: Directores: Nicholas Roeg
Pues a mi es un realizador que me encanta, francamente interesante. Me gustaron bastante performance y el hombre que cayo a la tierra. Y que maravillosa y magistral pelicula es amenaza en la sombra, con mi adorada y maravillosa Julie Christie y el gran Donald Shuterland. Magnifica pelicula que para mi es su mejor pelicula y que creo escuela, influyendo en muchas peliculas como el exorcista o la profecia. Las ultimas quizas han bajado un tanto el liston, aunque Eureka estaba curiosa sin mas.
En lineas generales, un magnifico realizador que espero que vuelva por sus buenos fueros, que son los primeros.
Re: Directores: Nicholas Roeg
Me alegra que traigas a debate una de mis peliculas favoritas.
Amenaza en la sombra tiene para mi gusto una de las atmosferas insanas mejor conseguidas sin necesidad de enseñarte nada explicitamente. El montaje del principio me parece simplemente soberbio, y algunas escenas de Venecia me resultan absolutamente terrorificas, nunca pensé hasta que vi este film que las calles de la "ciudad del amor" pudieran a llegar a resultar tan inquietantes.
Esa atmosfera tambien la encuentro presente en El hombre que cayo a la Tierra, pero en menor medida...
Re: Directores: Nicholas Roeg
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Empezó como director de fotografía en films como "La máscara de la muerte roja" de Roger Corman o "Farenheit 451" de François Truffautt
Y fue despedido por David Lean de Doctor Zhivago: click.
Saludos.
Re: Directores: Nicholas Roeg
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Iniciado por Screepers
Entre ellas una gran pieza de suspense psicológico a rescatar urgentemente: Amenaza en la sombra (1973).
Don't Look Now es excelente, pero te has saltado su obra maestra: Walkabout (1971). Este film fue elegido a principios de los noventa por un panel de críticos australianos como la mejor película de su país de todos los tiempos.
La primera vez que la ví en España, en la primera sesión, salí y entré para verla en la de tarde y salí y entré para verla en la de noche. Y porque no la ponían más veces, que sino la veo otra vez.
Es una de las pocas películas experimentales (Persona puede ser otra) que no ha perdido ni un ápice de interés en todos estos años. El diálogo es mínimo, pero las imágenes explican todo con una fuerza que a veces asusta.
Como siempre, Criterion tiene una edición impresionante de la película. No sé quién las selecciona en esta casa, pero su gusto es impecable.
P.D. El nombre del director es Nicolas Roeg.
Re: Directores: Nicolas Roeg
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Entre ellas una gran pieza de suspense psicológico a rescatar urgentemente: Amenaza en la sombra (1973)
Hace tres años la pasmos en un ciclo de cine parapsicológico en el Aula de Cine EPSA y encantó al público. Siempre la consideré como una de las películas más extrañas de su género, con un desenlace que te deja atónito.
[spoiler:3ac6a8fdaa]Ese enano no se olvida jamás, ni la manera tan eficaz con que manejaba el cuchillo...[/spoiler:3ac6a8fdaa]
Re: Directores: Nicolas Roeg
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En cuanto a la música de Barry, que luego se autoplagiaría en Memorias de África, es muy buena, pero mejor todavía es la fotografía del propio director.
Hay muchísimas diferencias entre la composición de Barry para una y otra, de autoplagio nada. (en cualquier caso "estilo") En "Walkabout" Barry hace un uso prodigioso de las voces como creadoras de misterio, partitura mucho más sutil, menos tendente a la espectacularidad...También más fiel a su estilo de finales de los sesenta
Re: Directores: Nicolas Roeg
"Don´t Look Now" es una auténtica joya, que perfectamente podría haber firmado el maestro Hitchcock (no en vano se basa en un relato de Daphne Du Maurier -"Los Pájaros"/"Rebeca"-).
Una verdadera delicia de película, que seguro que también gustó mucho a Brian De Palma :)) .
Re: Directores: Nicolas Roeg
Don't Look Now es una maravilla, cómo establece la desazón y la sensación de que algo va muy mal en el entorno que te rodea. Comparable en ese sentido a The Wicker Man. Por cierto, dos películas de la misma época y productora, que luego el productor Michael Deeley (luego colaborador de Ridley Scott) intentó relegar al olvido por no confiar en sus posibilidades. :apaleao
Re: Directores: Nicolas Roeg
Aqui otro admirador de DONT LOOK NOW.
Esa Venecia podrida, ese polvazo de la Christie (q se lo pega, y como, con Sutherland) y ese escalofriante final. Atmosfera malsana, terror realista. Y musica de Pino Donaggio (por el q citaba a De Palma).
Alguna edicion decente (y con subt) en dvd, por cierto ?
