Peter Greenaway

[MichaelB]

But don't forget films like The Company of Wolves and Absolute Beginners , neither of which could remotely be called 'realistic', and which ranked among the highest-profile British films of the mid-80s (they certainly were in Britain: I'm not sure how well they travelled abroad). I recently caught up with Don Boyd's Aria again, and it's almost a celebration of the cinema's fantastical potential - Greenaway didn't contribute, but Jarman, Julien Temple and Ken Russell did.

[Tommaso]

Oh, "The Company of Wolves" was quite often on German TV in the late 80s and 90s and was quite generally revered over here, as far as I can see. A very good film indeed. Jarman and Greenaway also enjoyed comparatively much success in Germany at the time, with Jarman winning the Silver Bear for "Caravaggio" in Berlin and his films surprisingly often on TV, even today (same goes for Greenaway, whose "J'accuse" will be shown on German TV next week).

All in all, the 80s were really a high time for British filmmaking, I think, although I never thought of "Absolute Beginners" and "Aria" as particularly great films.

[Nothing]

(a) Greenaway is out of place in contemporary cinemas

The article questions whether Greenaway "has any place", not whether he is 'out of place'. A subtle but substantive difference.

(b) it is ultimately more of the same from Greenaway.

So what if it is? Is Happy Go Lucky not more of the same from Leigh? Cheri more of the same from Frears? What, in any case, is this newness that the reviewer is demanding (does he really consider, say, Arnold and McQueen to be more progressive than Greenaway)?

the default critical paradigm for approaching British cinema - realism - was not really being met on a regular basis by British films, which allowed a different model to slip through

There are so many problems with this statement that one barely knows where to begin...

First of all, critics are cultural commentators - they respond to cultural trends, they do not create them. Perhaps critical support (or lack of it) can have a significant impact on the sucess of a particular film, or a particuar director (or could, back in the day). Perhaps individual critics and publications can decide whether to question the status quo, or whether to cheer it on (the issue I have with this S&S review) - and this can help, in a very small way, to steer the ship in a certain direction But the critical community does not hold the purse strings and they cannot ultimately set the agenda for those who do.

Secondly, kitchen-sink realism is not the 'default paradigm' of British cinema, critical or otherwise. Kitchen-sink realism didn't even emerge until the mid-60s. Since then, it hasn't really gone away, neither has it dominated. I wouldn't say it dominates even now (is Leigh really 'realist'? Atonement? Mamma Mia?)

Thirdly, I question the ability of any film, let alone an entire generation of filmmakers, to 'slip through' or 'gain attention' in the manner that you describe - for films cannot exist without funding, and arthouse films generally don't exist without public funding (lacking the commercial potential to entice venture finance). Those few that do get produced 'outside of the net', so to speak, are in for an extremely bumpy ride when it comes to exhibition (note the total lack of UK distribution/exhibition for Greenaway's Tulse Luper Trilogy, for one). If, say, an Angela Arnold film gets made instead of a Terence Davies film (or a Terence Davies film instead of a Ken Loach film!), this is because the arts establishment de jour wants it that way. Any trends, realist or otherwise, must therefore be addressed primarily in relation to the ideological aims of the arts adminstrations that set them.

A brief comparison of the antagonistic relationship that existed between the arts funding bodies of the 80s/90s and the Conservative government of the day, and the relationship that has been fostered between New Labour and the British film establishment since 2000 (given physical form in the shape of the UKFC), should, in fact, answer most of your questions. It is perhaps ironic that New Labour have done far more damage to the culture of British cinema than the Tories could ever muster.

[Duncan Hopper]

.

[Dr Amicus]

(a) Greenaway is out of place in contemporary cinemas

The article questions whether Greenaway "has any place", not whether he is 'out of place'. A subtle but substantive difference.

Too subtle for me I'm afraid - but I probably should go back to my S&S and read the review in its entirety. From the extract you included, I read it as (probably) meaning that Greenaway's films just don't fit with what is shown / viewed in contemporary cinemas - ie it's primarily a lament.

(b) it is ultimately more of the same from Greenaway.

So what if it is? Is Happy Go Lucky not more of the same from Leigh? Cheri more of the same from Frears? What, in any case, is this newness that the reviewer is demanding (does he really consider, say, Arnold and McQueen to be more progressive than Greenaway)?

