566 Insignificance

[domino harvey]

Insignificance's conceit is so outlandish that it needs a very good impetus for its existence, and I find nothing the film attempts, much less arrives upon, compelling enough to justify this methodology. By using stereotyped caricatures for the quartet depicted, Roeg and co. may indeed by aiming at a higher plane of critical consciousness via exploiting preexistent notions of these celebrities as outsiders looking in saw/see them. But the actual result is just obnoxious, as cartoon representations trade reference-happy eye-roller after eye-roller under a half-cocked philosophical umbrella that is a grotesque extrapolation on Wallace Shawn's least-loved party foul, the Celebrity What-If.

[jbeall]

And don't forget that we now have two Tony Curtis films joining his appearance in Spartacus to become part of the collection this year!

Don't forget Sweet Smell of Success.

I enjoyed it and thought that, at least in light of Performance and Bad Timing, that the film is quintessentially Roeg-ian in its constant play with high- and popular-cultural references. But I found it more fun than deep, and I'm not sure if the constant pomo pastiche ever (in any pomo work) adds up to anything meaningful, though I'd love to be proven wrong.

[simplelines]

Does anyone here know if Insignificance is supposed to be overly grainy? Don't misunderstand that question: I do realize grain is a part of most good transfers. I asked because it seemed to be a little too much at times, and I've even started to consider that my computer may be reading the disc incorrectly (if that's even possible). If there isn't a problem with the disc, and the awful picture throughout most of the film is supposed to be that way, I may sell it. The transfer gave me a headache. I doubt it's Criterion's fault, but it is what it is. At times, I felt like I was watching one of the earliest DVD transfers from the 90's.

[Roger Ryan]

Criterion's house style seems to allow more grain in their transfers than other labels. That said, INSIGNIFICANCE looks fine on my 51" TV and true to what I'd expect from this particular film. As others have pointed out, a monitor's sharpness setting should really be kept fairly low if not "off" altogether when watching Blu-rays. I don't know how this would apply to your computer's monitor, but I imagine a high sharpness setting would have more affect on a grainier transfer than one that used a lot of DNR.

[med]

Although in fairness to Criterion, he does cite Wikipedia in this essay.

Item! In his commentary track for The Turin Horse, Rosenbaum lets loose with an "According to Wikipedia..." at one point.

[knives]

He's been beaten down a lot as the interview someone recently posted shows. I mean he claims to be making work anonymously now just to avoid the critical drubbing he routinely endures.

Does anyone know how factual this is. Watching a double feature of this and Performance today made me really wish there was more Roeg out there.

[Cold Bishop]

I think that claim refers to art installations, not films.

[repeat]

I wouldn't be surprised if it were true, hard pressed to think of another director so widely held to have lost the plot entirely in mid-career - I suspect it's a self-perpetuating received idea, but must admit I haven't got around to watching anything post-80's myself. Puffball has an amazing 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, how common is that?

Not crazy about Performance (I like all his 70's solo stuff though), but Insignificance is definitely one of my all time favorites. Castaway actually looks like a potentially underrated gem to me.

[MichaelB]

I wouldn't be surprised if it were true, hard pressed to think of another director so widely held to have lost the plot entirely in mid-career - I suspect it's a self-perpetuating received idea, but must admit I haven't got around to watching anything post-80's myself. Puffball has an amazing 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, how common is that?

RT clearly didn't take my Sight & Sound review into account: with several reservations, I thought it was a rather pleasant surprise - and unquestionably a genuine Nic Roeg film in a way that a lot of his post-80s stuff wasn't.

Spoiler

The fact that Puffball is Nicolas Roeg’s first feature film in over a decade makes it of more than usual interest, not least because one of British cinema’s few genuine visionaries is back on something approaching recognisable form. As in Walkabout (1971) and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Puffball turns an outwardly normal environment — rural Ireland here — into something charged with weirdly inexplicable potency. Alongside Performance (1970) and Track 29 (1988), it has elements of ritualised ceremony, though it has most in common with 1973’s Don’t Look Now, which similarly revolves around children, a building restoration project and sinister women with psychic powers.

Both films also feature Donald Sutherland, who makes two brief appearances here in circumstances so disconnected from the main narrative that his character Lars isn’t mentioned in the synopsis. He’s the former mentor of architect Liffey Lambert (Kelly Reilly), ostensibly examining the cottage she’s restoring, but he becomes fascinated by an ancient stone, triggering an all-consuming, possibly ancestral interest in Nordic gods. Lars argues that Liffey should raze the cottage to the ground because its built-in memories cannot be mellowed, whereas she wants these memories to evolve from the inside out— an exchange that reveals much not only about Puffball but about Roeg’s approach to cinema in general.

