the man who fell to earth

It's a mixed up, jumbled up puzzle of a world in the cinema of British filmmaker Nicolas Roeg. Time, sex, obsession, and the psycho-sexual savagery that can exist between a man and a woman take on hypnotic and iconoclastic new meaning in his films. A true and punkish visual artist, Roeg's visual schema is a cacophony of disorienting, challenging, erotic images intended to fill the mind in a non-linear way; daring his audience to absorb the rush of images in a way that more closely evokes how we actually digest memories and thoughts. His films confidently and consistently establish their own vocabulary, a vocabulary that never leaves the mind no matter how confusing or vexing his stories play initially. An alien-looking David Bowie spreadeagle in front of a wall of television screens in "The Man Who Fell to Earth" (1976), Theresa Russell taunting Art Garfunkel with the sight of her exposed crotch in "Bad Timing" (1980), and the ingeniously elegiac sex scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in "Don't Look Now" (1973) are moments in which artist and chosen medium seemed destined to create such profoundly bizarre and rousing results.

As a recent guest on BBC'S "Film Programme", Roeg discusses the issue of time on film, censorship, and his latest mind-binding work, "Puffball." To listen click here.