304 The Man Who Fell to Earth

Discuss releases by Criterion and the films on them. Threads may contain spoilers!
Post Reply
Message
Author

User avatar
Taketori Washizu
Joined: Fri Jun 03, 2005 10:32 am

Re: 304 The Man Who Fell to Earth

#202 Post by Taketori Washizu » Mon Sep 02, 2013 11:42 pm

Never got around to buying this because I already had the Anchor Bay DVD. Thinking of finally upgrading now. Does it really matter between the DVD and the Bluray? Amazon vendors are charging a LOT more for the Blu-ray Disc. I don't really want to pay 200.00 bucks for it. The DVD is going for a lot cheaper and also comes with the novel.

Kauno
Joined: Sun Dec 18, 2011 4:01 am

Re: 304 The Man Who Fell to Earth

#203 Post by Kauno » Tue Sep 03, 2013 1:47 am

The UK Blu-ray would be more affordable.

User avatar
domino harvey
Dot Com Dom
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

Re: 304 The Man Who Fell to Earth

#204 Post by domino harvey » Fri Aug 01, 2014 2:00 pm

If you were curious what Studio Canal did with this film after denying the rights from Criterion, they did the only logical step to compete with Criterion's deluxe Blu-ray treatment: They put it out on DVD-R

User avatar
Adam X
Joined: Thu Apr 16, 2009 5:04 am

Re: 304 The Man Who Fell to Earth

#205 Post by Adam X » Sat Aug 02, 2014 10:55 am

Wow. Maybe Criterion slept with Studio Canal's wife? Or drowned their puppy.

User avatar
Mr Sausage
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 9:02 pm
Location: Canada

The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)

#206 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Sep 01, 2014 6:31 am

DISCUSSION ENDS MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29th AT 6:30 AM.

Members have a two week period in which to discuss the film before it's moved to its dedicated thread in The Criterion Collection subforum. Please read the Rules and Procedures.

This thread is not spoiler free. This is a discussion thread; you should expect plot points of the individual films under discussion to be discussed openly. See: spoiler rules.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

I encourage members to submit questions, either those designed to elicit discussion and point out interesting things to keep an eye on, or just something you want answered. This will be extremely helpful in getting discussion started. Starting is always the hardest part, all the more so if it's unguided. Questions can be submitted to me via PM.




***PM me if you have any suggestions for additions or just general concerns and questions.***

User avatar
colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)

#207 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Sep 15, 2014 7:53 pm

How much do others see this film as a sci-fi garbed version of The Great Gatsby? There's the obvious allusion in the moment of the blue light at the dock, but the the rest of the film also seems to create parallels. It involves a successful man living in a luxurious seeming world, yet a man yearning for the unattainable dream woman, all seen through the eyes of a friend who eventually betrays him as he social climbs his way up in the world.

Though while I think this provides a great spine to the film, and perhaps works as the best version of the themes of The Great Gatsby, I think The Man who Fell To Earth is much more than just a veiled Gatsby adaptation, as it tackles ideas of the American landscape; forcible assimilation; alcoholism; ambition successful or thwarted; the important role that sex and tactile bodies play within relationships; the natural versus industrial world; business and politics becoming dangerously intertwined; and culture clashes (foreign and indigenous, as well as high versus low).

There is so much to unpack in this magnificent film, and that is before we get into the amazing stream of consciousness, yet somehow perfectly apt, editing style of the film, where locations trigger memories that cross into visions that cause emotions, freely flowing back and forth again.

Robin Davies
Joined: Sat Sep 22, 2007 2:00 am

Re: The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)

#208 Post by Robin Davies » Tue Sep 16, 2014 1:42 pm

An interesting change between novel and screenplay is the bit where Newton's eyes are X-rayed. In the novel he's blinded but in the film he says "They're stuck. I'll never get them off", presumably referring to his human "eyes". Though rather implausible I took it to mean that this was the final stage in his conversion (corruption?) from alien to human.

