Don't Look Now

I'm an enormous fan of Nicolas Roeg. For me, one of the undisputed giants of British cinema - up there with David Lean, Michael Powell and Carol Reed. Roeg has left an indelible mark on cinema, creating highly idiosyncratic, sexually charged movies, characterised by dazzling use of fractured, non-linear time lines, that at their best, are phycholgically disturbing and visually powerful.

He's a true craftsman, having no formal film eduction, he learnt his trade from the shop floor upwards, as you'll see on his CV at IMDB, starting out as a camera operator to becoming one of the country's best Director's of Cinematography. Films like Truffaut's 'Fahrenheit 451', 'Far from the Madding Crowd', 'The Masque of the Red Death' are worth seeing alone for his sumptuous use of saturated colour. His illustrious pedigree includes his contribution as second unit camera operator on 'Dr Zhivago' and 'Lawrence of Arabia'. He's also the only film director I know to be immoratlised in the lyrics of a song (and my second favourite song of all time) Big Audio Dynamite's 'E=MC2'

But it's for the films he directed in the 1970's, 'Performance', 'Walkabout', 'Don't Look Now', 'Bad Timing' 'Man Who Fell to Earth' and 'Eureka', that make him such a hero to me and why I was cockahoop to be at a gala screening of 'Don't Look Now' at the Lexi's Flicker Club last night. Introduced by the director and the opening pages of Daphney Du Murier's short story, read by his wife Harriet.

It was a huge thrill to be just a couple of meters away from him and to see this great film on a big screen for the first time. It also felt all the more powerful for Ibolya and I, seeing it for the first time as a parents and married, you need to see it to know what I mean.