Art film and rock and roll have, since the 60s, been soul­mates of a kind, with many an acclaimed direc­tor turn­ing to musi­cians as actors, com­mis­sion­ing rock stars as sound­track artists, and film­ing scenes with bands. Before Nico­las Roeg, Jim Jar­musch, David Lynch, Mar­tin Scors­ese and oth­er rock-lov­ing auteurs did all of the above, there was Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni, who bar­reled into the Eng­lish-lan­guage mar­ket, under con­tract with Metro-Gold­wyn-May­er, with a tril­o­gy of films steeped in the sights and sounds of six­ties coun­ter­cul­ture.

Blowup, the first and by far the best of these, though scored by jazz pianist Her­bie Han­cock, promi­nent­ly fea­tured the Yardbirds—with both Jim­my Page and Jeff Beck. In the mem­o­rable scene above, Beck smash­es his gui­tar to bits after his amp goes on the fritz. The Ital­ian direc­tor “envi­sioned a scene sim­i­lar to that of Pete Townshend’s famous rit­u­al of smash­ing his gui­tar on stage,” notes Gui­tar­world’s Jonathan Gra­ham. “Anto­nioni had even asked The Who to appear in the film,” but they refused.

In stepped the Yard­birds, dur­ing a piv­otal moment in their career. The year before, they released mega-hit “For Your Love,” and said good­bye to lead gui­tarist Eric Clap­ton. Beck, his replace­ment, her­ald­ed a much wilder, more exper­i­men­tal phase for the band. Jeff Beck, it seemed, could play any­thing, but what he didn’t do much of onstage is emote. Next to the gui­tar-smash­ing Town­shend or the fire-set­ting Hen­drix (see both below), he was a pret­ty reserved per­former, though no less thrilling to watch for his vir­tu­os­i­ty and style.

But as he tells it, Anto­nioni wouldn’t let the band do their “most excit­ing thing,” a cov­er of “Smoke­stack Light­ning” that “had this incred­i­ble buildup in the mid­dle which was just pow!” That moment would have been the nat­ur­al pre­text for a good gui­tar smash­ing.

Instead, the set piece with the bro­ken amp gives the intro­vert­ed Beck a rea­son to get agi­tat­ed. As Gra­ham describes it, he also played a gui­tar spe­cial­ly des­ig­nat­ed as a prop:

Due to issues over pub­lish­ing, the Yard­birds clas­sic “Train Kept A‑Rollin’,” was reworked as “Stroll On” for the per­for­mance, and as the scene involved the destruc­tion of an instru­ment, Beck’s usu­al choice of his icon­ic Esquire or Les Paul was swapped for a cheap, hol­low-body stand-in that he was direct­ed to smash at the song’s con­clu­sion.

The scene is more a tantrum than the orgias­tic onstage freak-out Town­shend would prob­a­bly have deliv­ered. Its chief virtue for Yard­bird’s fans lies not in the fun­ny, out-of-char­ac­ter moment (which SF Gate film crit­ic Mick LaSalle calls “one of the weird­est scenes in the movie”). Rather, it was “the chance,” as one fan tells LaSalle, “in the days before MTV and YouTube, to see the Yard­birds, with Jeff Beck and Jim­my Page.” Anto­nioni had seized the moment. In addi­tion to fir­ing “the open­ing sal­vo of the emerg­ing ‘film gen­er­a­tion,’” as Roger Ebert wrote, he gave con­tem­po­rary fans a rea­son (in addi­tion to explic­it sex and nudi­ty), to go see Blowup again and again.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The “Lost” Pink Floyd Sound­track for Michelan­ge­lo Antonioni’s Only Amer­i­can Film, Zabriskie Point (1970)

13-Year-Old Jim­my Page Plays Gui­tar on TV in 1957, an Ear­ly Moment in His Spec­tac­u­lar Career

Jim Jar­musch: The Art of the Music in His Films

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Crit­ics have applaud­ed Bradley Coop­er for the bold move of cast­ing Lady Gaga in his new remake of A Star Is Born, and as its tit­u­lar star at that. As much cin­e­mat­ic dar­ing as it takes to cast a high-pro­file musi­cian in their first star­ring role in the movies, the act has its prece­dents, thanks not least to film­mak­er Nico­las Roeg, who died last week. Hav­ing start­ed out at the bot­tom of the British film indus­try, serv­ing tea at Lon­don’s Maryle­bone Stu­dios the year after World War II end­ed, he became a cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er (not least on David Lean’s Lawrence of Ara­bia) and then a direc­tor in his own-right. That chap­ter of Roeg’s career began with 1970’s Per­for­mance, which he co-direct­ed with Don­ald Cam­mell and in which he cast no less a rock star than Mick Jag­ger in his act­ing debut.