User avatar
matrixschmatrix
Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 11:26 pm

Re: The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)

#209 Post by matrixschmatrix » Tue Sep 16, 2014 2:46 pm

The Gatsby connection is an interesting one- it's certainly a movie as obsessed with the book is about time, trying to force your way back through time, and the casual cruelty time inflicts on virtually everyone, but in a sense, it's taking almost the opposite tack- where Gatsby has everyone involved borne hopelessly onward by the current, the tragedy of the movie is as much as anything that Newton isn't, and there is a tragedy both in that he could go back- maybe, possibly, if he could overcome his lethargy and the hold that Earth has on him- and that he is a rock whom the current flows around, throwing the damage it does to everyone else into sharp relief. As the movie's editing suggests that we're viewing time the way Newton does- in fragments, facets that skip and stutter instead of flowing smoothly forward- one could perhaps connect him to Gatsby as a creature whose mind is forever in the past, but I think he's more alien than that, more disconnected from time altogether. It's certainly a valuable spine to force on to a fairly amorphous film, though.

I might almost say that both Gatsby and this movie are iterations of Faust, stories of someone who gains everything in hope of somehow outrunning the consequences of being human, of mortality and frailty, and almost makes it- only to fail so hopelessly that they and nearly everyone else are worse off than when they began.

User avatar
colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)

#210 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Sep 17, 2014 7:05 am

I'm not sure that I'd quite agree with the Faust angle, as I see Newton as someone with a clear mission (to get water back to his home planet and be reunited with his wife and children), whose mission gets averted (perverted) by the intoxicating influence of other human beings with their own agendas on him.

I like your point about time though: perhaps in that sense Newton losing Mary-Lou to Bryce isn't so much a tragedy than an inevitability. Newton raised Mary-Lou with him into a new world of a powerful position (as he did Farnsworth and Bryce, etc) and they get pulled apart by exterior forces, but even when Newton leaves captivity at the end of the film he leaves Mary-Lou to her relationship with Bryce, perhaps because of the realisation that both Mary-Lou and Bryce exist on the same cosmic timescale.

Strangely despite Newton presumably being on track to outlive them all he seems to be one of the most nostalgic characters, continually thinking back to his first contact with Earth or seeing through time to the Wild West camp, and so on. Everyone else is concerned with of the moment machinations or industry: stocks and shares, crucially important this millisecond, forgotten the next; the next big invention; or casual, interchangable sex. (Yet those of the moment impulses are what drives humanity on the wider scale too) But Newton doesn't seem able to place his nostalgia in context. It all blends together in the mind into new forms.

Maybe tellingly only Mary-Lou gets a couple of moments of sober introspective nostalgia, particularly in that heart-breaking monologue about trains. And perhaps that's why she drinks!

User avatar
Sloper
Joined: Tue May 29, 2007 10:06 pm

Re: The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)

#211 Post by Sloper » Sun Sep 21, 2014 10:25 am

I used to watch this film a lot when I was about 13 or 14; it was weird and nostalgic watching it again after all this time. I was glad to find that I still like it a lot, and that it still seems as daring, inventive and tragic as I remembered. David Bowie and Candy Clark are just wonderful in this.
colinr0380 wrote:...the amazing stream of consciousness, yet somehow perfectly apt, editing style of the film, where locations trigger memories that cross into visions that cause emotions, freely flowing back and forth again... I see Newton as someone with a clear mission (to get water back to his home planet and be reunited with his wife and children), whose mission gets averted (perverted) by the intoxicating influence of other human beings with their own agendas on him... Everyone else is concerned with of the moment machinations or industry: stocks and shares, crucially important this millisecond, forgotten the next; the next big invention; or casual, interchangable sex. (Yet those of the moment impulses are what drives humanity on the wider scale too) But Newton doesn't seem able to place his nostalgia in context. It all blends together in the mind into new forms.
matrixschmatrix wrote:...there is a tragedy both in that he could go back- maybe, possibly, if he could overcome his lethargy and the hold that Earth has on him- and that he is a rock whom the current flows around, throwing the damage it does to everyone else into sharp relief. As the movie's editing suggests that we're viewing time the way Newton does- in fragments, facets that skip and stutter instead of flowing smoothly forward- one could perhaps connect him to Gatsby as a creature whose mind is forever in the past, but I think he's more alien than that, more disconnected from time altogether.
I think one of Newton's big problems is that he is hypersensitive to external stimuli. On his planet, sex appears not to involve any kind of penetration, but rather a sort of acrobatic dance in which the bodily fluids are apparently being flung onto the bodies, not secreted by them. Paul Mayersberg talks about this in an interview on the DVD. The costume designer also talks about how the aliens wear their most precious commodity, water, in their external clothing, and remembers designing them so that their arteries appeared to be on the surface of the body, pumping white fluids rather than red blood.