I think the problem here is that a 'Greenaway Film' is clearly recognisable as different to the norm and thus it easier to categorise as 'more of the same' - but exactly the same criticism has been made of Leigh (All or Nothing stands out in my memory here) and Loach (Barley was seen as an inferior retread of Land and Freedom). But my point was really on the disconnect between seeming positives - intellectualism, experimentation - and 'nothing new'; yes, all the old Greenaway 'virtues' are there, but there is no advancement on his art from 20 years ago. Now this is not to condone such an attitude, but I don't think it's quite the shocker you do. But this could lead to a lengthy discussion on the merits or otherwise of auteurism...

the default critical paradigm for approaching British cinema - realism - was not really being met on a regular basis by British films, which allowed a different model to slip through

There are so many problems with this statement that one barely knows where to begin...

First of all, critics are cultural commentators - they respond to cultural trends, they do not create them. Perhaps critical support (or lack of it) can have a significant impact on the sucess of a particular film, or a particuar director (or could, back in the day). Perhaps individual critics and publications can decide whether to question the status quo, or whether to cheer it on (the issue I have with this S&S review) - and this can help, in a very small way, to steer the ship in a certain direction But the critical community does not hold the purse strings and they cannot ultimately set the agenda for those who do.

I don't really have a problem with this - I generally agree with you. And it certainly doesn't contradict my own comments. I was trying to argue, admittedly extremely simplistically, that as generally film reviewers in Britain have tended to favour 'realism' over other approaches, that has benefitted CRITICALLY some films / filmmakers over others - nothing to do with box office performance or indeed the financing of films. Now as there was a seeming lack of such films during the 80s, this opened up a gap for British films that didn't necessarily fall within a loose 'realist' paradigm to gain critical approval and significant coverage. Although, commercially, British cinema in the 80s was not exactly healthy (at least from a mainstream pov - I'd be interested in knowing how British films fared in arthouses beyond a couple of obvious hits), artistically it's another matter, and I'd certainly agree with you regarding the artistic merits of 80's cinema versus late 90s / 00s.

Secondly, kitchen-sink realism is not the 'default paradigm' of British cinema, critical or otherwise. Kitchen-sink realism didn't even emerge until the mid-60s. Since then, it hasn't really gone away, neither has it dominated. I wouldn't say it dominates even now (is Leigh really 'realist'? Atonement? Mamma Mia?)

I didn't mention kitchen sink realism at all - merely 'realism', an admittedly amorphous word. I think it's safe to argue that, again in general, most criticism of British films has often tended to favour realist modes over non / anti / any-other-variant-thereof realism - so Documentary is seen as key in the 30s, serious war films over George Formby or Gainsborough or Powell & Pressburger, Kitchen-Sink over Hammer or Carry On, and so on. I'm not agreeing with this (my Avatar and name aren't just chosen at random - my Doctoral Thesis was on Amicus's horror and SF films) but just stating that the general critical consensus favoured one type of filmmaking over another.

And again, you move from my comments on critical consensus to film production - I'm not arguing that British Films are necessarily realist, even in general, just that the critical consensus has traditionally preferred such films.

Thirdly, I question the ability of any film, let alone an entire generation of filmmakers, to 'slip through' or 'gain attention' in the manner that you describe - for films cannot exist without funding, and arthouse films generally don't exist without public funding (lacking the commercial potential to entice venture finance).

Once again, I'm not talking about film production, just critical responses to them. Assume (admittedly dangerous, but go with it) a serious film magazine, tv programme, broadsheet etc wants to cover British films on at least an occasional basis. If, as I argue, the dominant preference is for 'realism', than that is what is more likely to covered unless you want to go down a more populist route (and this may of course not be necessarily different). Now, if there is a lack of 'realist' films to cover - and in the 80s Loach and Leigh were largely absent from cinema screens (to name two key examples - and yes there are issues about either actually being 'realist', but I'm referring to how they are approached in general) - than that allows other films to gain attention.

Those few that do get produced 'outside of the net', so to speak, are in for an extremely bumpy ride when it comes to exhibition (note the total lack of UK distribution/exhibition for Greenaway's Tulse Luper Trilogy, for one). If, say, an Angela Arnold film gets made instead of a Terence Davies film (or a Terence Davies film instead of a Ken Loach film!), this is because the arts establishment de jour wants it that way. Any trends, realist or otherwise, must therefore be addressed primarily in relation to the ideological aims of the arts adminstrations that set them.

That's Andrea not Angela. But anyway, aren't you just making the argument that you claim I'm making (and which I wasn't)? At least, if you are still including film critics amongst the 'arts establishment'?

Apart from that, I tend to agree with your point here - although UK distribution being what it is, there are still loads of issues concerning access to screens by British films in general (whether directed by Loach, Arnold, Davies or Greenaway) and I suspect that is at least part of the issue. But as a long time admirer of Greenaway (and Loach, Davies and Leigh) I agree that it is at least hugely disappointing (and probably nearer shameful) that his films have not been able to find an outlet in British cinemas.

