Nicolas Roeg’s Perversion of Suture

Nicolas Roeg has died at the age of 90. People will remember him for a striking form of vision embodied in the many films that he directed or filmed as cinematographer. For me, this vision is nowhere more poignantly indicated than in his uncannily self-reflexive masterpiece Don’t Look Now (1973), in which he undermines conventions of cinematic sight through subtly shocking POV shots that align the camera and our eyes with the perspectives of inanimate objects (such as the doll above) or sightless characters (the blind woman whose vision structures a crucial scene in the film, as I argue in my interactive video essay on it: “Don’t Look Now: Paradoxes of Suture”).

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