One of the hotly anticipated highlights at the second edition of Mediterrane Film Festival, which opens this weekend in Malta, is a posthumous tribute to David Bowie. The legendary British art-rock icon, who departed this earthly dimension for a higher astral plane in 2016, left a deep imprint on film culture not just as a musician but also occasional actor, soundtrack composer, omnivorous movie fan and champion of cult directors. Bowie was primarily a rock superstar, but his long and rich creative career was steeped in cinema, hooked to the silver screen.
Almost 55 years ago, in July 1969, a then-unknown Bowie made his first visit to Malta to perform at the International Song Festival, held at the Hilton hotel in Valletta. His breakthrough hit Space Oddity had just been released, but the long-haired folk-pop singer from South London played an older composition, the wistful When I Live My Dream, plus a Maltese song for which he had composed English lyrics, No-One Someone. He won second prize in the contest, played an impromptu show for the crew of a US aircraft carrier docked in Valletta harbour, and sent a telegram to his wife Angie complaining the weather was “bloody hot”.
More than half a century later, Bowie’s legacy lives on in Malta, with a slender program of festival screenings plus a masterclass on his cinematic work hosted by Adrian Woottonm CEO of Film London. The key title, an audiovisual feast on the big screen, is the late rock icon’s first major acting role as Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). Charting the slow corruption of an extra-terrestrial business tycoon adrift in the hostile alien weirdness of 1970s America, director Nicolas Roeg’s cult sci-fi classic was a perfect fit for Bowie, who was exiled in the US himself at the time, insulating himself from high-pressure supernova fame with a major cocaine habit. Roeg was also a great match for Bowie: both were visionary English mavericks with a shared taste for the avant-garde, surrealism, random cosmic connections and occult mysticism.
Cerebral, hypnotic and luminously beautiful, The Man Who Fell to Earth remains a richly rewarding inner-space odyssey half a century later. It is certainly dense with literary allusions, from Icarus and Daedalus in Greek mythology, who plunged earthwards after flying too close to the sun, to Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. There are strong Biblical echoes too, with Newton as a messianic innocent betrayed by Judas-like friends. The passing decades have added some more timely resonances, notably climate change, with Newton fleeing ecological catastrophe on his home planet. The film clearly struck an autobiographical chord with Bowie, who revisited his most feted screen alter ego at the end of his life in his hit stage musical Lazarus.
But Bowie’s relationship with the big screen went deeper than his acting sideline. His music itself was cinematic, widescreen and immersive, drawing on a deep filmic hinterland for visual and lyrical inspiration. Indeed, his 1969 breakthrough hit Space Oddity was a thinly veiled homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a spectacular psychedelic opus about a stranded astronaut undergoing a mystical transformation on the farthest fringes of the galaxy. Even the astronaut’s name, David Bowman, felt like an uncanny echo. Bowie would later borrow elements of Kubrick’s next film, A Clockwork Orange (1971), for his dystopian glam-rock messiah persona Ziggy Stardust.
Long before he crossed over into acting, cinematic allusions and cracked actors figured prominently in Bowie’s work, from the famous Greta Garbo pose he replicated on the cross-dressing cover of his 1971 album Hunky Dory to his mid 1970s live tours, which borrowed their stage designs and stark monochrome palette from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and other German Expressionist classics. On his 1976 Isolar tour Bowie even screened the surreal silent short Un Chien Andalou (1929), a collaboration between director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí, before coming onstage.
As an actor, Bowie earned some of his finest notices for his co-starring role on Nagisa Oshima’s elegant literary adaptation Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983), a lyrical depiction of sadism, stoicism and unspoken homoerotic desire in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. By stark contrast, he also played a suave vampire entangled in a bisexual love triangle with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon in the stylish but shallow erotic thriller The Hunger (1983), directed by Tony Scott, brother of Ridley. Much mocked at the time, his role as goblin king Jareth in Muppets mastermind Jim Henson’s fairy-tale puppet fantasy Labyrinth (1986) has earned enduring cult appeal, partly because the singer’s winking performance as a diabolical charmer with glam-rock hair and prominent trouser bulge made him a sex symbol to a whole new generation of younger female fans.
In his later career, Bowie mostly retired from acting, though he occasionally popped up in offbeat indie dramas and minor festival films. But he was sporadically lured back in front of the camera by high-profile offers from major directors like Martin Scorsese, David Lynch and Christopher Nolan. His cameo as Pontius Pilate in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) may be brief, but it is electrifying. “He left behind a remarkable body of work,” Scorsese told Entertainment Weekly shortly after Bowie’s death in 2016. “His music and his image and his focus were always changing, always in motion, and with every movement, every change, he left a deep imprint on the culture.”
Increasingly reclusive in his autumn years, Bowie initially declined Christopher Nolan’s offer to play maverick Serbian genius inventor Nikola Tesla in the deluxe magic-trick thriller The Prestige (2006). But Nolan persisted, ultimately capturing one of the late rock legend’s most memorably bizarre screen roles. “Tesla was this other-worldly, ahead-of-his-time figure,” the director told Entertainment Weekly in 2016, “and at some point it occurred to me he was the original Man Who Fell to Earth.”