Unfortunately I'm afraid the notion of a British Art Cinema is anathema to our politicians of either hue (I say our, but technically I'm not part of the UK and we have our own idiots in charge) - like too many areas, if it isn't commercially exploitable, it's worthless. But that's another argument...

[yoshimori]

Two new blu-rays coming 8/18/10 from Sweden:

Prospero's Books
Baby of Macon

Also on DVD.

[Tommaso]

No doubt these will be my personal releases of the year!! =D> =D> =D> =D>
Always assuming all subs are removable, of course.

I had given up all hope of seeing these released in decent editions. This still sounds too good to be true....

[tavernier]

wow...I won't believe it until I'm watching them.

[Nothing]

Whoops, I forgot about this...

generally film reviewers in Britain have tended to favour 'realism' over other approaches, that has benefitted CRITICALLY some films / filmmakers over others - nothing to do with box office performance or indeed the financing of films.

But I don't think this term 'realism' has much, if any, meaning. If you mean the exclusion of fantastical narrative elements (?), or ostentatious stylisation (?), than I think the position of Hitchcock, Chaplin, Powell and Lean at the top of the British filmmaking canon rather contradicts your statement. Secondly, your emphasis on the critical 'benefit' of a certain kind of approach is rather besides the point. I have been talking about the entire process by which films get made and seen, in which a filmmaker like Greenaway finds favour and loses it again - financing through to exhibition to levels of publicity, public awareness, box office success and ultimate longevity. Critical reactions are a part of this, and historically may give us insight - I criticised the original S&S review because it 'tows the party line', although, in doing so, it becomes a useful piece of historical evidence for generations to come - but, equally, to place too much weight on this critical evidence is liable to give you an incomplete, or inaccurate, picture. You must, first and foremost, have a grasp of what was going on behind the scenes, politically.

Now as there was a seeming lack of such films during the 80s, this opened up a gap for British films that didn't necessarily fall within a loose 'realist' paradigm to gain critical approval and significant coverage.

Or I could argue that the feting of Greenaway over, say, Bill Douglas' Comrades demonstrated a critical preference for ostentatious artifice over 'realism' in the 1980s. But this would be to miss the point also. The simple fact is that most critics and publications will go along with the mood of the day - to establish what this mood is and where it comes from, you have to follow the lines of argument that I have already made above.

I didn't mention kitchen sink realism at all - merely 'realism', an admittedly amorphous word... [critics faboured] Kitchen-Sink over Hammer or Carry On... just stating that the general critical consensus favoured one type of filmmaking over another.

But I think you're going a little off track here, dragging in the cheap British genre cinema of the 60s-80s. Certainly, these films found little favour with critics, but then they were entirely commercial entities for which such critical favour was, in any case, irrelevent. Nb. I used the term 'kitchen sink realism', as opposed to 'realism', because the former is a term I can accept (refering as it does to a definable filmmaking movement and philosophy).

in the 80s Loach and Leigh were largely absent from cinema screens... that allows other films to gain attention.

Loach was working in television (where he belongs, imho) and Leigh was a young filmmaker who had yet to establish himself. I'm not seeing your point.

there are still loads of issues concerning access to screens by British films in general (whether directed by Loach, Arnold, Davies or Greenaway)

This is a wishy-washy generalisation - and a distortion of the facts. Loach's last film, Looking for Eric, had a massive nationwide release, and FCUK gave hundreds of thousands - more than the budget of Terence Davies' last film - to Icon Distribution (Mel Gibson's company, until very recently) to widen the release / fatten their pockets. As for Arnold, both of her films, which rather arguably don't deserve to be seen at all, have received extensive exhibition on the City Screen monopoly circuit, thanks to Claire Binns; the same Claire Binns who has refused to screen the Greenaway (but one example), a decision which S&S decided to defend in their article - hence my aprobation.

If we are to believe the FCUK figures, Harry Potter and James Bond are British films too, and they seem to be receiving fairly wide exposure.

Unfortunately I'm afraid the notion of a British Art Cinema is anathema to our politicians of either hue - like too many areas, if it isn't commercially exploitable, it's worthless.

Not true at all. The central aim of FCUK is to create and shape non-commercial films with a message that is acceptable to their government paymasters; to manage the 'voice' of British Art Cinema in the way that Alistair Campbell manages the press.

Great news on those Blu-Ray releases!