You can see Jag­ger in action in Per­for­mance’s trail­er, which describes the pic­ture as “a film about mad­ness… mad­ness and san­i­ty. A film about fan­ta­sy. This is a film about fan­ta­sy and real­i­ty… and sen­su­al­i­ty. A film about death… and life. This is a film about vice… and ver­sa.”

Those words reflect some­thing real about not just Per­for­mance itself — which crash­es the end of the swing­ing 1960s into grim gang­ster­ism in a man­ner that draws equal­ly from Borges and Bergman — but Roeg’s entire body of work, and also the strug­gle that mar­keters went through to sell it to the pub­lic. But you don’t so much buy a tick­et to see a Nico­las Roeg film as you buy a tick­et to expe­ri­ence it, not least because of the par­tic­u­lar per­for­ma­tive qual­i­ties brought to the table by the music stars Roeg put onscreen.

In 1976 Roeg cast David Bowie as a space alien named Thomas Jerome New­ton in the “shock­ing, mind-stretch­ing expe­ri­ence in sight, in space, in sex” of The Man Who Fell to Earth, arguably the role he was born to play. “I thought of David Bowie when I first was try­ing to fig­ure out who would be Mr. New­ton, some­one who was inside soci­ety and yet awk­ward in it,” Roeg says in the doc­u­men­tary clip above. “David got more than into the char­ac­ter of Mr. New­ton. I think he put much more of him­self than we’d been able to get into the script. It was linked very much to his ideas in his music, and towards the end, I real­ized a big change had hap­pened in his life.” How much Bowie took from the role remains a mat­ter for fans to dis­cuss, though he him­self admits to tak­ing one thing in par­tic­u­lar: the wardrobe. “I lit­er­al­ly walked off with the clothes,” he says, “and I used the same clothes on the Sta­tion to Sta­tion tour.”

Even if step­ping between the con­cert stage and the cin­e­ma screen looks nat­ur­al in ret­ro­spect for the likes of Jag­ger and Bowie, can it work for a low­er-key but nev­er­the­less world-famous per­former? Roeg’s 1980 film Bad Tim­ing cast, in the star­ring role of an Amer­i­can psy­chi­a­trist in Cold War Vien­na who grows obsessed with a young Amer­i­can woman, Art Gar­funkel of Simon and Gar­funkel. (Play­ing the woman, inci­den­tal­ly, is There­sa Rus­sell, who would lat­er show up in Roeg’s Insignif­i­cance in the role of Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe.) The clip above shows a bit of how Roeg uses the per­sona of Gar­funkel, sure­ly one of the least Dionysian among all 1960s musi­cal icons, to infuse the char­ac­ter with a cere­bral chill. In Roeg’s New York Times obit­u­ary, Gar­funkel remem­bers — fond­ly — that the direc­tor “brought me to the edge of mad­ness.” Roeg, for his part, had already paid his musi­cian stars their com­pli­ments in that paper decades ear­li­er: “The fact is that Jag­ger, Bowie and Gar­funkel are all extreme­ly bright, intel­li­gent and well edu­cat­ed. A long way from the pub­lic stereo­type.” But will any direc­tor use per­form­ers like them in quite the same way again?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe Explains Rel­a­tiv­i­ty to Albert Ein­stein (in a Nico­las Roeg Movie)

Watch David Bowie Star in His First Film Role, a Short Hor­ror Flick Called The Image (1967)

When David Bowie Became Niko­la Tes­la: Watch His Elec­tric Per­for­mance in The Pres­tige (2006)

Mick Jag­ger Acts in The Nightin­gale, a Tele­vised Play from 1983

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.