We Lost A Pair

Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, directors Nicolas Roeg (top) and Bernardo Bertolucci (bottom) both passed away, in London and Rome, respectively.  Both had influenced us immensely.

Back in the 1970s, we took four years off between high school and college.   In retrospect, it was the wisest thing we could have done at the time. But when we finally decided it was time to continue our education, we wound up enrolling at Boston University as a Film & Broadcast major.  Our decision was largely based on the impressions films like Roeg's Walkabout, Don't Look Now, and The Man Who Fell To Earth, and Bertolucci's The Conformist and Last Tango In Paris had made on us.  If that was the kind of art that could be created on screen, we wanted to be a part of it.  Sure, there were Americans who were doing some interesting things at the time too (e.g., Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver), but it seemed to us that it was the Europeans who were really blazing a new trail.  If we couldn't be directors like them, if after trying our hand it turned out we didn't have the talent, then we wanted to be screenwriters or cinematographers or at the very least literate critics like The New Yorker's Pauline Kael, and BU seemed like just the place to get started.

Or so we had thought.  As it turned out, in those post-Watergate years, BU's School of Public Communications was more interested in turning out print and television journalists than in artsy film directors, and what we really wanted to learn was being taught over in the Theater and Drama program at the School of Fine Arts, but we weren't interested in all the stage plays and theatrics that program entailed.  Don't get us wrong, we're not criticizing the School of Public Communications - it turns out our freshman classmates included Howard Stern and Geena Davis (although we never knew or noticed either of them).  If we had stayed there, we would probably have been right at ground zero when the burgeoning punk-rock scene intersected with videography and the rock-music video was invented, and who knows where that would have taken us (probably to rehab, eventually).  But disillusioned with the Public Communication curriculum, we eventually wound up making the unlikely transfer from a Film & Broadcast major to majoring in geology, probably the first and only time that's ever happened.

Anyway, this isn't about us, it's about the loss of two of the titans of art cinema, two provocateurs who made movies unlike anyone before them or after, and the unlikely proximity of the dates of both of their demises (November 23 for Roeg and November 26 for Bertolucci).

That's not the only pair that we lost today (warning, awkward segue coming up) - this morning we lost a pair of teeth.  All throughout the Thanksgiving holiday and all throughout the whole long weekend, we were dreading the appointment we had made with the dentist to have two teeth extracted first thing Monday morning.  It was hard to feel thankful with that sword hanging over our head.  But Monday morning came, we went, and they're gone.  Two less teeth in our head.  It was relatively painless, although one tooth put up more of a fight than the other, and we're home today recovering with ibuprofen and Tylenol.  The only solace we can find is that with our self-extraction a couple weeks ago and with one other tooth extracted about ten years ago, that's now four gone out of 32, so this process can't go on forever.  The thought "four down, 28 to go" has crossed our mind, but we're not buying into that.

Anyway, tough way to start a week - two of our cinematic heroes gone and two teeth yanked out of our heads Monday morning. We should name the new gaps in our smile "Nicolas" and "Bernardo."