[zedz]

Or I could argue that the feting of Greenaway over, say, Bill Douglas' Comrades demonstrated a critical preference for ostentatious artifice over kitchen sink realism in the 1980s. But this would be to miss the point also.

Off-topic, I know, but I couldn't resist. If you're suggesting that "Bill Douglas' Comrades" = "kitchen sink realism" then this is indeed missing the point!

[Nothing]

If you're suggesting that "Bill Douglas' Comrades" = "kitchen sink realism"...

No less so than Mike Leigh.

[knives]

Which I suppose poses the question when did Mike Leigh come to be considered realism anything let alone kitchen sink. (okay that may be extreme phrasing on my part, but even you have to admit that is a bit of a left field example)

[Gropius]

If you're suggesting that "Bill Douglas' Comrades" = "kitchen sink realism"...

No less so than Mike Leigh.

To echo Zedz, Douglas strikes me as a filmmaker who was much more preoccupied with 'painterly' aesthetics than Leigh ever has been - Comrades is full of quite luscious imagery - whereas the descriptor 'kitchen sink realism' generally implies a sort of scaled-down theatre/TV look, focussed on conflicts in (intentionally drab) domestic settings. On a stylistic continuum, therefore, Douglas seems much closer to Greenaway than Leigh, even if his narrative themes are 'realist'.

(Also, to echo the others, the Blu-Rays are very good news, assuming the transfers are decent. Mâcon needs to be rediscovered by a new generation of viewers, in all its repellent greatness.)

[John Cope]

Also, to echo the others, the Blu-Rays are very good news, assuming the transfers are decent.

They have to be better than what we have now which is next to nothing--no offense to Nothing.

When the time comes though some of us (i.e. me) may need help ordering these things off that website. Perhaps they'll appear elsewhere as well...

[colinr0380]

This will take the discussion off topic a little but I wanted to add some of my opinions/defence of Greenaway here. I like the way that all of Greenaway's films seem to deal with initially very simple, almost childish, approaches to their subjects perhaps initially dictated as much by budget and available resources as by the subject matter itself. For instance, just taking the early works as examples for now, the journey through a landscape created by panning over maps with narration in A Walk Through H, the disagreements about the final version of a lost film based on unearthed research materials in the incredibly structuralist Vertical Features Remake, or the fantasical water-based world of hierarchical dynasties and bloodthirsty wars described over images of streams and lakes in Water Wrackets.

However these simplistic, pared down approaches to this material contrasts with the incredible complexities they reveal as they progress. The many ways of structuring footage in the various Vertical Features is based on incomplete, fragmentary knowledge of the original creator's intentions (as well as personal, geographical and institutional biases of those involved in the project - all seem as far from the originally envisioned restoration of the film as they were at the beginning, yet at the same time all of their various takes on the material have some merit, and perhaps pay the greatest complement to their, possibly non-existant, inspiration by having been born from that initial uncompleted idea); the imagery of Dear Phone appears as text interspersed with pictures of isolated telephone boxes which provides both content and context but in isolation from one another (Greenaway describes on the DVD as this being structured like a book where because of the manufacturing process you get bundles of pictures bound together in their own sections and only somewhat related to the text directly around it, instead needing the reader to relate word and image together meaningfully); and of course The Falls (and H Is For House) which reveal both the benefits and drawbacks of simple alphabetical ordering to bring a representative, unbiased sample together, but also to draw in much irrelevant or esoteric information too, and represent information in a non-chronological, arbitrarily related way (except when family names occur together and have to be unpacked in a bunch, much like the telephone booth pictures in Dear Phone) that occasionally through strange fateful twists of language bring illuminating pieces of information into close proximity with each other.

This ordering also takes the old quote of "a film needs a beginning, a middle and an end...but not necessarily in that order" to an extreme, suggesting that every moment of the material is all three - there is no particular beginning, or end goal to be reached, but there is a 'middle' of accumulating knowledge while the search is going on, or still considered worth continuing with. We wouldn't expect a dictionary to reach an exciting climax at the letter 'Z' just because all other books are structured in that manner to hold an audience's attention in a linear fashion!

The shorts don't stand in isolation from the features however. Greenaway has said that they all take place in the 'same world', and they do all feel of a piece, with elements of other ideas inside them. Taking the magnum opus of The Falls as an example again - various entries reference A Walk Through H (as being a lost, and perhaps apocryphal, film!) and the Goole Water Tower from Vertical Features Remake, as well as looking forward to The Tulse Luper Suitcases, the death of an architect, Van Hoyten and Amsterdam Zoo and one entry even includes a Cissie Colpitts (by virtue of a name change to a surname beginning with "Fall..."), which is the shared name of the three sisters in Drowning By Numbers.

