Nicolas Roegs Bad Timing Movie Review Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4000 words

Nicolas Roegs Bad Timing - Movie Review ExampleIts a completely different discipline, it exists on its own. I would say that the beauty of it is its not the theater, its not done over again. Its done in bits and pieces. Things are happening which you cant get again.When the French poet, theorist- involvemaker, Jean Epstein, first delivered his concept of Photogenie to Parisian salons and academic circles at the Sorbonne in 1923 and 1924, film as an art form was in its infancy. The whole idea of film as a medium worthy of serious scholarship, along with the phylogeny of the auteur theory, was still decades off. Yet, the seeds were planted and if it wasnt for his early, groundbreaking works, (or in Walter Benjamins case, shocking words), we wouldnt have the concept of independent film or cinema as an art form onto itself, something we a great deal take for granted today. The films of director Nicolas Roeg, taken as a whole, have been read as experimental, voyeuristic, brilliant and b ombastic. Roeg started out working in the British film industry in London and developed his craft working as a camera assistant. He ended up heading second units on two films for director David Lean, the epic masterpieces, Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. Roeg then went on to win high acclaim in his own right as the cinematographer of the continent films Fahrenheit 451, Far From the Madding Crowd and Petulia, for the influential directors Francois Truffaut, John Schlesinger, and Richard Lester. When Roeg decided it was time to direct his own films, he proceeded with an instinctual knowledge of what he wanted. It is with this sensibility, a way of pursue his craft by what appeals to the senses, that he approached the film Bad Timing A Sensual Obsession, a work that mevery have argued is one of his best, along military position the classic Dont Look Now. I will pursue, in this paper, how Epsteins concept of photogenie and Walter Benjamins idea of the optical unconscious, fro m his essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Technological duplicability2, are seminal to the work of Roeg in the film Bad Timing in his use of the camera, his approach to the actors (especially in relationship in their use of props), his maturation of the story in his editing choices and in the final re-structuring of the film.Jean Epstein defined his concept of photogenie, first coined by Lois Delluc as the art of cinema, as any aspect of things, beings or souls whose moral character is enhanced by filmic reproduction. He goes on to sayThe mind travels in time, just as it does in space. But whereas in space we imagine three directions at right angles to each other, in time we conceptualise only one the past-future vector. We can conceive a space-time system in which the past-future direction also passes through the point of intersection of the three acknowledged spatial directions, at the precise act when it is between past and future the present, a point in time, an instant witho ut duration, as