Perhaps it's the 'interiority' of the human race that Newton struggles to cope with, our capacity for projecting a persona that does not correspond to what is inside. This is literally what Newton has to do in order to 'become' human, and as Robin mentioned above, when the fake, external 'eyes' become stuck to him forever, this signifies the final stage of his imprisonment within an authentically human, profoundly inauthentic and totally impenetrable outer shell.

Arriving on Earth for the first time, Newton is intensely vulnerable, hidden inside a defensive duffel coat, startled by a speeding car. Later we see him watching a violent piece of Japanese theatre in a restaurant, intercut with Bryce and his student making violent love to each other; later still, Newton’s mind seems to tune into the sounds of Bryce having sex; he can’t bear to travel at high speeds, either in a car or an elevator; and then of course there are all those televisions which he watches at the same time. Newton is both hypnotised and deeply shaken by this plethora of stimuli. Eventually, he screams at the televisions: ‘Get out of my mind! Get back where you belong!’ In another scene, he comments that television seems to show you everything, but doesn’t communicate any real truths.

He arrives on this planet seeking water, and begins by drinking it down hungrily from a river, a natural source; eventually, he is intoxicated by gin (which looks like water, but isn’t), consuming bottle after bottle of it. He says that he ‘sees things’ when he drinks gin, and throughout the film we’re shown a number of his visions, some of which connect to reality (Bryce having sex, the pioneers), some of which must be imaginary (the poignant vision of his return home to his family); and ultimately, it’s impossible to tell the difference. Is he really seeing his wife, back at home, watching a broadcast of the World Enterprises commercial, or is he just imagining it? There seem to be at least two visions of his wife and children lying dead in the desert, in one of which his wife appears to have spent her last moments trying to bury the children in the sand (or the sand has been blown over them); can they both be real? If either of them is real, why does Newton produce the album so that his wife can hear it? At least some of these must be products of Newton’s imagination.

And so much of what we see elsewhere in the film could be either real or a fantasy, or even both: the reality that Newton finds on Earth is truly unreal in so many ways. The killing of Farnsworth is a good example. Surreally, he apologises to his murderers for not breaking the window on the first swing, and they reply good-naturedly, without a hint of irony, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Farnsworth and his lover are seen falling through the sky as though there is no ground beneath them to hit, just an eternal expanse of air to dive gracefully through – and why do the killers throw the dumbbell out of the window as well? We could also look to the very start of the film, where Newton’s arrival is signified, not through special effects or some stylised representation, but through what is clearly stock footage of a man-made spacecraft, and then through a landing sequence that seems deliberately imitative of The Planet of the Apes (with which this film has a few other things in common). It gets the film off on the right foot, signalling a disjunction, or at any rate a hopelessly ambiguous relationship, between representation and reality.

The reference to Auden’s poem, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ placed alongside the Brueghel painting it describes, is well-chosen, because it’s a poem about ‘suffering’ and its ‘human position’ – how the human condition is to suffer alone, while the rest of the world goes callously on its way. The real truths are hidden away inside, inaccessible. This is the condition Newton is helplessly infected by, his interior self awakened, stimulated, glutted and overwhelmed by TV, alcohol, human sex and the whole speeding, superficial kaleidoscope of life on Earth, to the point where he is all ‘interior self’, incapable of actually doing anything meaningful or productive. One of his final acts in the film is to produce an album, ‘The Visitor’, so that his wife will hear it on the radio. Whatever other messages it might be intended to communicate to her, this album will undoubtedly inform her that Newton will remain on Earth indefinitely, a permanent ‘visitor’, never belonging to the culture or contributing to it (humans, it seems, will not like or understand the album), but trapped in it, creating and consuming its commodities, until he has ‘had enough’ – that is, until he has achieved the quintessentially human state of inebriated satiety and brow-beaten submissiveness. On his planet, they wear their selves and everything they value most on the outside; by the final shot of the film, Newton is eclipsed by his hat and clothes.

The music at the end is 'Stardust', performed by Artie Shaw and his orchestra in 1941. But I'm sure that there's a little musical quotation, by Shaw's clarinet, of 'I'm through with love, I'll never fall again' at one point, which is a nice, poignant touch, even if unintended.