As well as showing how the most simplistic structures we are grouped into (of society, of relationships, of information) have the most complex resonances there is also an interest in the rituals and orderings, the rules that govern behaviour and daily life. They are are at the same time completely arbitrary in the way that they are created and imposed and essential to functioning with others.

At this level (and this is where I think some of the articles quoted in the thread have a superficial point) Greenaway's films seem most interested in the intellectual - the yearning for the abstract idea that solves the puzzle, to find the perfect order out of the meaningless chaos. Yet there is a wry sense of self awareness about the just how absurdly impossible (and perhaps undesirable) such a sterile system actually may be in practice, which is something that often leads to the ironic endings of his films (which would be tragic if they were often not also so funny! This is where the articles commenting on Greenaway's 'going to kill myself in a few years' or 'cinema is dead' comments (deliberately?) miss the inherent resonances with his body of work), undermining these attempts of the characters to create order, meaning or a place in their society that they can comfortably fit into. But that doesn't mean that the attempt to structure or find meaning shouldn't be admired!

There is the sense of a love of language, architecture, cinema, art, food, religious ideas, gender differences and sex as abstract concepts or intellectual ideals that can inspire the very best of humanity, but also the bitter awareness of the way that all these potentially positive ideas, with all their inherent power, are often co-opted and corrupted (or faked) by societal, ritual, monetary practicalities - a painting only becomes important for what it is worth not what it might mean or inspire; a personal covenant becomes an unthinking obediently held but misunderstood posture that everyone must conform to; the mobster/politician co-opts art not because they like it but because it inspires the right feelings about them in the subjects that they wish to rule over, or can be used as an ostentatious display of wealth to simply show off not because they might have any interest in the object itself (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover is perhaps the most explicit example of this).

That is why Greenaway's films are both incredibly beautiful and quite horrific, often at the same time - distant from the immediate action and hard hitting at the deepest levels of ethics, morality and communication. In a sense the ideas are tamed and the dangerous power that they hold, and might inspire in a viewer, is managed (which makes Nothing's comments on the 'managing' of Greenaway's films themselves in recent times quite apt in a way!)

This might annoy Nothing, but I see quite a relationship between Greenaway and Lars von Trier, though I like Greenaway a bit more. Both are interested in revealing the arbitrariness of morality and societal structures, to expose the mechanics that keep the world ticking along. I think there is a genuine interest and care for this world within both of their bodies of work, even if there are no illusions that this 'ticking along' often involves collateral damage along the way and a casual attitude to those destroyed, left behind or abandoned in the constant flow of the world. In filmic terms there seems like a move from a very controlled world almost empty of human beings, or with human beings used as props, to incorporating the human being as centrally important to their respective filmic universes. They're the chaotic, violent, sometimes insane centres around which the more antiseptic, brutally efficient mechanisms of society are structured around. (there are also the carefully managed clashes and melding between 'high' and 'low' culture - with Greenaway the use of David Attenborough or John Gielgud against the popular comedians used as gang members in Cook, The Thief, or Jim Davidson in A Zed And Two Noughts. Von Trier has the clashes between 'star names' and the circumstances in which they find themselves) This incidentally is where I think a lot of people miss the element of true feeling in both Greenaway and von Trier - the interest in and care for the individual characters but at an unbridgeable remove creates a far more moving connection to their archetypal plights than you could get in any wildly emotive, desperate to involve the audience in the drama, film (For example perhaps Precious would have been better if done in the style of Baby of Macon!) The distance, sometimes wryly amused, sometimes bitterly condemnatory, sometimes resigned, often artificially imposed as if in laboratory conditions, often creates the greater emotional impact, at least for this viewer.

There is also the idea of creating 'movements' which might inspire other people to follow their example. Von Trier of course has Dogme but Greenaway is even more fascinating as his 'movements' have their own inbuilt futility to them, and are often woven both inside the fabric of the world of his films and in the making of the films themselves. The arbitrary numbering of 92 (92 boxes in the Tulse Luper Suitcases, various permutations of the number in Vertical Features Remake, the 92 entries of The Falls, etc) suggests both an impossible and unobtainable target. The Falls is perhaps the key to this (and much of the rest of Greenaway's work, with its Ballardian undertones) as it also has the theme that von Trier took up later with his US(A) trilogy of following a particular concept through to the bitter end - forcing a kernel of an idea to become novel simply by focusing onto it and expanding it into a central theme of the film.

