cuento haga un hueco en la mula... me llevo.

Las capturas han sido determinantes en esta decisión. Siempre me ha fascinado este director y su obra

Muchas gracias Dardo

Las capturas siempre las hago pensando en la "manada"...

[professor keller]

y que ví hace ya un tiempo y si es cierto que por momentos reconoces el cine más interesante de Roeg con pinceladas de las que para mí son sus mejores obras y marcan un poco su estilo, pero tengo el recuerdo que por momentos me hacía salirme de la historia y por eso quizás ese ritmo tan poco constante hace que la tuviese ya medio olvidada pero es cierto que de estos años está mejor que los otros truñacos que filmó.

Esa es precisamente la idea: que al menos la película marca un intento de regresar a una narración más "Roeg", lo cual la hace más interesante que otras más convencionales pero fallidas, como la sobrevalorada Eureka. Coincido contigo en que no logra consolidar una buena película de todas maneras.

Que yo sepa no hay subs en ninguna lengua que conozca. Creo haber visto en rumano o algo así.

Edito: efectivamente hay subs en rumano. Tienen a su favor que son 600 líneas, por lo que podrían utilizarse como plantilla de tiempo para traducir de oído, aunque yo de momento no puedo hacerlo.

[Dardo]

Bueno pues si quieres dejamos el trabajo ahí apartado y si más adelante se puede hacemos unos subtítulos y rescatamos esta película tan desconocida de Roeg.

[WalterBurns]

Gracias por compartir este documental tan interesante.

[samourai_]

Muchas gracias.

[Cirlot]

Lo que más me sorprende es que los Roeguianos, entre los que me cuento, ignore, pasen por alto o directamente desconozcan la que, para mí, es la mejor película que hizo en su etapa posterior a Bad Timing (los últimos 25 años de su obra, vaya): la directamente maravillosa Two Deaths. Tengo un Dumbedé chapucero en 4/3 y sin subtítulos al que, de todas formas, haré un ripio un día de estos.