Nicolas Roeg and *Don't Look Now*

• Nicolas Roeg is a somewhat peripheral figure in the resurgence of interest in 1970s British cinema, despite being synonymous with the decade.
• Roeg's work from 1970 to 1980 includes:
  • Performance (1970)
  • Walkabout (1971)
  • Don’t Look Now (1973)
  • The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
  • Bad Timing (1980)
• These films showcase a volatile cinema, with cultural references, pop bodies, sex, violence, memory, vision, time, and space.
• Roeg's peripheral status stems from:
  • Film theory's tendency to rediscover the overlooked rather than reconsider the theoretically passé.
  • His directorial persona occupies the liminal space between art-house and commercial cinema.
• Don't Look Now is examined through time, space and color to demonstrate that Roeg’s film offers an example of the experimental potential of commercial cinema.

Adaptation

• Don’t Look Now is Roeg’s second adaptation from a literary source, Daphne du Maurier’s short story of the same name.
• Allan Scott's screenplay makes key alterations within the du Maurier tale, such as:
  • Christine being associated with red rather than blue.
  • Her death from drowning not meningitis.
  • The film’s narrative commencing at the Baxter home in England rather than the café in Venice.

Time/Space

• Don’t Look Now’s opening sequence contains over one hundred shots in just seven minutes, depicting the film’s narrative preoccupations.
• Roeg introduces key preoccupations and visual metaphors, drawing space, time, narrative, and spectator into a mosaic of association.
• The disconnection between the two images within the opening sequence, a pond and a shuttered window, brings to the fore questions of perception, narrative, and reception.
• Roeg and Clifford’s elliptical editing style prepares the spectator for a visual strategy that questions our acceptance of classical narrative structures.
• Roeg's montage does not say that two shots are connected, but that they might be.
• Roeg and Clifford’s rhizomic editing structure coerces the spectator into seeking a relationship between connections that may, or may not, exist.
• Connections emerge through meticulous associative and elliptical editing style and the careful implementation of mise-en-scène.

Color

• The classic perception of 1970s British cinema is feeling dull and debilitated.
• The 1970s was the decade when colour finally became the dominant aesthetic within cinema.
• Roeg uses film colour in innovative and challenging ways, both as a cinematographer and director.
• Leslie Dick concludes that red functions as a sign for loss, an image of the ever-present possibility of sudden death.
• Mark Sanderson considers the film’s colour to aesthetically denote familial relations.
• Roeg's use of colour in the 1970s can be seen as a continuation of the experimentation with colour prevalent in his cinematographic work in the 1960s.

Chromatic Doppelgangers

• Don’t Look Now’s aesthetic is based around a colour strategy that elevates one particular hue, red, over a more restrained and desaturated palette.
• Venice becomes monochromatic, a wintry liminal urbanity within which the transient eruptions of red draws the spectator’s eye.
• Anthony Richmond recollects that taking the color red out of everything except the dwarf’s clothing and the little girl’s mac played a very big part in the design and costume design.
• Roeg implements colour to attract the spectator’s gaze and elevates the significance of red’s presence.
• Colour becomes an active element, linked into transitions between frames, narrative preoccupations, and demarcations of the body.
• Roeg’s aesthetic strategy coerces the spectator into connecting together the twin red bodies of Christine and the dwarf.
• Colour becomes the impetus behind the rhythm of the narrative, the memory of the red of Christine becomes overlaid onto the corporeality of Venice’s murderous denizen.
• John’s desire to uncover the truth beneath the red leads to a fall, his death by the blade of Venice’s killer.
• The film cuts from the unidentified body in the slide to an upside-down Christine running besides the water’s edge, her red raincoat reflected in the pond’s water.

Spiral

• Questions surrounding identity and gender permeate Don’t Look Now narratively and aesthetically.
• Roeg’s use of colour can be seen to be exploring this complication of gender and identity, particularly at the moment of Christine’s death.
• At the moment that John accidently spills water onto the slide, red suddenly discharges from the dwarf’s image in the slide, triggering John’s paranormal ability.
• It is as if it is the presence of red that brings John into a state of delirium.
• As John lifts Christine from the water, time enters into a repetitive loop, with the gradual movement of colour within the slide, with red slowly spiraling inward, turning from red to blue then white.
• The spiral raises questions concerning the relationship between body and colour, in particular within Don’t Look Now, the body as abject.
• Red becomes a connection between two disparate bodies, a dyadic relation that positions both bodies at opposite ends of a chromatic spectrum.
• Roeg aligns the spectacle of red with differing aspects of femininity, that disrupt John's patriarchal position.
• Roeg consistently constructs feminine bodies imbued with the potential to destabilize patriarchal and hegemonic gender roles.
• Colour in Roeg’s films suggests a complex series of association and connections, between bodies and power.

Conclusion

• Roeg is defined by an unmistakable signature, presenting life and society through a lens of innovation, experimentation, and complexity.
• Roeg could not fully express himself in any other decade than the 1970s.
• Roeg’s first decade as a director sought to prove that British cinema could in fact produce work of breathtaking complexity, intellectual rigor, and exhilaration.