There is also the feeling that events when they occur are truly messy, nasty, uncoordinated and unpredictable, yet with hindsight they get reinterpreted by artists, writers, filmmakers and historians into meaningful and coherent structures that may themselves be inherently and fatally flawed by the imposition of such a structure to the chaos (on perhaps a lower ambition level many of Oliver Stone's films seem to have elements of this idea, consciously or not on the part of the filmmaker himself), whether that is the various explanations given for the VUE (Violent Unknown Event) in The Fall, the number game of Drowning By Numbers, the ritualistic fashion display of The Pillow Book, the theatrical or architectural framing of Baby of Macon or Belly Of An Architect, or the tableaux framings of The Cook, The Thief and seemingly Nightwatching.

[Tommaso]

A spirited defense of PG for sure! And with some unusual points of view that I would probably not have come up with in connection with Greenaway, for instance:

There is the sense of a love of language, architecture, cinema, art, food, religious ideas, gender differences and sex as abstract concepts or intellectual ideals that can inspire the very best of humanity, but also the bitter awareness of the way that all these potentially positive ideas, with all their inherent power, are often co-opted and corrupted (or faked) by societal, ritual, monetary practicalities

I would agree with you about those concepts being able to inspire 'the very best of humanity', but I think for PG they are nothing more than futile attempts to create meaning; I very much think that Greenaway's view of the world is that it is as meaningless as the attempts to order it, inevitably doomed to fail. Death comes in any case, either by means of the structuring concepts or without them. There is little to nothing in Greenaway's films that inspires hope in me ("Prospero" as written basically by Shakespeare is an exception), and all his feature films are concerned with death and the way it comes to happen. So the notion of PG as a moralist is quite foreign to me, and thus I cannot agree with your von Trier comparison, whose cinema indeed is moralistic very often, or rather: morals and ethics form a major part of the questions that von Trier raises in his best films.

This incidentally is where I think a lot of people miss the element of true feeling in both Greenaway and von Trier - the interest in and care for the individual characters but at an unbridgeable remove creates a far more moving connection to their archetypal plights than you could get in any wildly emotive, desperate to involve the audience in the drama [...]

I indeed miss this 'true feeling' in Greenaway, but not necessarily in von Trier whose films I find very involving (some say: manipulative), even in a film like "The Five Obstructions". Greenaway is much, much colder, indeed like paintings set in motion, something for us to contemplate perhaps, but to contemplate on a more or less purely aesthetic or at least highly intellectual level. I simply can't see any real 'agenda' in Greenaway's films, not even in "Cook". That's no value judgement from my side, on the contrary I like that kind of 'irresponsible' filmmaking, unfettered by the demands of political or social engagement, for example. PG's cinema seems to me to exist in its own space, in a world apart, and is basically of an escapist nature for me. Again, I think that is a perfectly valuable stance for a filmmaker, especially if he regards the world and perhaps even himself with a distanced, cynical, perhaps misanthropical view.

There is also the feeling that events when they occur are truly messy, nasty, uncoordinated and unpredictable, yet with hindsight they get reinterpreted by artists, writers, filmmakers and historians into meaningful and coherent structures that may themselves be inherently and fatally flawed by the imposition of such a structure to the chaos

Indeed, and probably for Greenaway much more than for von Trier, "Chaos reigns". Only in the world of art, it seems to me, PG can find the sense of being in control that he seems to need, in full awareness of and with ironical distance to this need.

[colinr0380]

I do agree about the essential futility of trying to make sense of the world that Greenaway's films suggest but I do think there is some wry sympathy there for the characters even at the same time as acknowledging their futility, misguidedness, insularity and even maybe the utter insanity of the schemes/semi-conscious death wishes that they begin to construct around themselves, which is why I think Greenaway could be associated as much with the cooly observational J.G. Ballard as to von Trier, who I agree has a much more 'in your face', ramped up involvement in attitudes towards morality and emotional involvement - he wants you to feel your response and then critique it, while Greenaway feels as if he wants you to study the characters at a remove from the very first moment. For instance the discovery in Drowning By Numbers of poor Smut's semi-successful attempt at self-circumcision ("don't worry Cissie...I sterilised the scissors") is muted in what is shown and far more disturbing on the intellectual level in raising notions of castration, father worship, societal/peer/sexual pressures and the fascination/fear of dawning female power, self sufficiency and self awareness of their potential to make their own rules to live by (Smut has an interest in the myth of Samson losing his power when Delilah cuts his hair). Antichrist on the other hand hits you with the viscerality of a similar sequence on a gut level first then makes you consider all the intellectual ramifications of the act.

