It was above all a filmmaker of non-conventional, who has spent his life experimenting with modes of narration and visions of cinema’s most original and frightening of the 70s and 80s.
The british filmmaker Nicolas Roich died Friday at the age of 90, in London. He will remain for his masterpiece Don’t look back , an adaptation output in 1973 as a novel by Daphne du Maurier. It featured a couple in mourning in a Venice winter, fantastic, scary.
His other great film, which has influenced the seventh art, like any pop culture, is The Man who came from elsewhere (1976). Roich tells the story of the tragic fate of a being came from the stars, personified by David Bowie. Face to alabaster, fascinating look, this “alien” lost on Earth, come to find water to save his planet, will be tortured by an armada of scientists sadistic, eager for discoveries, making the innocent alien, a kind of strange figure of christ.
A cinema of visceral
Born on 15 August 1928 in London, Roich begins by being a director of photography for films such as Lawrence of Arabia of David Lean, The Masque of the red death of Roger Corman, or even Fahrenheit 451 of François Truffaut, in 1966. In 1970, he co-directed with Donald Cammell his first film, Performance , in which a mobster wanted for murder finds refuge in a rock star’s decadent, epitomized by Mick Jagger.
will Follow Walkabout (1971), oppressive roaming in the australian desert, and Don’t look back ( Don t Look Now , 1973), which will be a scandal because of an extraordinary sequence sex between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. Roich mixed up in the faces ecstatic of the protagonists during the act with the moment in which they rhabillent after the enjoyment.
In 1976, a year before Star Wars, The Man who came from elsewhere ( The Man Who Fell to Earth ) upsets the canons of the cinema of science fiction and becomes a cult film. For example, it has influenced Christopher Nolan, Steven Soderbergh or Ridley Scott.
The cinema visceral Roich, using the deconstruction narrative popping up the real, has thrown its last fires in 1985 with A night of reflection , where the director imagines the encounter between Albert Einstein and Marilyn Monroe in a hotel room in new york in the mid-1950s.