Re: Directores: Nicolas Roeg
Está claro que tenemos opiniones diferentes sobre esta película y, sospecho, sobre el cine en general. Eso está bien. Pero hay un punto que me ha sorprendido. Se trata de este párrafo:
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Iniciado por lacollectionneuse
Yo no hago alusión a la popularidad de estas obras, sino a los testimonios y análisis que a posteriori se han ido recopilando en los libros o enciclopedias que versan sobre la Historia del cine. Tarea ardua la de encontrar alguna de ellas en los que se cite "Walkabout". En cambio "Persona" se reseña en todas ellas.
Si te refieres a la crítica actual, puedo darte la opinión de tres o cuatro fuentes contrastadas. Son sólo opiniones, pero leídas por millones de personas en todo el mundo.
Primero, lo que opina Roger Ebert, al que supongo conocerás, dentro de su libro Great Movies (las 100 mejores películas de la historia):
Walkabout (1971)
Roger Ebert / April 13, 1997
Is ``Walkabout'' only about what it seems to be about? Is it a parable about noble savages and the crushed spirits of city dwellers? That's what the film's surface seems to suggest, but I think it's also about something deeper and more elusive: The mystery of communication. It ends with lives that are destroyed, in one way or another, because two people could not invent a way to make their needs and dreams clear.
Nicolas Roeg's film, released in 1971, was hailed as a masterpiece. Then it disappeared into oblivion, apparently because of quarrels over ownership, and was not seen for years; Premiere magazine put it first on its list of films that should be available on video but were not. In 1996 a new theatrical version restored five minutes of nudity that had been trimmed from the original release; that director's cut is now available on video.
The movie takes its title from a custom among the Australian aborigines: During the transition to young manhood, an adolescent aborigine went on a ``walkabout'' of six months in the outback, surviving (or not) depending on his skills at hunting, trapping and finding water in the wilderness.
The film opens in the brick and concrete canyons of Sydney, where families live stacked above one another in condominiums. We glimpse moments in the lives of such a family--a housewife listens to a silly radio show, two children splash in a pool, and on a balcony their father drinks a cocktail and looks down moodily at them. There is something subtly wrong with the family, but the film doesn't articulate it, apart from a suggestive shot of a bug that does not belong indoors. In the next scene, we see the father and children driving into the trackless outback in a wheezy Volkswagen. They're on a picnic, the children think, until their father starts shooting at them. The 14-year-old girl (Jenny Agutter) pulls her 6-year-old brother (Luc Roeg) behind a ridge, and when they look again their father has shot himself and the car is on fire.
Civilization, we gather, has failed him. Now the girl and boy face destruction at the hands of nature. They have the clothes they are wearing, a battery-operated radio, and whatever food and drink is in the picnic hamper. They wander the outback for a number of days (the film is always vague about time), and stumble upon an oasis with a pool of muddy water. Here they drink and splash and sleep, and in the morning the pool is dry. At about this time they realize that a solemn young aborigine (David Gulpilil) is regarding them.
They need saving. He saves them. He possesses secrets of survival, which the film reveals in scenes of stark, unforced beauty. We see the youth spearing wild creatures, and finding water in the dry pool with the use of a hollow reed. He treats the child's sunburn with a natural salve. Some of the outback scenes--including one where the youth spears a kangaroo--are intercut with quick flashes of a butcher shop. Man's nature remains unchanged across many platforms.
There is an unmistakable sexual undercurrent: Both teenagers are in the first years of heightened sexual awareness. The girl still wears a school uniform that the camera regards with subtle suggestiveness. (An ambiguous earlier shot suggests that the father has an unwholesome awareness of his daughter's body.) The restored footage includes a sequence showing the girl swimming naked in a pool, and scenes of the aborigine indicate he is displaying his manliness for her to appreciate.
These developments are surrounded by scenes of implacable, indifferent--but beautiful--nature. Roeg was a cinematographer before he became a director (he co-directed the Mick Jagger film ``Performance'' in 1969 before this first solo outing). His camera here shows the creatures of the outback: lizards, scorpions, snakes, kangaroos, birds. They are not photographed sentimentally. They make a living by eating other things.
Aboriginal culture has a less linear sense of time than that of a clock-bound society, and the time line of the movie suggests that. Does everything happen exactly in the sequence it is shown? Does everything even happen at all? Are some moments imagined? Which of the characters imagines them? These questions lurk around the edges of the story, which is seemingly simple: The three young travelers survive in the outback because of the aborigine's skills. And communication is a problem, although more for the girl than for her little brother, who seems to have a child's ability to cut straight through the language to the message.