The project’s gestation is paralleled by Liffey’s pregnancy. Roeg has never fought shy of graphic sexual material but its purpose usually goes beyond titillation, whether as an expression of freedom (Performance), obsession (Bad Timing, 1980) or, most famously, between a couple clinging to each other in the wreckage of a bereavement (Don’t Look Now). Puffball, though, deals with coition’s primary biological purpose, emphasised by several startling shots of the inside of Liffey’s vagina at the point of her partner’s ejaculation. (This is true to Fay Weldon’s source novel, which is replete with similar gynaecological detail.)

However, the bulk of the film is a horror melodrama that sits uneasily with the more Roegian elements. Liffey’s neighbour Mabs (Miranda Richardson) has three daughters but is desperate for a boy, and when told that she’s too old, she blames Liffey, whose pregnancy seems to be sapping her ability to conceive. Her motive for having a boy is to ‘correct’ an appalling family tragedy, her brother having burned to death in the cottage — which was previously owned by their mother Molly (a red-wigged Rita Tushingham, whose presence similarly evokes plenty of memories).

A witch, Molly plants straw effigies and her son’s shoes in the cottage and concocts potions to try to boost her daughter’s fertility: she sees Mabs’ longed-for son as some kind of resurrection. Molly’s visionary powers are shared with her granddaughter Audrey (Leona Igoe), whose obsessive noodling on an electronic keyboard is not so much a symptom of teenage withdrawal as an urge to block out family strife and disturbing premonitory images. Roeg dissolves to close-ups of indeterminate crystalline patterns and developing embryos (sometimes inside the fungal puffballs dotting the landscape) before letting rip with a trio of full-blown supernatural set pieces featuring a deformed baby and a Caesarean by kitchen knife.

In short, Puffball is a cinematic brew just as heady as one of Molly’s concoctions. In this overwhelmingly matriarchal environment, it’s perhaps appropriate that the male characters barely register. Reilly acquits herself well with sometimes unsympathetic material (such as an uncharacteristically crass cut from her bleeding crotch at the point of miscarriage to the hole at the heart of the ancient stone), and veterans Richardson and Tushingham just about prevent the witchcraft subplot from lurching into farce. Aside from funding issues, it’s hard to see why the location was shifted from the novel’s Somerset to Ireland, since nothing is made of the country’s own pagan heritage aside from Liffey’s name now evoking Dublin’s ancient river. But although Puffball never regains the heights of Roeg’s 1970s masterpieces, it ranks alongside little-seen Two Deaths as his most intriguing effort since Insignificance.

(My review's in the spoiler tags - I don't think there are any significant spoilers as such, but I thought I'd play safe).

Not crazy about Performance (I like all his 70's solo stuff though), but Insignificance is definitely one of my all time favorites. Castaway actually looks like a potentially underrated gem to me.

I should probably see it again to give it a fair hearing, but I can't say I'm in any hurry. For me, this was where Roeg seriously started to go downhill - although it wasn't a linear slope, as I loved The Witches.

[knives]

Yeah, Insignificance doesn't entirely work due to wanting to grind in who these people are supposed to represent without saying who they are which leads to severe silliness. I do think though that that apocalyptic ending is pretty much perfect and had it been the last thing he did it would have been the perfect way to go out. Basically I think the problems are primarily due to the source material and not Roeg's direction which is just lovely to behold.

I think that claim refers to art installations, not films.

Booger, though it's nice he's still getting any work.

[criterion10]

hard pressed to think of another director so widely held to have lost the plot entirely in mid-career

I actually had a conversation with someone on Letterboxd recently, where we compared Ken Russell to Nicolas Roeg as another director who had an early period of brilliance, but eventually lost it.

I'm not as familiar with Roeg as I am with Russell, who is a favorite of mine, so I can't comment on what caused his career to go downhill. Although, in regards to Russell, it was largely due to a number of critical and commercial failures (most notably Lisztomania and Valentino), coupled with the controversy surrounding Altered States; this eventually caused him to begin making much lesser productions with studios that no longer even exist.

[repeat]

Yeah, Insignificance doesn't entirely work due to wanting to grind in who these people are supposed to represent without saying who they are which leads to severe silliness. I do think though that that apocalyptic ending is pretty much perfect and had it been the last thing he did it would have been the perfect way to go out. Basically I think the problems are primarily due to the source material and not Roeg's direction which is just lovely to behold.