User avatar
colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)

#212 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Sep 21, 2014 12:19 pm

That reminds me of an aspect of the film that I really like: that it feels as if the film is presented as humanity's view of an alien visitation. We follow Newton as the major character but from the very beginning we see him almost entirely through the lens of a human context (Roeg says in his commentary that we are "always being watched", but just as important is that we are always being interpreted and judged), from the NASA stock footage at the beginning through to the beautifully curated soundtrack. Even the alien visitation is seen through the eyes of what being a human outsider to American culture could be like, with Newton's British passport and Mary-Lou trying to help him fit in by getting her church congregation to sing Jerusalem to welcome the newcomer, its strains of nostalgia for a promised yet distant (and perhaps always in the mind) land segueing beautifully into the use of "Try To Remember". Even Newton himself, perhaps due to his human eyes, is often presented looking through glasses, taking them off and on in shots as if to see better as if to try as get away from that human cultural imposition, or as you say Sloper to hide himself away like a rockstar behind tinted lenses. He seems to feel hemmed in by the artistic representations of human culture which are imposing on and defining his character's journey.

Yet Newton's nostalgia for this planet only extends back to his landing, therefore it makes sense that he would return to the lake that he splashed down into to make his home. It is only really in the visions of his planet (memories? hallucinations? long distance psychic communication?) that we ever see a vision of the planet he left behind, themselves fading or changing with the effect of time and memory. It was a beautiful touch that Candy Clark plays both Mary Lou and the wife from another world as that only strenghtens the complication.

Perhaps it is telling at the end of the film that we don't get to hear his album, made as a form of communication with another world (a life story? a cautionary tale? a farewell?), as any kind of depiction of what it sounded like would be another imposition on Newton's extraterrestrial nature by human filmmakers! It is more than sufficient that in the record store scene humanity has already put a price on (and discounted a couple of times!) his communication anyway, relegating what could potentially be a profound statement to the bargain bins.

User avatar
matrixschmatrix
Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 11:26 pm

Re: The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)

#213 Post by matrixschmatrix » Sun Sep 21, 2014 10:12 pm

Of course, I've always kind of assumed that the music he's making in the film is essentially Bowie's album Low.

User avatar
Mr Sausage
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 9:02 pm
Location: Canada

Re: The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)

#214 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Sep 22, 2014 8:37 pm

It occurs to me that Bryce and Newton have a weirdly symbiotic relationship; they seem to mirror each other: early in the movie, Newton is driven and pure--he doesn't distract himself with empty sensory experiences. Yet his first(?) vision of Bryce foreshadows the tone of the third act the movie: Bryce has aggressive, animalistic sex full of roars and tumbling that seems to attempt an oblivion through hedonism. Bryce admits as much to his supervisor at the college: he is bored, idle, chasing empty pleasures to fill his time. But as Bryce is drawn closer into Newton's world, he abandons the hedonism and grows more purposeful and driven, eventually discovering Newton's secret on his own and outing him later for career advancement. Newton, on the other hand, goes through the same trajectory in reverse, losing his focus being consumed by hedonism until his imprisonment is capped by an orgy of sex and simulated violence that echoes his first vision of Bryce (the violent Japanese drama intercut with Bryce having sex). And yet both men end in the same place: tired and disillusioned and failing to really communicate with each other.

I have a small question: any idea about the identity of the man who sees Newton descend the hill at the beginning and what role he's meant to place in the story and the film's significance?

User avatar
colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)

#215 Post by colinr0380 » Tue Sep 23, 2014 4:33 am

I sort of see Bryce as understanding of Newton at the end with his perhaps too on the nose understanding final response to the line "I think Mr Newton's had enough" of "Yes, I believe he has". Newton is perhaps spent at the end, but I don't feel a sense of failure to communicate, more a communication between ex-business partners meeting again after a long time apart. Time is as much of a divider as distance is.

Which probably plays into the man on the hill from the beginning of the film. He basically seems like a representative of sinister government agencies that will kidnap Newton and destroy his plans near the end of the film. However Roeg talks in his commentary in more general terms about this figure being a "watcher", showing that everything we do is seen by someone. From the moment Newton arrived on Earth even wandering through an empty landscape he was being monitored.

In a way this is an aspect that (beautifully) dates the film, making it more an analogue than digital artefact. Our modern social media age is all about (sometimes seems only about) the awareness of being watched by others and a kind of referential feedback between the person being seen and the audience doing the seeing. In The Man Who Fell To Earth Newton seems to want to be the hidden observer (as in the scene when he is bombarded with one-way information from all the television sets), but he is also the object of fascination from everyone, even if only because he is a successful businessman.

