Insignificance (film) - Production

Production

All of the interiors for Insignificance were shot at Lee Studios in Wembley, with exteriors shot in New York City. Mise-en-scène was created through the use of Pablo Picasso's post-cubism painting "Woman and Child on the Seashore" which underscores The Actress' pain about her childlessness, while the fractured structure of the narrative was mirrored in the splintered image of Theresa Russell used as a nude calendar shot of The Actress. Created by photographer-collagist David Hockney, the image is, according to film critic Chuck Stephens, "a pinup in a hundred pieces, a centerfold sent through a centrifuge..." and is a reflection of The Actress. With "her much-exposed and famously exploited psyche already splintered into jagged, mingled shards of kittenish innocence, movie business cunning, overwhelming erotic appeal, and abject inner terror, Monroe was postcubism's quintessential glittering star...perfectly pieced together and seen prismatically all at once..." The image is also a metaphor for Roeg's non-linear filmmaking, Stephens notes that "for a cine-cubist like Roeg, two entirely disparate spatial and temporal dimensions are never more than a splice apart, and in Insignificance, the past is always present, and never goes away."