(By the way I think Drowning By Numbers would make a fascinating double bill with Robert Altman's 3 Women!)

Where von Trier, beginning with Dogme, seemed to begin to pare down the stylisation to discover the world of emotion within a close up on a face as characters face destruction by their wider worlds, Greenaway begins to embellish more and more to show how the individual is in a way mentally overpowered by the rules, rituals and codes of conduct of the societies in which they live. At the same time as attempting to define a new relationship with the world, most of the characters are still trapped within these over-arching societal structures and even are co-opted into participating in their own oppression at the same time as trying to escape from it.

I think the knowledge of the uselessness of such endeavour makes the characters more endearing somehow, their experiments and yearnings to understand seem less like grand quests than like games or hobbies to just as much pass the time as to actually 'discover' some essential quality of the world. There is the sense that perhaps it is the physical traces of such work that may become our legacy - manuscripts, libraries full of books, tape recordings, dictionaries, artworks and films (even the internet) - which make such activity worthwhile in a longer term sense, though even significant artworks can be lost, have their significance changed or forgotten or be wiped from the official record, only underlining the transitory nature of life itself (and there is often an acknowledgement of this 'mortality of information' in the way that bodies get used as the ultimate canvasses for information or experimentation - from the previously mentioned Drowning By Numbers, operations to hurry the process of melding with birds along in The Falls, cannibalism as the ultimate form of haute cuisine in Cook..., the literalisation of a holy relic in Baby of Macon, or the calligraphy/full body tattoos/eventual skinning of The Pillow Book which bears some comparison to the wraparound story from Clive Barker's Books of Blood, though many of Barker's other works have this fascination with body modification/skinning).

Morality itself is not immune from this - it is treated as deeply important in the short term and on the personal level for the characters but utterly irrelevant on the wider one. Whimsical intellectual ponderings or vaguely understood emotional drives begin to take on brutally, bluntly literal significances as they begin to have 'real world', often bloody, consequences, but even they have no wider impact beyond those individuals involved, irrevocably changed, and sometimes utterly destroyed by them (though that doesn't stop us from feeling for those individuals - at a remove). Beyond the tiny story that we have been following the wider world keeps indifferently turning - that is perhaps where Greenaway's and von Trier's films most bear comparison.

[Oedipax]

Where has Prospero's Books been announced for Blu-ray?

Prospero's Books
Baby of Macon

And ZOO

[zedz]

The Tulse Luper Suitcases

Despite all the anticipation, I don't think anybody's actually commented on this (Australian) release since it came out. I watched the films last week and here are my thoughts.

The transfers are all splendid. Audio is simple stereo, which may have been how they were mixed theatrically, but is a slightly missed opportunity for films with such complicated soundtracks.

1: The Moab Story

I had seen The Moab Story back in the day, and at the time I thought it was an exciting experiment, and potential return to form for Greenaway, but one which ran out of steam and ran itself into the ground about halfway through. I think this had to do with how Greenaway goes all out with the audio and visual layering in the opening scenes, incorporating multiple frames within frames, annotations, running catalogues, documentary footage, rehearsals, animations and narratives. Once the action moves to Utah, however, the film becomes much more focussed on the narrative, which is one of the less interesting items on the smorgasbord, and the patchy performances becomes more prominent and harder to ignore.

Greenaway has always been a director who's striven to overwhelm his actors with all his other business (its almost as if he's jealous of them), but at least in the eighties and early nineties he selected actors that could put up a good fight (and, occasionally, as might be the case with Brian Dennehy in Belly of an Architect, prevail). In this film, many of the actors are just filling their roles rather than inhabiting them. This is particularly critical with JJ Feild as Luper himself, whose blandness might be the only sensible way to approach the oddly conceived character (who we're supposed to accept as both a passive Candide figure and as the sharp, animating genius of countless weird and wonderful works).

Second time through, however, and aware of those issues, I was much more focussed on the formal qualities of the film and enjoyed it a lot more on those terms. Greenaway has synthesised a wonderfully eccentric style for the film, and while it's hardly as revolutionary as he'd like to think - this will become a much bigger problem with the third instalment - it's fun to see what effects he can get out of it. In the first part, most of those effects are pulled out in the first half of the film, so there are diminishing returns even on this more rewarding level. It's no doubt an occupational hazard for films that are so serial in nature, and built upon the enumeration of long catalogues. This film-catalogue (16 chapters, 92 characters, 92 suitcases, 92 objects to represent the world) is even more ambitious that The Falls, and Greenaway's structural invention only goes so far.

