Beginning this Friday, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is putting on a retrospective of Scottish filmmaker Donald Cammell’s work. The series includes all four feature films Cammell directed, as well as an uncompleted short from 1972; a 75-minute documentary on the director made in 1998; the 1968 Robert Parrish directed Duffy, for which Cammell was screenwriter; and Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising, which featured Cammell as Osiris, God of Death.
Duffy (never released on video or DVD) stars three Jameses—Coburn, Mason and Fox—and partially takes place in swinging London, a scene Cammell was known to be a part of. From this experience, Cammell would come to direct his 1970 debut, Performance, the film for which he is (rightfully) best known (it is set to receive its long overdue DVD release on Feb. 13). With Performance, he re-teams with Fox who co-stars as Chas, a British gangster on the lam.
Playing opposite is Mick Jagger as Turner, a rock star who’s lost his mojo. In what the studio thought to be their version of Richard Lester’s highly commercial Beatles films, Performance is instead an experimental drug- and sex-filled masterpiece, once described by Marianne Faithfull as “a film that preserved a whole era under glass.” Influenced by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, William S. Burroughs, and Aleister Crowley, it is a hyper-stylized, unapologetically indulgent, self-reflective exploration of identity that could have only come from the ’60s.
Kent Jones, who programmed the series, says of Cammell, “[He] represents a moment when sexual experimentation, drug culture, rock and roll, avant-garde aesthetics, poetic impulse and—in Cammell’s particular case—black magic, all came together.” Exquisitely edited with highly innovative inter-cutting, the fractured narrative follows Chas and Turner—tough guy and pop star—as their egos collide.
Cammell went on to release a meager film a decade, beginning with 1977’s Demon Seed, starring Julie Christie as a housewife trapped inside her house and impregnated by a robot. It was followed by 1987’s White Of The Eye, a serial killer thriller, and 1996’s Wild Child, a fragmented softcore drama starring Christopher Walken and Anne Heche. All interesting failures at best—and at worst surprisingly amateurish and painfully bad—these are for the truly curious only.
We are left to wonder what role Perfomance’s far more accomplished co-director Nicolas Roeg had in crafting the film, and why Cammell, who committed suicide in 1996, was never able to fulfill the promise of his debut. Also, if the (partially self-created) myth of Cammell seems more compelling than his body of work. Kent Jones defends the director: “The narrative of the tortured artist is an instant grabber, and there are quite a few mediocre artists who have clung to it and made it work for them; but that's not the case with Cammell. He was amazingly gifted—visually, and with actors—and he was a great explorer unafraid to fail; rare in movies, American movies in particular.”
