Weekend Economists Mourn David Bowie 8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016 (1/15/16)

[Proserpina]

24. Bowie the film star: imaginative, daring and endlessly charismatic

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2016/jan/11/david-bowie-film-star-appreciation-man-who-fell-to-earth-labyrinth-prestige

In terms of drama and characterisation David Bowie put his genius into his music, not his movie work, although his film career was as imaginative, daring and eclectic as everything else about him. Space Oddity is, in its way, a perfectly formed sci-fi mini-masterpiece of the 60s, charting in tiny, brilliant narrative leaps Major Tom’s excitement at blast-off, his ascent to celebrity status, his “space birth” outside the capsule, the disaster of the mission, and his epiphanic acceptance of love, mortality and man’s insignificance in the vastness of space. A film might take 120 minutes to tell the same story — less well.

Pop singers from Sinatra to Elvis to Madonna have dabbled in the movies, with varying results, but David Bowie always convinced his public that every role he accepted was an artistic decision and an artistic experiment, governed by his own idealism.

His orchidaceous strangeness made Bowie perfect casting for Nic Roeg’s 1976 movie The Man Who Fell To Earth — his film debut, in fact — based on the Walter Tevis novel, about the extraterrestrial creature who comes to Earth looking for water and natural resources for his own stricken planet. Bowie himself, the exotic exquisite, was to all intents and purposes an extraterrestrial himself; and unlike all the other heroes of 70s glam, it seemed as if his eerie beauty would not come off with the make-up.

Bowie’s style and his line readings were not those of a trained actor, and he continued to be mocked, affectionately and otherwise, for a certain space-oddity in his performance. But watched again, what is striking in The Man Who Fell to Earth is Bowie’s utter calmness, self-possession and poise. This is not stunt casting: it is event casting. Bowie endows the movie with his own extraordinary charisma and prestige, as if appearing in an installation or art happening...

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