Performance (film) - Influence

Influence

Several aspects of the film were novel and historically it foreshadows MTV type music videos (particularly the 'Memo from Turner' sequence in which Jagger sings) and many popular films of the 1990s and 2000s.

• Performance was the first feature film to employ the cut-up technique (although the technique was employed in experimental shorts in the 1960s and 1970s, notably by Antony Balch). Directors Cammell and Roeg also went on to use this technique in later movies, before it became commonplace in popular cinema.
• The gangster aspect of Performance has been imitated by many popular directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie and Jonathan Glazer.
• Performance pushed boundaries by featuring explicit sex scenes and drugs, which have been rumoured to be real instead of simulated. Although Andy Warhol's (and other underground filmmakers') films had featured such behaviour before Performance, it was unprecedented that they appeared in a studio production.
• Big Audio Dynamite's song "E=MC²" includes extensive dialogue samples from Performance. The song "Further Back and Faster" by Coil (on Love's Secret Domain) also samples dialogue from the film.
• Happy Mondays' second album, Bummed, features several songs inspired by the film, including "Moving In With', "Performance" and "Mad Cyril". "Mad Cyril" is explicitly inspired by the film and included the following dialogue samples:
  • "I like that, turn it up"
  • "It was Mad Cyril!"
  • "What about the detector vans, they be right with you?"
  • "We've been courteous"
  • "Put the frighteners on the flash little twerp"
  • "Let's have a look, let's have a look, excuse me, but... Come in!-take it off, take it off"
  • "Its a right pisshole, long hair, beatniks, druggers, freeloaders, tsk, freeloaders"
  • "I need a bohemian atmosphere"
• Also inspired by the movie were the '79 Mod Revival act, Secret Affair whose East End following known as 'The Glory Boys' were based on the South London gangsters portrayed in the film. Glory Boys was also the title of their first album.
• In keeping with the intellectual bent of Jagger's character, legendary Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is quoted numerous times during the film. His photograph appears in the brief montage which follows Turner's shooting.
• Beat the Devil, the BMW promo film directed by Tony Scott and starring James Brown, Gary Oldman, and Clive Owen contains at least two references to Performance. At one point Owen's character says "I know a thing or two about performing" – a quote from Chas. The Devil, played by Oldman, dances with a fluorescent tube, just as Turner does in Performance. In addition, in the earlier Tony Scott film True Romance Gary Oldman (as Drexl) is seen swinging a lampshade back and forth in front of someone, as Turner does during the "Memo from Turner" sequence.
• Cult film director Harmony Korine was possibly inspired directly by Performance in casting James Fox and Anita Pallenberg as an impersonating couple (the Pope and the Queen) in his film Mister Lonely.
• The video for The Charlatans single "Just When You're Thinking Things Over" was inspired by the film with singer Tim Burgess adopting the Mick Jagger slick-backed hair look. Also, in the video for "Jesus Hairdo" we see him dancing with a neon strip light lifted from the film.
• Writer-director Paul Schrader has often cited Performance as one of his favorite films. In a 2007 article for Film Comment, he describes the film's influence.
• Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume III: Century, makes several references to Performance in its second issue, "Paint it Black", prominently featuring Mick Jagger's Turner character. The plot of the issue revolves around an actual Rolling Stones concert that took place after the death of Brian Jones, and shows just how Turner "lost his demon."