The 'watcher' figure turns up again in Newton's bedchamber just after the gun-orgy farewell with Mary-Lou and just before Newton realises he has been left alone to wander the world with all of his powers, his prestige, his signifiers of 'otherness' removed from him. The meeting with the 'watcher' is kind of comparable to the final scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey I think, being that it takes place in a strangely furnished hotel suite and is a kind of benediction before events move on to the next stage of existence. Although in this case it is the 'watcher' who is the one who has aged.

User avatar
Mr Sausage
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 9:02 pm
Location: Canada

Re: The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)

#216 Post by Mr Sausage » Tue Sep 23, 2014 1:51 pm

colinro wrote:I sort of see Bryce as understanding of Newton at the end with his perhaps too on the nose understanding final response to the line "I think Mr Newton's had enough" of "Yes, I believe he has". Newton is perhaps spent at the end, but I don't feel a sense of failure to communicate, more a communication between ex-business partners meeting again after a long time apart. Time is as much of a divider as distance is.
I never said they didn't understand each other on some level. But there are two key failures in communication: Bryce lies about Mary-Lou, with all that implies and withholds, and Newton's album is a communication Bryce doesn't understand and which evidently wasn't meant for him anyway. All the really important stuff isn't communicated.

User avatar
colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)

#217 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Sep 24, 2014 12:25 pm

"Ask me"
"What?"
"The question you've been wanting to ask me since we met"
"Are you a Lithuanian?"

I would agree, although do you feel that there is also a sense of ambiguity surrounding what either Newton or Bryce know about the other? We've seen Newton appear to Bryce before on the dock, so perhaps Newton has the ability to sense that Mary-Lou would be with Bryce, the same way he seems to sense that he is going to be betrayed. Perhaps his senses are simply more developed. And we've seen Bryce listening to Newton's record just before the final scene. He already suspects that Newton is a "Lithuanian" and can probably infer that the record could be a form of communication to his home planet. So they both talk around the subjects that they bring up (continuing their interactions from the previous scenes), with Bryce lying about Mary-Lou perhaps to spare Newton's feelings. It feels like a strange echo of the X-ray betrayal scene, which itself had previously shown Newton imagining his wife seeing his World Enterprises advert across space.

The question that I'm left with is why Bryce tracked Newton down again, although it results in a perfect final scene. Is it a guilty attempt to make amends now that Newton is as down to earth as they are, just another drunk human in a cafe? Or is Bryce just compelled to keep periodically checking in on Newton's progress, the way that a fascinated astronomer might observe the decaying grandeur from the slow death of a distant universe?
SpoilerShow
I'm speaking purely in terms of the film of course, as Tevis's wonderful novel features a much fuller version of that final scene discussing the kind of music Newton was singing, what he was saying in the message, the fate of the Earth, and so on. And Bryce is honest about living together in a relationship with "Betty Jo" in the novel. It is the kind of great narrative tying up passage you need in a novel. However in the film the dialogue of that scene gets cut down to its barest minimum, the same conversational material treated more obliquely through performance and music, which somehow multiplies its meanings more.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Thu Sep 25, 2014 4:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Sloper
Joined: Tue May 29, 2007 10:06 pm

Re: The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)

#218 Post by Sloper » Thu Sep 25, 2014 4:12 pm

Really interesting thoughts, Colin and Mr S. There's a moment in the scene where Newton is getting an injection, while watching The Third Man, where he plaintively says to the doctors, 'I came alone - I told you I came alone, nobody saw me.' We see the shot of Holly Martins' coat dropped by the swinging doors (by Anna), perhaps subliminally suggestive of the duffel coat Newton wore (as protection?) when he arrived on Earth. Then we cut to a flashback of the duffel-coated Newton descending the hill, and the watcher following him at a distance. (Could the empty, discarded coat be a key image here? Loss of protection? Nakedness?)

So the film goes out of its way to remind us of the watcher's presence at the start of the film, and to emphasise Newton's ignorance and innocence. The watcher represents a human force that Newton wasn't aware of - the notion of constant surveillance is part of it, definitely. But the look on the watcher's face in the bedroom scene Colin mentions is very telling. It's a sort of vigilant, slightly concerned expression - he's evaluating Newton to try and determine whether he still constitutes a potential threat, or whether he has at last been neutralised.

