Performance
Nicholas Roeg / Donald Cammell 1970
After a long time waiting to see Performance – being an admirer of Roeg’s other films, including Bad Timing, Don’t Look Now – it was equally irritating and amusing for the circumstances of watching the film
being quite strange. One can only respond to the encounter on its own
terms I suppose – and it wasn’t entirely without its benefits. I had
picked up a VHS copy, still wrapped in cellophane, at a market, and so
hoped the quality would be decent enough. It wasn’t bad, but there were
other issues – after watching about 90%, we realized that we had the TV
on the wrong input channel. We had been sitting through the film in
black and white – we’d muttered a few comments expressing surprise at
this, but hadn’t thought to investigate further than that. Part of the
reason for this was the strange and compelling early sections of the
film – where scenes of a trial are cut, often in a bizarrely
disorientating way, with scenes of Chas (James Fox) doing his
‘enforcer’s work. After realizing our mistake, we remarked at how the
earlier sequences had been in some way more disorienting than the drug
scenes later on. An edited psychedelic structure, through fast paced
concatenation and parataxis, drained of all washes.
I wanted to write something about the film before going back to see
it as it was intended – mainly because it seemed that watching in
monochrome allowed the structure of the film to be granted visibility
that would otherwise have been less apparent. There was a firmness to
the mechanics of each scene, a more primary relation between the
switches of the edit and the (non)movements of the camera – a diagram of
the film’s workings. Quite a few times I was reminded of another film
I’d seen recently (and not yet managed to write something about),
Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa Vie, particularly in the oddly heavy
handed movements of the camera. I read something about Godard using
heavy machinery to shoot that film, and in certain shots it seemed as
though the camera detached from one weighty position, before
freewheeling awkwardly along a length of track, following a permitted
arc of movement, and coming to a halt ion a new position. It was like
the neat, contained movement of shifting the body’s weight, say from
elbow to elbow, in order to look ‘round an obstacle, a central figure.
Godard often used this technique, switching viewpoints around an actor
positioned in centre-frame, seen from the back like a Casper David
Friedrich Rückenfigur. Roeg/Cammell employ a similar process of
having characters obscuring the viewpoint, as well as being obscured
themselves. This was also combined with an interesting borrowing and
collage of reflections a la Bergman’s Persona, where
body parts were extracted and reinserted on to others’, compounding the
themes of becoming, uncertain psychological boundaries, androgyny,
mirroring and symmetry, etc.
Watched in black and white I remember being struck by how the film reminded me of Chris Petit’s Radio On, in general aesthetic if nothing else, but I was also struck by the resonances between Performance and Petit’s novel Robinson,
from the underworld connections with film and pornography, to the
hideaway populated with mysterious, drugged out figures. I couldn’t help
feeling that the ending of Performance was weak, or at least it seemed not to hang right, if that expression can do anything other than confuse. It was a little like the ending of Blow Up,
which I’ve always really liked, even it has become cliché – the
uncertainty as to the contaminated identities and ‘performances’ of Chas
and Turner doesn’t hold the absurd poignancy of the acceptance of the mime at the end of Antonioni’s film – it is obviously going for a different speed
of mystery too, with Turner’s face only very briefly glimpsed in a car
window as it escapes, as if a look of any other duration would either
never establish the required tension of paradox, or would allow it to be
immediately seen through.
