Performance (1970) Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Exile on Notting Hill

It’s hard to discuss the breakdown and disillusionment of British and American culture of the 1960s going into the new decade, one of the richest and most well-documented periods in modern art, without bringing up The Rolling Stones. Throughout the scattering of the flower power movement and the Manson Murders, the Stones were at the forefront of the culture; as depicted in the Maysles Brothers’ doc Gimme Shelter, the stabbing of an audience member by a Hell’s Angel biker during the Stones’ set at the Altamont Free Concert in the December of 1969 is regarded by many as the moment the 1960s truly died.

The widely felt beauty, optimism, and excitement of the era was quite rapidly showing its ugly underbelly, but in 1968, before Charles Manson and before Altamont, the Stones’ own Mick Jagger would play a pivotal role in a film from two first time directors that would become a pivotal text during this shift, Performance. The story follows ruthless gangster right-hand man Chas, played by James Fox in a role gloriously against type for his aristocratic acting family dynasty that would become one of his go-to archetypes. He’s a vicious unsavoury type who takes glee in the violent tasks his boss sets out for him, until one night he goes a step too far and kills an old friend, forcing him to go into hiding. His exile leads him to a huge Notting Hill property-turned-squat, a hippie den where rockstar recluse Turner (Jagger) himself has gone into hiding alongside his girlfriends played by Michéle Breton (featured in Godard’s Weekend) and Stones’ muse Anita Pallenberg.

What ensues is difficult to articulate, as is the case with nearly all of Nicholas Roeg’s films. This is his directorial debut, but that’s after nearly two decades working as a camera operator and cinematographer, this film included. Screenwriter Donald Cammell too marks his directing debut, who was originally a painter and socialite. At its heart Performance is a subjective, scatter-brained breakdown of both a monumental era and of the self, an intense interrogation of persona, masculinity, sexuality, and reality itself. Few films before or since can boast being edited by no less than four different people, but if there was any film in the world that I would have guessed had this many editors cutting and splicing it together then Performance would probably be my first choice.

Perhaps as a result of this being his first effort directing, the editing is the wildest of Roeg’s entire career, and whilst the combination of scenes and shots doesn’t create some of the considered poetry of Don’t Look Now or Walkabout, its rash chaos of extraordinary shot choices, loose overdubbing of dialogue, and occasionally mindbending superimpositions create a radical but coherent experience watching. During its early crime section the hazy, out of step cutting feels like a proto-Harmony Korine in Spring Breakers mode, an intensely modern style I didn’t think I’d ever see replicated in the 1970s, while the more sensuous latter half has shades of the surreal logic Luca Guadagnino employs in Queer. It’s hard to understate how out of time Performance feels, epitomised by Jagger’s glorious Ry Cooder-scored rendition of Memo From Turner near the climax.

Through using nearly every cinematic technique in the book, Roeg and Cammell created an anti-boho diagnosis of the breakdown of the flower power movement far ahead of the curve. In fact Cammell’s screenplay is almost prophetic in certain ways, around the time of Performance’s eventual staggered release in 1971 Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones alongside Anita Pallenberg would flee the UK in the wake of a dispute with their manager, an exorbitant new tax bill from the government, and a slew of drug busts. The band found asylum in a dilapidated chateaux in France that would become a hive of creativity and debauchery where they would record one of their most acclaimed albums Exile on Main St, marking the period as a key reference point of bohemian culture and a bizarre mirror to Performance’s own story of crime-adjacent hippie hideouts, but to far more insular, morbid effect.

The role of who had the dominant voice in directing Performance is a contentious topic for some, but given that this was the beginning of the most productive and critically successful era of his career, where he’d immediately follow up with Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Bad Timing, an astounding run of his most celebrated films, it’s often Roeg who is attributed the most authorship over the film. In the aftermath of its difficult and delayed post-production, Donald Cammell’s reputation would seemingly go in the opposite direction. Despite moving to Hollywood immediately after finishing Performance to continue his film career he’d be faced with resistance at almost every turn and struggle to get his films off the ground, his three other films each being spread apart by almost a decade each, and all of them dwarfed by the impact of his debut, until his death by suicide in 1996. There’s a small contingent who believe that Cammell’s part in this film has been undercut by Roeg’s far larger status and that Performance is at its core Cammell’s film through and through, with Roeg’s input being purely technical. For me the answer to this debate is trivial, what’s fascinating is that there is a conflict of identity that runs from the external plot of the film all the way to the very heart of Performance, a creative dissonance that perfectly aligns with ideas at play on screen. It’s a miracle that this experimental enigma was ever released at all, let alone one that has managed to stay relevant in the conversation as long as it has, and time only reveals Performance more and more as an essential capsule of British culture and cinema.

Jake’s Archive – Performance (1970)