This week we lost the cinematic master, Nicolas Roeg. The British auteur practically defined cinematic counterculture in the 1970s and his groundbreaking filmography includes David Bowie’s turned as a lonely alien in The Man Who Fell To Earth, Donald Sutherland’s searing, anguished performance in the unforgettable Don’t Look Now, and the mysterious parable of Walkabout. Variety had some words to share at Roeg’s passing…

Each film was a compelling, idiosyncratic tale with highly stylized performances — and beautiful, moody cinematography.

Roeg immediately hit again with his saga of the Australian outback, “Walkabout,” on which he again did double duty. As with “Performance,” the narrative was fractured, and it offered a certain mysticism that captivated arthouse audiences. The film starred Jenny Agutter and his son Luc as siblings abandoned in the desert by their father who are found by an Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) on his coming-of-age walkabout.

Two years later, in 1973, Roeg directed “Don’t Look Now,” with two major stars, Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, in the leads. This occult story set in Venice was perhaps his most fully realized and moody thriller, though it never reached a mass audience as it was overshadowed by “The Exorcist” in the year of its release.

…Roeg used Bowie’s alien persona to good effect in “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” another odd but satisfying film about a visitor from another planet. Based on a 1963 science fiction novel about an extraterrestrial stranded on Earth, it co-starred Candy Clark, Buck Henry and Rip Torn and competed at the Berlin Film Festival. When Paramount’s Barry Diller saw the finished film, he reportedly refused to pay for it and it was released independently, later becoming a cult classic and staple of repertory cinema.

Here’s a review of Performance that I published in my newspaper column earlier this year…

With the recent passing of The Rolling Stones’ muse Anita Pallenberg, this week’s screening of the cult classic Performance at the Belcourt Theatre’s Music City Monday event couldn’t be more timely. Pallenberg, Mick Jagger and James Fox are all featured in this countercultural crime drama that finds a wounded mobster holing-up in the decaying mansion of a reclusive rock star and the ladies who share his bed. This scenario finds Performance delivering on all of its sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll promise, but the movie continues to find new viewers because of its dazzling photography and editing, its inventive use of sound and its deeper examining of the links between artistic performance, madness and identity.

Chas (James Fox) is an enforcer for an East London gang. Chas uses his penchant for cruelty and violence to intimidate and coerce anyone who threatens the business of his boss, Harry Flowers. But when Chas winds up on the wrong side of Flowers’ favor, he finds himself on the run from the gang he used to call his own. Chas colors his hair, assumes a new name and ends up hiding out in the decadent abode of a washed-up rock star named Turner (Mick Jagger). At first Chas is put-off by the perverse, bohemian lifestyle and free love values Turner shares with his bisexual housemates Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michelle Breton). But little by little, Turner and Chas start to influence and mirror one another in a surreal face-off, pitting Chas’ traditional tough guy masculinity against Turner’s androgynous, theatrical persona.

Lots of movies from the 1960s are still labeled “lurid” or “wild” because they caused scandals when they were released half a century ago during those days of cultural revolution. That said, many of those films – Blow Up comes to mind – now seem coyly charming with their peeks of nudity and hints at forbidden desires. Performance, on the other hand, seems thoroughly preoccupied with sex and violence, and the editing of the sights and sounds in the film’s famous opening sequence alone confuses every wince, groan, slap and caress into a montage of sensations that still seems as intense and skanky as the best Keith Richards solos.

In its original form, Donald Cammell wrote Performance as a comedic romp – a lighthearted look at London counterculture in the swinging ’60s. But under the influence of the work of Agentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges and the theatrical philosophies of Antonin Artaud, Cammell’s drafts of the screenplay grew increasingly darker. Warner Bros. was originally hoping to get The Rolling Stones version of The Beatles’ A Hard Days Night (1964), and one might argue that the milieu at Turner’s pad seems a lot like the one the British tabloid press captured during The Rolling Stones’ infamous “girl in the rug” drug bust at Keith Richards’ country estate in 1967 – the year before Performance was produced. When Warner Bros. got Cammell and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg’s (the pair are credited as co-directors) finished product, they demanded changes. A deft Cammell supervised edits to satisfy the studio while also making the overall feel of the film even more hallucinatory. After threatening to shelve the movie, Warner Bros. eventually released the film in 1970 when it quickly became a cult phenomenon. The movie is now regarded as one of the most influential and innovative British films of all time.

