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…
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