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film1970

Performance

Disciplines:
crime drama
psychological thriller
cinema/avant-garde cinema

Summary

A 1970 British film directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg in which a violent gangster hides in a reclusive rock star's London house and undergoes a dissolution of identity.

Core Contribution

Pioneered the collision of British crime cinema with avant-garde editing and rock-era counterculture, creating a template for identity-disruption narratives that influenced Nolan and many others.

Key Spikes & Highlights

  • Identity-swap as horror (the criminal and the artist exchange personalities through drugs, music, and sex — neither emerges intact)
  • Borges on screen (Mick Jagger is literally shown reading Borges, signaling that the film's logic is labyrinthine and literary rather than naturalistic)

Historical Influences

Jean-Luc Godard Jorge Luis Borges

Intellectual Lineage

British New Wave Swinging London cinema Avant-garde editing

Allied Works

Don't Look Now The Man Who Fell to Earth If....

Contemporaries & Peers

If.... Blow-UpDon't Look Now

Minds Influenced

Sexy BeastChristopher Nolan's structural vocabulary

Intellectual Posterity

No conceptual posterity found.

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Performance

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