Days apart in the last week of November, filmmakers Nicholas Roeg and Bernardo Bertolucci left us. The turn–the-page pairing of two representative-of-something artists sounded echoes of July 1997, when Robert Mitchum and Jimmy Stewart died on the first and the second of the month—quite the “they don’t make them like that anymore” farewell to the best of the old Hollywood; and of July 30 2007, when Michelangelo Antonioni and (MCC favorite) Ingmar Bergman, paladins of the postwar European art-house, left the building.
This is not that, but the similarities of these two filmmakers resonates, in ways that are once again suggestive of the passage of time. Each was a brilliant visual stylist; each made their most enduring films in the sixties and seventies, in thrall of the New Wave; and both were very curious about sex. Don’t roll your eyes—that’s a bigger deal than it sounds like. The end of movie censorship in the late 1960s offered new (and often exploitative) freedoms to filmmakers. But to take sex seriously, and to express ideas about sexuality (and its vast complexities) thoughtfully, and in cinematic terms, nested in the context of complex personal problems and relationships—this is something that few attempted, and fewer did well.
Roeg started out as a cinematographer; his notable contributions in that capacity include Fahrenheit 451 (Truffaut 1966), Far from the Madding Crowd (Schlesinger 1967), and Petulia (Lester 1968). He would go on to direct five features in the 1970s: Performance, Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Bad Timing (1980). Don’t Look Now, starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie is his masterpiece. If you can get past the dead child in the beginning (usually an automatic non-starter for us, but it works here), this is a film that must be seen, ideally on the largest screen possible. Performance is a wild ride of a gangster movie (very 1960s out there), featuring Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg; Man Who Fell is a collection of great scenes that are better than the movie as a whole, and boasts impressive performances by David Bowie, Rip Torn, Candy Clark and Buck Henry. And we’re going to go out on a limb for the oft-maligned Bad Timing. It is overlong (we could skip the entire Moroccan interlude), and we’re not sold on the relationship between Art Garfunkel and Theresa Russell. But the unfolding mystery, fractured time structure, Cold War backdrop, and bravura performance by Harvey Keitel all worked for us.
Bertolucci was quick out of the gate, with two movies made in his early twenties that were suggestive of enormous talent: La Commare Secca and Before the Revolution. He would fulfill that promise in 1970 with two ruminations on Italian fascism and historical legacies (which are, sadly, more relevant today than ever): The Spider’s Stratagem and, a landmark, The Conformist (a film described by David Thomson as “drunkenly beautiful and deeply disturbing.”) Bertolucci would follow those with the enormously controversial Last Tango in Paris. His third collaboration with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, Tango features Marlon Brando in one of the greatest performances in the history of screen acting (one theory holds that Brando’s subsequent apparent indifference to his screen performances was rooted in an unwillingness to ever dig that deeply again). In recent years the film has become notorious for different reasons (then puritanism and prurience, now patriarchy)—but we’re sticking with it, and can’t improve on Stephanie Zacharek’s take on the entire affair.
For more on Roeg and Bertolucci, good starting points are obituary features from The Los Angeles Times and Sight and Sound, respectively. Or you can take the opportunity to screen Bertolucci’s late career effort, The Dreamers, a love letter to the possibilities of sex, cinema, and 1968, a year when the movies mattered, so much so that young people would take to the barricades on behalf of Henri Langlois and the Cinématheque Française.