The reputation of Nicolas Roeg

Abstract

This chapter reflects on the ways in which the reputation of the British film director Nicolas Roeg has developed from the 1970s through to the twenty-first century, and considers how this might tell us interesting things about the discursive and cultural frameworks that shape particular films (and the critical reception of them) historically within the contexts of British art cinema. Looking specifically at Performance (co-directed with Donald Cammell, 1970) and Don’t Look Now (1973), it argues that through an engagement with the ancillary discourses that have circulated around Roeg’s reputation and the reputation of the films he has worked on over the last fifty years we might develop a more nuanced understanding of how British art cinema can be seen as a set of complementary and competing, historically contingent discourses, informed by concepts of aesthetics and authorship, narratives of production, exhibition, reception, but also, significantly, reputation.