Shattered Memories

DRAWER FILLED WITH CUFF LINKS. A WALL SPLATTERED WITH RED LIQUID. A dizzying helicopter shot of a car racing through city streets. Naked writhing bodies. A clock ticking. Naked writhing bodies again. Nicolas Roeg put shots together like this, abolishing connective tissue and banishing linear time. His work is as unique to him as a fingerprint or DNA, and so imitated that it’s now part of the conventional language of filmmaking. What is not easy to imitate is the emotional impact of his style, how personal his vision was. Roeg’s work plunges you into the pool of the unconscious, where symbols equal reality, where is about sex, where the thought nags, “Something meaningful is going on here, if I could just figure out what it is.” “My interest is energy. Transference of energy,” says Newton (David Bowie) in Roeg’s , and the same could