There's one tantalizing scene where the travelers actually pass close to a settlement; the aborigine sees it, but does not lead the others to the top of a rise where they could see it, too. Is he hiding it from them? Or does he not understand why they would be seeking it? (The film gives us no information about the aborigine's background--not even whether he has ever had any contact with modern civilization.) There's a haunting scene where they explore an abandoned farmhouse; she cries while looking at some photographs, and he watches her carefully as she does so. And finally a scene where the aborigine paints himself in tribal designs and performs a dance that can be interpreted as courtship. The girl is not interested, and the gulf between the two civilizations is not bridged.
What should we have been hoping for, given the conditions of the story? That the girl and her brother learn to embrace a lifestyle that is more organically rooted in nature? That the aborigine learn from them about a world of high-rises and radios? That the two teenagers make love as a sort of symbol of universality, before returning to their separate spheres?
I think the film is neutral about such goals. Like its lizards that sit unblinking in the sun, it has no agenda for them. It sees the life of civilization as arid and unrewarding, but only easy idealism allows us to believe that the aborigine is any happier, or his life more rewarding (the film makes a rather unpleasant point of the flies constantly buzzing around him).
Nicolas Roeg does not subscribe to pious sentimental values; he has made that clear in the quarter-century since ``Walkabout,'' in a series of films that have grown curiouser and curiouser. In ``Don't Look Now,'' ``The Man Who Fell to Earth,'' ``Insignificance,'' ``Track 29,'' ``Bad Timing'' and other films, many of them starring his wife, Theresa Russell, he has shown characters trapped inside their own obsessions and fatally unable to communicate with others; all sexual connections are perverse, damaging or based on faulty understandings.
In ``Walkabout,'' the crucial detail is that the two teenagers can never find a way to communicate, not even by using sign language. Partly this is because the girl feels no need to do so: Throughout the film she remains implacably middle-class and conventional, and she regards the aborigine as more of a curiosity and convenience than a fellow spirit. Because not enough information is given, we cannot attribute her attitude to racism or cultural bias, but certainly it reveals a vast lack of curiosity. And the aborigine, for his part, lacks the imagination to press his case--his sexual desires--in any terms other than the rituals of his people. When that fails, he is finished, and in despair.
The movie is not the heartwarming story of how the girl and her brother are lost in the outback and survive because of the knowledge of the resourceful aborigine. It is about how all three are still lost at the end of the film--more lost than before, because now they are lost inside themselves instead of merely adrift in the world.
The film is deeply pessimistic. It suggests that we all develop specific skills and talents in response to our environment, but cannot easily function across a broader range. It is not that the girl cannot appreciate nature or that the boy cannot function outside his training. It is that all of us are the captives of environment and programming: That there is a wide range of experiment and experience that remains forever invisible to us, because it falls in a spectrum we simply cannot see.
También la opinion de Halliwell’s Film & Video Guide:
Eerily effectivecontrast of city with native life, a director’s and photographer’s experimental success.
La guía le otorga cuatro estrellas sobre cuatro (máxima clasificación), sólo otorgada en 1971 a French Connection y The Last Picture Show.
O la crítica que hizo la web independiente The Dual Lens en 2003:
Walkabout
Reviewed by Ian Whitney
Suggested by Davin Lagerroos
Set in the harsh outback of Australia, a place largely barren of civilization, technology or people, Walkabout is, surprisingly, a film about systems, organization and communication. Using a premise that could quickly turn into an outback version of The Incredible Journey, in which languageless animals triumph over all odds, Nicolas Roeg’s mellow, sexual and beautiful film gives its characters language but makes it useless, part of a barrier that no one can overcome.
Roeg, whose films create unfamiliar landscapes out of the everyday— a science-fiction of the present—begins with a Sydney bound by bricks and traffic patterns and a soundtrack of gibberish singing. From here, he slides around a brick wall to reveal Australia’s brutal interior, suggesting the border between the two is mostly imaginary, only a fragile, suburban Hadrian’s wall.
Within Sydney we’re introduced to young boy (Luc Roeg, the director’s son), his teenaged sister (Jenny Agutter) and their parents along with Roeg’s take on the Western system, full of nonsense and rules, valuing useless knowledge—the constant gibberish spewing out of the radio is the film’s comic relief—over experience. Once the children end up alone in the outback, their “knowledge” doesn’t help them much—we should eat salt because our uncle might have once said to eat salt in the desert!
Fortunately their desert survival skills become unimportant after they meet a young Aboriginal man (David Gulpilil) on his walkabout, which the film explains is the Aborigine passage to manhood. The man’s knowledge comes entirely from experience, and the experience of the hundreds of generations before him, and is perfect for the environment; how to hunt a kangaroo, how to start a fire, how to find water. But outside of his obvious survival skills, his behavior is a total mystery to the teenage daughter. He’s not made Angelic—Roeg loves scenes of him clubbing kangaroos to death—he’s simply pragmatic in comparison to the kids’ culture of absurdity. He’s certainly in a better position than the Aborigines who make cheap, racist Australian knick-knacks.
