The Circuit

Seven Meditations Upon Encountering Nicolas Roeg in Karlovy Vary... or Why I Still Like Film Festivals
by Steven Gaydos

1)  The Karlovy Vary Film Festival has honored Roeg (pictured with "Puffball" actress Rita Tushingham) with a career retrospective and more importantly an official screening of his new film "Puffball" in the Grand Hall at midnight where 1300 European film fans took a trip into Roeg's bizarre and unique universe. "Puffball's" an unsettling Gothic yarn filled with pagan spells, raw sex, graphic fecundity and other Roeg specialities. Roeg told me the Festival had "kept my baby alive and made sure it could enter the world properly." Next time someone asks me what service film fests perform, I'll have a handy example.

2)  So again, many critics and fest directors, film biz mavens and assorted cultural gatekeepers are unamused by these Roegian musings. In 1970, they all attacked his film "Performance." When I lived in a London a few years ago, a British critics' poll called it "The best British film ever made" and when I relayed that info to his producer, Sandy Lieberson, Sandy said with a bitter laugh, "35 years too late."

Over lunch, I told Roeg about how much I enjoyed his film "Track 29" in the Cannes market and how angry the film made the British critics and Roeg told me, with not a whit of bitterness or regret, "I have never made a film that has been well-received." This from the man who made "Man Who Fell to Earth," "The Witches," "Bad Timing," "Don't Look Now" and "Walkabout." I think of films I've seen recently that were "well received" and I start to feel as confused and disconnected to reality as the typical Roeg hero.

3)  Some supposedly important and edgy festival directors passed on "Puffball" and I think about all the minor conventional safe crap they regularly program and I start to get very pissed off. Who are they to bar the door to the new Roeg film? How effing dare they not allow their audiences to see his film and make up their own minds.  Craven conventional cowards. Whatever happened to provocation and risk-taking in fest land? Isn't the new work of a master filmmaker automatically worthy of viewing, even if people come after you with pitchforks? Oh how the champions of film freedom become staid and stale, not to mention soulless and disrespectful of artists who've changed the language of film. Fug 'em. He's been at this filmmaking gig for about 60 years, undaunted and undimmed by the timidity of the mainstream thinkers.

4)  In conversation, Roeg is as mentally stimulating as his best work. And like his films, a conversation with Roeg leaps about from the cosmic to mundane, with intelligence, grace, manners, profundity and wry humor coursing like an electric current through every line. I'm thinking that someone needs to do a Master Class with this dude and film it and then I hear his wife Harriet has started a film project on this and I am deeply thankful. It's a moment of Roegian synchronicity.

5)  Just watched a piece of "Bad Timing" through the rococo chandeliers of the Grand Ballroom at the Hotel Pupp and likes the shattered fragments of story that constitute the film, I'm seeing shards of images and pain and remembering the tragic coincidence of death that accompanied that dark film's making (Laurie Bird, then-girlfriend to star Art Garfunkel, died of a drug overdose). I try to sleep and the time space continuum buzz in my head does get a synchronistic assist from the disco bass lines thumping from the Lazne III revelry outside the window.

6)  What are Roeg's films all about? I may have finally figured it out, after my own 38 years of watching with excitement, exasperation and the most pleasurable confusion imaginable. Roeg's a paparazzi, but he's not stalking movie stars. He's catching eternity on the sly, in compromising situations, pants down, angry and in flagrante and eternity's bodyguards are not amused. When they catch Roeg and throw him out on the sidewalk, he bounces, but his pictures still get developed. Some of us peruse the tabloids just for the pleasure of catching these shots because they prove that eternity is just as fucked up and human as the rest of us. Vice. And Versa.

7)  When I was a teenager, Bob Dylan wrote something like "Some people are terrified of the atom bomb and some people are terrified to be seen reading Modern Screen magazine." If Nicolas Roeg made a movie out of that, I'll bet Karlovy Vary would have the balls to show it and I'll bet there would be 1300 young European film fans sitting in the theater at midnight, trying, like Mr. Roeg, to figure out what it all means.

Steven Gaydos is the Executive Editor of Features for Variety.