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A minor entry in the Nicolas Roeg filmography that few people will have seen. In March 2001 the BBC broadcast four 15-minute films that the corporation had commissioned for an occasional arts strand, Sound on Film. Each episode featured a new piece of music by a living composer, with visual accompaniment by four very different directors. Pilgrimage was directed by Werner Herzog with music by John Taverner; The New Math was directed by Hal Hartley with music by Louis Andriessen; In Absentia was directed by the Quay Brothers with music by Karlheinz Stockhausen.

The second film in the series, The Sound of Claudia Schiffer had music by Adrian Utley, the guitarist/synth player in Portishead, with visuals by Nicolas Roeg. I can imagine many people bristling at Utley being described as a composer in a list that includes Stockhausen and Taverner—he may well dispute the term himself—but being the owner of many Portishead records I was happy enough with the pairing. I wasn’t so happy with the film, however, which seemed like an incoherent reprise of the more cosmic moments from Roeg’s earlier films combined with found footage and computer effects that were clunky at the time and look distinctly antiquated 25 years later. The BBC’s listing described The Sound of Claudia Schiffer as a film that “contemplates the nature of celebrity and memory, and how vision can be affected by sound”. In the short introduction Roeg admits to being unsure what any of it meant at all.

Watching the piece again I still don’t think it’s very good but it does reinforce my view of Roeg as the most cosmically aware of British directors, especially among the resolutely parochial crowd (Ken Russell excepted) who were his contemporaries. “Cosmic” in this sense is a quality that can easily devolve into vague mysticism or New Age kitsch but at his best Roeg was always looking beyond the immediate confines of space and time, whatever his films might be concerned with at the story level. You see this in his persistent cross-cutting, where visual and thematic rhymes turn everyday life into a web of intricate connections which his characters fail to notice. And his films are often cosmic in a stellar sense; watching Eureka again I was struck this time by the way the film opens with a shot of a pool of gold-infused water whose surface resembles a cloudscape over the sea as observed by an orbiting satellite. The shot which follows—only the second image in the film—is a view of the Earth from space, something which the film’s characters (in 1925 and 1945) could never see for themselves. The Sound of Claudia Schiffer goes overboard with this expansive tendency, turning the model’s narrated biography into something more suited to a description of a visitor from another planet.

Of the other films in this series, the Hartley/Andriessen doesn’t seem to be on YouTube but the Herzog/Taverner may be seen here. In Absentia has been available for many years now on the Quay Brothers’ DVD and blu-ray collections.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Roeg abroad
• Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
• The Nicolas Roeg Guardian Lecture, 1983
• Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Space
• Canal view