I know what you mean, but I don't even mind the silliness, for me it's part of the package - but anyway, the ending and the flashback sequences (which I think are entirely Roeg's own devising) are for sure among some of the perfect moments in cinema for me. Actually I think it's pretty unbelievable that this thing even got filmed in the first place!

A piece of trivia that never ceases to amuse me, this was released in parts of Europe with the hilariously (in)appropriate title She's The Bomb; the original was probably deemed unpronouncable for whatever non-English speaking target audience the distributors were dreaming of...

[zedz]

Not crazy about Performance (I like all his 70's solo stuff though), but Insignificance is definitely one of my all time favorites. Castaway actually looks like a potentially underrated gem to me.

I should probably see it again to give it a fair hearing, but I can't say I'm in any hurry. For me, this was where Roeg seriously started to go downhill - although it wasn't a linear slope, as I loved The Witches.

I haven't seen Castaway since it came out, and I was very disappointed. Potentially great premise, lots of capacity for astounding visuals and sequences (they've even got music from Eno / Hassell's Fourth World on the soundtrack), but as soon as the film should be ramping up, it sort of peters out. Bear in mind that Roeg and his camera crew have to pretend that Oliver Reed is wasting away, so the coverage gets pretty odd!

[colinr0380]

I really like Insignificance, 'iconic' characters and all, though I certainly agree with knives that it is likely the play rather than the direction that would really be the inherent cause of issues audiences have with the material. Insignificance really seems as if it is the last hurrah for that extremely intricate, heavily inter-edited 'stream of consciousness', complex yet also effortless-seeming style of filmmaking that Roeg was a brilliant master of and perfected through Walkabout, Don't Look Now, Man Who Fell To Earth, Bad Timing, Eureka and here. Although you can start to see the more linear style on display here in the more stagey-sections (which I like, I hasten to add!), before the magnificent editing between the characters coming together, the wordless flashback scenes and end sequence shatters them into splintered fragments again.

The later films from Castaway and on (Track 29, The Witches, Cold Heaven, the segment in Aria and so on) are often still interesting and entertaining narratively and performance-wise but much more straightforwardly presented. Which can be a disappointment for those looking for a stylistic continuation of his best works.

[AnamorphicWidescreen]

Watched Insignificance for the first time recently; liked the film quite a bit - very interesting that the names Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, Albert Einstein, etc. were never mentioned in the film, though it was obvious these characters were supposed to be (or at least supposed to represent) them.

My impression was that the Roeg (or whoever wrote the script) was trying to combine certain eras in U.S. history (in this case the '40's - '50's?!) by bringing together all of these huge personalities in one hotel/hotel room. However, I will admit I'm not really sure what the film was trying to say - possibly that these characters were all larger-than-life icons, but that they were also flawed to a great extent?!...

Spoiler

The scene with the aftermath of the atomic bomb was quite chilling...

I will have to re-visit the movie at some point, since I have a feeling I'll get more out of this the second time around...

I've only seen a handful of his films that came out after this (Track 29, Witches - neither of which I thought were that great), but I agree that Insignificance was possibly his last movie that really used his signature & compelling non-linear, stream-of-consciousness editing to a great extent - that being said, I haven't seen all of his post-'85 films so can't say this definitively....

[Roger Ryan]

...My impression was that the Roeg (or whoever wrote the script) was trying to combine certain eras in U.S. history (in this case the '40's - '50's?!) by bringing together all of these huge personalities in one hotel/hotel room....

The film is based on a stage play by Terry Johnson who also wrote the screenplay. While the chance meeting of these "huge personalities" is entirely fictional, the time-frame of the film can be pin-pointed to September, 1954; it was that month that Monroe was in New York shooting the famous skirt scene for THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH along with her husband DiMaggio, McCarthy had just completed his latest round of hearings and Einstein was teaching at Princeton.

[AnamorphicWidescreen]

The film is based on a stage play by Terry Johnson who also wrote the screenplay. While the chance meeting of these "huge personalities" is entirely fictional, the time-frame of the film can be pin-pointed to September, 1954; it was that month that Monroe was in New York shooting the famous skirt scene for THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH along with her husband DiMaggio, McCarthy had just completed his latest round of hearings and Einstein was teaching at Princeton.

Thanks for the clarification. I knew the meeting(s) between these four was fictional, but I appreciate the pin-pointing of the time-frame. So, even though it never happened, I guess the point is that it conceivably "could" have...in some kind of alternate reality...