I think this is why, in the very next scene, Newton finds the door of his compound unlocked. Having been reduced to this state, all hope of returning home lost, his eyes permanently human (and notice that even before the x-ray burns them on, the alcoholic Newton cannot keep his hand steady enough to remove the lenses), he can safely be released. He's in a permanent state of captivity now, anyway.

Throughout the film, there's a real sense that Newton represents something wild - he reinvigorates the lives of Farnsworth, Mary-Lou and Bryce - but that he is also seen as representing a threat, something that needs to be ring-fenced and tamed. The narrative structures Mr Sausage points to play into this, I think. Even the establishment of World Enterprises is part of Newton’s downfall: long before the takeover, he unwittingly humanises (and thereby degrades) himself and his innovations by channelling them into this huge corporation. Having made WE (a significant acronym? loss of individuality? 'one of us'?) such a success, of course Newton has to play by the rules and 'take a wider view', fitting in and cooperating with the soulless economy of which he is now such an integral part.

So the watcher sort of ties this together, an emblem of the human impulse to police and smooth out difference, to neutralise and assimilate the alien. That’s what makes this such a sad film. Newton is this new, beautiful, brilliant and profoundly innocent creature, and we methodically snuff him out. It’s worse than killing him, in a way; Newton ends up resembling one of those resigned, docile animals you see in the zoo, reduced to the status of a passing amusement to be smiled at and patronised. There is something of the depressed polar bear in Newton’s final slump.

It’s especially sad because, as Colin says, the film adopts a very ‘human’ perspective, so we feel complicit in this process. But Newton does confess to Bryce, ‘We’d have probably treated you the same if you’d come over to our place’ – a nice idiomatic touch in that last phrase, showing how casually human Newton has become, and is if the distant alien planet is just the house down the road. The line also universalises the story, underlining the point that it’s not about humans vs. aliens, but humans vs. ‘the alien’. Any settled, established culture would chew up and spit out such a visitor.

Incidentally, in honour of this round of the film club, I watched Roeg and Cammell’s Performance for the first time last night – absolutely stunning film, a true masterpiece. Can’t believe I hadn’t seen it before. Roeg is extremely fond of zooming in and out of his characters’ faces (reminiscent of early Naruse in some ways!). Why is that? What kind of effects does it help him to achieve? It’s a very confrontational device, obviously, and like the hyperactive cutting between different scenes it creates a sense of constant dynamism. Perhaps it also relates to this theme of ‘watching’ we’ve been talking about, that sense of intrusive scrutiny. Of Roeg’s other films, I’ve only seen Don’t Look Now (quite possibly I’m the only forum member who hasn’t seen Walkabout...), so perhaps someone more familiar with his body of work can comment on this?

User avatar
colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)

#219 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Sep 25, 2014 8:00 pm

(Reading this post back before posting, I don't think this answers your queries on the use of zooms Sloper, but I'll post it anyway!)

The zooms do get used very interestingly in many of these early Roeg films, often seemingly in conjunction with a move into a kind of interior mindspace and usually coupled with a significant object, say the sand pouring out of the rock, or the fixing of the brooch in Bad Timing or the many close ups of watches in Insignificance.

A lot of it I think has to do with the attempt at providing links through associated imagery to comment on character, or even to provoke a suggestion of guilt in them (and therefore the audience) given that so many of these films are about interludes in character's lives being reminisced about, occasionally simultaneously as they are in the process of being lived through. So in Insignificance we get the zoom out of a blinding spotlight (very atom bomb-like) to introduce the Actress, followed by continual pans into her picture on the wall of the bar unsettling the Ballplayer. Or we get zooms into close ups of parts of bodies, say the Actress clutching the balloon.

One of the most impressive aspects of many of Roeg's films is just how quickly they set up the 'inciting incident' of the film to get their characters reminiscing as quickly as possible (within the first ten minutes or so) not just about events in their lives that we in the audience are not privy to, but also to events that we ourselves witnessed along with the characters. Bad Timing I feel is the film that plays with this the most audaciously due to its investigatory structure of flashbacks slowly revealing and reframing our relationship with our main characters. But Walkabout does it with its cut-up beginning into suicide scene, or Don't Look Now with the death of the daughter. We'll never know what the happy family life pre-accident in Don't Look Now was like, even as we're being asked to remember back to a time before that accident. Even The Man Who Fell To Earth does it by reminding us of the splashdown lake with the mid-point trip to visit it with Mary-Lou, while Newton himself reminisces of a period of his life further back than that, further back than we the audience can go with him back to his planet except in his abstracted memories.