If Western society via Sydney is made nonsensical by Roeg, then man’s systems of thought are equally incomprehensible. Roeg uses several matched cuts to link Aboriginal experiences to western ones; each group has its ways of working with the world and each group is incapable of understanding the other. Despite this equality, the film still feels like it honors the “mysterious” nature of Aboriginal life is while dismissing Western life as purely nonsensical. A Western death is horrific and bizarre, an Aboriginal death (if it is a death, I’m a bit unclear) is mysterious and honorable.
Still, Roeg goes farther than many who practice the “noble savage” line of thought. The man is never portrayed as lacking, never says anything like, “stupid whitefella.” The story is more a meeting of two incompatible worlds, bridges of experience that are impossible to cross, even as common sexual desires pull them together. In an essay on the film Roger Ebert says:
The film sees the life of civilization as arid and unrewarding, but only easy idealism allows us to believe that the Aborigine is any happier, or that his life is more rewarding.
This is ascribing a message to the film that, despite Roeg’s attempts, doesn’t exist. Perhaps audiences—or at least me—are incapable of turning off the part of their brain that says a “natural” life is somehow better than an “unnatural” one (the idea that Western civilization is unnatural is facile and far, far outside the purview of this article). I’m familiar with Western civilization, so when Roeg fills it with gibberish I see the strictures he’s critiquing. I never saw Roeg point the same finger at Aboriginal culture.
The children keep their school blazers and nice shoes ever at the ready, suggesting also that not only can these cultures not communicate, but that that can’t affect each other. The girl in particular is unaffected by the engagement, despite a growing sexual attraction between her and the man, she refuses to let the experience changer her, treating the trip more like a summer holiday. Her languid swim intercut with the man’s hunting and cooking tells us all we need to know. For her, nature is an idyll; for him, it’s a daily routine of survival.
These conflicts of worlds, systems and sex are vital to the film, of course, but Roeg’s imagery could make the film worthwhile even if it were gutted of its social content. Roeg’s 70s films—Walkabout, Don’t Look Now and The Man Who Fell To Earth—showcase his ability to capture an environment—Australia, Venice and New Mexico, respectively—and transform it into an unearthly dream world. Sometimes his visual tricks get away from him in Walkabout—using turning pages as wipes or his still-photo montages, for example—and become gimmicky; but when he’s under control, he makes Australia, a country I had the pleasure of visiting 3 years ago, as familiar and as foreign as I remember.
I don’t understand the link between Australia and poetic, mysterious filmmaking, although I do appreciate the results. What in the countryside leads to films like Walkabout and Picnic At Hanging Rock? While Roeg may not have succeeded at the double-sided analysis of culture’s bindings, Walkabout does capture, in its landscape and its characters, the mystery of communication—visual and verbal.
9/8/2003
O, por ultimo, la crítica de All Movie Guide(5 estrellas sobre 5):
The contrast between modern, urban civilization and life in the natural world lies at the heart of Nicolas Roeg's visually dazzling drama Walkabout. In broad outline, the plot might resemble a standard fish-out-of-water tale: two city children become stranded in the Australian outback, and struggle to find their way back to civilization with the help of a friendly aborigine boy. But Roeg and screenwriter Edward Bond are concerned with far more than the average wilderness drama, as a shocking act of violence near the story's beginning makes clear. This is particularly true in regards to the relationship between the white children and the aborigine boy, who ultimately develops a troubled romantic attraction towards the older sister. Obviously intended as a statement on the exploitation of the natural world and native cultures by European civilization, the film nevertheless maintains an evocative vagueness that usually — but not always — favors poetry over didacticism. Most importantly, the film's justifiably acclaimed cinematography is likely to sway even those who find fault with the film's narrative and message. The shift between the sterile city images and the truly stunning, beautifully composed Australian landscapes provide the film's single best argument, making the film a vivid and convincing experience. — Judd Blaise
Re: Directores: Nicolas Roeg
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Iniciado por F_Elliott
Aqui otro admirador de DONT LOOK NOW.
Esa Venecia podrida, ese polvazo de la Christie (q se lo pega, y como, con Sutherland) y ese escalofriante final. Atmosfera malsana, terror realista. Y musica de Pino Donaggio (por el q citaba a De Palma).
Alguna edicion decente (y con subt) en dvd, por cierto ?
Ahi la has dado, Elliot. Ese polvazo de mi adorada Julie es antologico, quien fuera el Sutherland en esa pelicula. Y es que miss Christie es una de mis grandes debilidades.
Re: Directores: Nicolas Roeg
Pues he leido q Roeg lo metio a ultima hora, y tuvo q cortar algunos planos por "fuertes"... de la epoca, claro. Incluso hay pases donde lo cortan entero. En fin...
