Skip to main content

August 15, 1928

 


Nicolas Roeg (August 15, 1928) is an English film director. The Man Who Fell to Earth(1976) is one of his famous films. This director often uses a disjunctive narrative presentation on screen. One of his films is Don't Look Now (1973). When I saw this movie, I found it so gory as to be off-putting. Then I read up on the story (from a Daphne DuMaurier novel) and found out Roeg's film is considered a major classic. Now that I read that, I find my assessment has changed. 

There is a meowing on the soundtrack. It grows throughout the film though this sound is always a minor detail. Finally it is explained, in the scene where Donald Sutherland walks an old lady, purported to have psychic abilities, home to her Venice apartment. He, I believe, is the one who comments that she takes care of the cats but they don't stay. She says, "Do you like cats Mr. Baxter." He says, "Yes, but they often don't like me."

Nicolas Roeg and Julie Christie, the star, are reported to have attended seances together, before filming started, in order to get certain scenes in 
Don't Look Now right.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

August 23, 1941

Onora Sylvia O'Neill (August 23, 1941) is a British thinker. She studied at Oxford and received a doctorate from Harvard. After a noted career, in 1992, she  accepted the post of  Principal of  N ewnham College, Cambridge, and since 2006 she has been Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. Her 1997 paper, "Environmental Values, Anthroporphism, and Speciesism" contains a timely  argument  in which Dr. O'Neill, (she prefers that title to the "Baroness" to which her elevation to the peerage allows) points out inadequacies in the use of the term speciesism to argue against according humans more ethical rights than aspects of the non human world.  A viewpoint that puts " a person torturing a cat is on a par with a cat torturing a bird," is not one she finds supportable. The link is to a downloadable version of this paper.  We have  this picture  of Onora O'Neill, in 2002, at Newnham College: We meet in the Principal's lodge at Ne

August 25, 1990

Watch enough old movies (pandemic anyone) and you can fill in this scene--- businessmen, sex, court corridors. This is the backdrop to a scene from Morley Callaghan's novel, The Man With the Coat , (1955), from which we quote: As a businessman, Singerman might say he couldn’t afford to be associated with an old fighter who was an outcast from a place where the best people went. “I won’t be an outcast,” Mike said so loudly that his own voice in the darkness startled him and he sat up in bed. Then he heard a cat in the lane behind the building. The window was open a few inches. The weeds that bothered his hay fever grew in the lane. Again he heard the cat dragging at the lid of the garbage pail. The lid clattered and rolled and he jumped up, slammed the window shut, then he clenched his big fists with the broken knuckles and stood in a trance for a long time. A more directly biographical account is Morley Callaghan's story of accompanying a lady friend to the coliseum one night,

August 22, 1806

Jean Honoré Fragonard (April 4 1732 to August 22, 1 806) the famous French painter, whose art illustrated the lives of a gilded class, included cats occasionally in his scenes. We have some biographical context from the  National Gallery of Art : 'Fragonard was one of the most prolific of the eighteenth-century painters and draftsmen. Born ... in Grasse in southern France, he moved with his family at an early age to Paris. He first took a position as a clerk, but having demonstrated an interest in art, he worked in the studio of the still life and genre painter Jean Siméon Chardin (French, 1699 - 1779). After spending a short time with Chardin, from whom he probably learned merely the bare rudiments of his craft, he entered the studio of François Boucher ....1703 - 1770). Under Boucher’s tutelage Fragonard’s talent developed rapidly, and he was soon painting decorative pictures and pastoral subjects very close to his master’s style....Although Fragonard apparently never took cour