I also wonder whether the zooms and internalised moments, and stream of consciousness editing style, also build into a comment on perhaps one of Roeg's biggest overarching themes: that of the tragic lack of or miscommunication between people, even in an intimate relationship. Even when you are alone with each other there is still a retreat into the depths of your own mind, into private concerns and fears, desires and drives, basically the core of individual motivations, that remains unexpressed on the surface level (this perhaps relates to Mr Sausage's point above) and perhaps barely conscious even to the character themselves (Donald Sutherland's character in Don't Look Now is perhaps the prime example of this compulsive drive turned risky wish fulfilment). We can see that in many of the climaxes of those early Roeg films, as characters become completely isolated from one another in devastating ways - say Jenny Agutter in her kitchen in Walkabout or Julie Christie reaching her arms through the barred gate in Don't Look Now, Theresa Russell turning away from Art Garfunkle (and damningly the audience) in Bad Timing, or Newton's passivity at the end of The Man Who Fell To Earth - having to live with an awareness that for a moment there was an experience of a kind of vitality that has disappeared from their existence. Often the audience are the ones left to note this sense of a way of life which has passed on, and in some ways was always inevitably going to slip away from the grasp of the characters with the natural passage of time, even if in filmic terms that passing away is sped up somewhat.

But the characters often seem that they have folded those, often difficult and sometimes painful, experiences into themselves to make them the people that they are by the end of the films. Maybe they are transforming into entirely different people because of the traumas they are experiencing, and perhaps these films show that process of coming out of the other end of that change, at least in those who survive the transition.

(I think my favourite part of any Roeg film has to be the extremely brief moment in Bad Timing when Theresa Russell's character leaves Denholm Elliott, walks directly into camera (zooming into us) and bursts into a magnificent smile at the last moment, as if on entering a new phase of her life, albeit one which is going to turn out to be just as bad for her as the previous relationship was!)

AnamorphicWidescreen
Joined: Tue Apr 16, 2013 12:21 am

Re: 304 The Man Who Fell to Earth

#220 Post by AnamorphicWidescreen » Mon Feb 23, 2015 7:30 pm

The Man who Fell to Earth is Roeg's least "accessible" film for me, and I don't mean that as a criticism, but more of a compliment. Even if you pay close attention, some things are still hazy. The passage of time is a very obvious theme in the film, but it's left intentionally unclear exactly how many years have passed from beginning (when the alien lands on Earth) to the end - is it 20 years? 30 years? It seems like things here are intentionally left ambiguous...

The sequence when
SpoilerShow
the lawyer & his assistant were both thrown out of the skyscraper window was quite brutal & unexpected, not least of which because it was somewhat unclear why this was done...I'm guessing it had something to do with corporate espionage
The ending scene with the DB alien drinking on the restaurant/bar patio was a fitting end to character & the film; despite all of his riches, with the passage of time & a rough life, he ended up a broken husk & a shade of his former self...

This was one of those Roeg films where the storyline/plot seemed secondary to the surreal tone/vibe the film was trying to convey.

The "true" appearance of the alien & his family reminded me quite a bit of the Martian aliens in the excellent late '70's TV mini-series The Martian Chronicles (based on the Ray Bradbury book of the same name)....


User avatar
colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: 304 The Man Who Fell to Earth

#222 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Sep 12, 2016 1:16 pm

The Man Who Fell To Earth is currently getting a 40th anniversary cinema release in the UK to be followed by a new DVD and Blu-ray, but the most exciting part of this is that the film's soundtrack is being released for the first time on CD or LP now and with some kind of collectible book edition in November.

Of course no Bowie on it, but you get Louis Armstrong singing Blueberry Hill, a version of Try To Remember and some of the best music to be thrown out of a window/dive into a pool to!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Mon Sep 12, 2016 1:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Robin Davies
Joined: Sat Sep 22, 2007 2:00 am

Re: 304 The Man Who Fell to Earth

#223 Post by Robin Davies » Mon Sep 12, 2016 1:30 pm

This is very welcome, though it's disappointing that the full soundtrack will not be on the Collector's Edition Blu-ray release of the film.
It would be even better if they could dig up Bowie's unused soundtrack:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/ ... n-phillips" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Post Reply