Warner Bros. was also hoping the Performance soundtrack would comprise a new album by The Rolling Stones, but rumors that Mick Jagger’s sex scenes with Anita Pallenberg were anything but play acting drove a wedge between the singer and Pallenberg’s then-boyfriend Keith Richards. However, this Music City Mondays pick comes along with a soundtrack full of nuggets featuring contributions by Randy Newman, Ry Cooder, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Lowell George and composer Jack Nitzche. Merry Clayton might be best known for her standout singing on The Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter,” and her vibrant vocals adorn three tracks here alongside the lone Stones contribution, “Memo from Turner.”

Performance is a chestnut of psychedelic ’60s cinema, but unlike the usual exploitation fare of the era, it’s a sophisticated examination of self-perception and self-expression through the lens of sex and drugs. The movie hits high gear by the time Chas becomes part of the scene at Turner’s mansion, which is almost literally a house of mirrors where Chas lies about being a juggler before the influences of Turner, Pherber and Lucy slowly start pulling at the loose ends of the gangster’s identity.

Here’s Jarvis Cocker interviewing Roeg about The Man Who Fell to Earth back in 2013…

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After some recent posts about the Summer of Love, Brian Jones, Anita Pallenberg, and Swinging London this video caught my eye while I was working on sprucing up my YouTube Channel. You could paint a pretty full picture of the Summer of Love and the culture it inspired just looking at drugs and the Vietnam War. Of course drugs and war were nothing new in 1967, and LSD and marijuana were just the latest forms of mind-expansion for the contemporaneous iterations of humanities most ancient poets, philosophers, visionaries and mystics.

In The Archaic Revival, Terence McKenna wrote:

And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are.

Here’s a trippy documentary tracing human appetites for altered states from the Dawn of Man to the present…

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A few years ago I stumbled across this biopic about The Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones: Stoned tells the story about the British rockers with an eye on their multi-instrumentalist and original leader. Before Mick and Keith became the Glimmer Twins, The Rolling Stones were Brian’s band. The story goes that Brian got deep into drugs before he was unable to call upon his preternatural musical talents in the recording studio. Add to Jones’ decline the emergence of Mick and Keith as an original songwriting team, and Keith’s stealing Brian’s girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, and maybe it wasn’t very surprising that Brian Jones was found dead in his swimming pool after he was fired from the band.

Here are a few words from the Wiki…

Original Rolling Stones bass guitarist Bill Wyman said of Jones, “He formed the band. He chose the members. He named the band. He chose the music we played. He got us gigs. … he was very influential, very important, and then slowly lost it – highly intelligent – and just kind of wasted it and blew it all away.”

At around midnight on the night of 2–3 July 1969, Jones was discovered motionless at the bottom of his swimming pool at Cotchford Farm. His Swedish girlfriend, Anna Wohlin, was convinced Jones was alive when he was taken out of the pool, insisting he still had a pulse. However, by the time the doctors arrived it was too late and he was pronounced dead. The coroner’s report stated “death by misadventure” and noted his liver and heart were heavily enlarged by drug and alcohol abuse.

Here’s the thing: Stoned is a conspiracy movie at heart:

Stoned, also known as The Wild and Wycked World of Brian Jones in the UK, is a 2005 film about Brian Jones, one of the founding members of The Rolling Stones. The film explores the idea that Jones was murdered by Frank Thorogood, a builder hired to renovate Jones’s Cotchford Farm in East Sussex. The film also illuminates Jones’s use of alcohol and drugs, and his relationship with Anita Pallenberg.

Anita Pallenberg’s passing on June 13, makes Stoned‘s YouTube presence timelessly timely. Here’s Stoned…

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Today we celebrate the 1944 birthday of model, actress and Rolling Stones’ muse Anita Pallenberg. Pallenberg was Brian Jones’ girlfriend before he destroyed himself with drugs and she hooked-up with Keith, during which time she filmed the infamous love scenes in Performance with Mick Jagger.

Performance is a landmark psycho/sexual/crime drama masterpiece by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg. Here’s the Wiki…

On its release the film received mixed reviews. Most reviewers focused on the graphic sexual elements. One reviewer (Richard Schickel) described it as “the most completely worthless film I have seen since I began reviewing.” In the late 1970s and 1980s, Performance gradually acquired a cult following on the late night and repertory cinema circuits. By the 1990s, the film had undergone a critical reappraisal. In 1995 Performance appeared at number 30 in a Time Out magazine “all-time greats” poll of critics and directors.[4] After Cammell’s death in 1996, the film’s reputation grew still further. It is often cited as a classic of British cinema.

In the September–October 2009 issue of Film Comment, Mick Jagger’s Turner was voted the best performance by a musician in a film.[5]

In his 15-hour documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Mark Cousins says: “Performance was not only the greatest seventies film about identity, if any movie in the whole Story of Film should be compulsory viewing for film makers, maybe this is it.”

Here’s the best version of Performance I could find on YouTube. NSFW…

Stay Awake!

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