Word: petulia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Director Roeg, formerly a cameraman (Petulia) has made two previous films: Performance, which he co-directed, and Walkabout. Both had a disquieting beauty, a dreamlike sense of dislocation and, most of all, a reliance on the visual vocabulary of the cinema to build and sustain the narrative. Don't Look Now is Roeg's best work so far -the most deliberate and contained. Much of the movie's power comes from images that carry a kind of glancing, indefinable threat and remain in some dark corner of the imagination. They are immediate but not quite real, like...
...only ambitious, but successful. It marked an abrupt about-race for Director Richard Lester, who had previously been known for the Beatle films, and for his ground-breaking anti-war phantasmagoria How I Won the War. The story of an affair between two upper-middle-class eccentrics, Petulia makes audiences uncomfortable because both parties are messed up, and can't come together in a way which would help them grow. It also aroused the more chauvinistic American critics because of its depiction of the stultifying side of plastic American life (even in San Francisco where most of the film takes...
ADAMS HOUSE DINING HALL. Petulia...
...through his Eden. Walkabout suddenly becomes a lyric travelogue, assaulting the harsh Flinders mountain ranges, trailing the little camels of the red desert near Alice Springs, mooning under the blooming quandong tree. Director Nicolas Roeg, who made his reputation as a cinematographer (Fahrenheit 451, Far from the Madding Crowd. Petulia), shows a precise and delicate Down Understanding. But give him anything human, and he seems as naive as a third former...
...seems at first far too facile and fragile an idea for a full-length movie: the roller derby as a metaphor for America's competition, violence, degradation. Scenes of derby competition worked well in films like Petulia and Medium Cool because they were used as secondary symbols, episodes that were part of a more complex whole. But an entire feature devoted to the derby, its stars and its lifestyles? Director-Cameraman Robert Kaylor confounds all expectations in Derby. He does it by treating the competition not as a symbol but as a sorry fact of life...