Out There: The Visionary Cinema of Nicolas Roeg
Screening Dates
  • February 17, 2018 6:30 with Introduction
  • February 18, 2018 8:30
Imported 35mm Print

Is Nicolas Roeg’s haunting, hallucinatory masterpiece the greatest British film of all time? The results of a 2011 Time Out poll argue yes, with a panel of 150 reputable film folk (Wes Anderson, Ken Loach, and Terence Davies among them) crowning the enigmatic horror film the UK’s best. The centrepiece to Roeg’s astonishing 1970s output, if not his career, this brilliant and brazenly-cinematic adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier novella casts Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as a couple who decamp to Venice to forget the death of their young daughter. There, they cross paths with a blind woman gifted with ​“second sight,” who relays an ominous message from the afterlife. The film’s iconic, erotic, time-slipping sex scene—a furor in its day—is unforgettable, as is the red-clad apparition glimpsed running around the city’s eerily-empty network of passageways. A dazzling, frightening essay on the uncanny effects of grief.

Print courtesy of the BFI National Archive