2: Vaux to the Sea

So I was assuming diminishing returns with another four hours to go, but to my surprise Greenaway really lifts his game for the second part. The above structures continue, and at this point they're neither here nor there, really, but he comes up with some very interesting variations on the frames-within-frames motif, particularly when he tiles different takes of the same scene on top of one another, so we get a kind of cubist performance within a tableau (out of which other terrific effects can be coaxed, such as having a swinging lightbulb and its parallel-universe twins stuttering through the mini-frames). Von Trier has tried for similar effects in his car-crash editing of multiple performances in Dogville and other films, but the linearity of his approach doesn't really go anywhere, in my opinion: it's just flashy disjuncture. Greenaway, on the other hand, manages to present multiple takes simultaneously, within a coherent, single frame - it's one scene, one composition, even if it is made up of a mosaic of parallel moments. He doesn't push it too far - which is probably a good thing - but it's effective and evocative, particularly when several different inflections of a performance are struggling for prominence.

Greenaway had foregrounded multiple performances from the start in Part 1, where we got to see multiple actors simultaneously 'auditioning' for roles in the film, and at times 'rehearsal' or 'audition' footage is inserted into the ongoing action. In Part 2, Tulse Luper is doubled, with two actors, younger and older, appearing, often simultaneously in the frame.

This is something of a relief, as it takes the pressure off Feild (who also seems to be a little slyer and nuanced this time around anyway) and his alter ego, Roger Rees, is a better actor. (In checking the actor's name, I'm amused to see that imdb has been so baffled by the film that Rees is relegated to the final name on the supplementary cast list, with no character name attached, even though he's in in the lead, playing the title role!)

In fact, the acting all around is better in this film. All of the characters are rather brittle caricatures, but a number of actors manage to invest them with some enthusiasm and panache, specifically Isabella Rossellini (Madame Moitessier), Annabelle Apsion (Mrs Haps-Mills) and Steven Mackintosh (Gunther Zeloty). And it's always nice to see Ana Torrent. The catalogues trundle on, the picaresque narrative bumps and gurgles listlessly, but in this film there are far more incidental pleasures strewn along the way (even some inventive CGI), and I was really looking forward to a rollicking conclusion that would tie everything up.

3: From Sark to the Finish

Oh dear. Here's where the wheels fall off. Much of the problem with the final film seems to be that the money simply ran out. The cast list is slashed: there are none of the big names and none of the small felicities of performance which enlivened part 2. And even episodes designed to tie up the stories of major characters (including the guy who had been positioned as Luper's arch-nemesis in the two preceding films) have to resort to narration and stills. In some episodes major (numbered) characters don't even appear except as found images. The plethora of inset expert commentators of the previous films are reduced to one or two talking heads. Feild seems to have bailed out of the project - there are a couple of early glimpses - and the ringer Greenaway brings in for one scene is wretched.

For much of the film Greenaway seems like he's playing catch-up with his own grandiose schemes on the smell of an oily rag, having to conjure up characters with no actors to portray them, simply to reach the magic number 92 (I bet he was really regretting leaving some of the speaking roles in part 1 unnamed and unnumbered). He abandons the catalogue of 92 objects to represent the world in this part as well (and never manages to account for the 'missing suitcases' that fell between the gaps of Parts 1 and 2, though some might be recovered from the fine print). He's only managed to get through six of his sixteen chapters in the preceding two films, so now he's scrabbling to tick those boxes as well.

The CGI, which had been used very effectively in Part 2, now has to be blocky and clunky. Rather than taking his aesthetic forward into the 21st century, he's regressing back to the 1980s, and much of this film seems to be at a sub-TV Dante level in terms of visual invention. And that's fatal, as this also means that the film is less visually interesting than a lot of perfectly mediocre video art of the last twenty years, which is a pretty low bar to hurdle. And when Greenaway actually does photograph real actors in real settings, he falls back on lazy 'imposing' symmetry, like an ambitious film student who's seen too much Kubrick and too little else. All in all, the third film is visually impoverished after the fussy but generally rewarding earlier ones. Where Part 2 rather impressively built upon the visual tropes of the first film, Part 3 either rotely repeats or simply abandons them.

So can all these apparent problems be formally justified? Is there some narrative element that will arrive at the last minute to justify the ramshackle nature of the last lap? Well, if you're exceedingly generous, maybe there is, but not really. There's a twist, but it doesn't necessarily have any bearing on the manner in which the tale is told, which doesn't change.

This 'twist' ending is desperately cliched. Don't worry, it's not 'it was all a dream', but probably only because Greenaway couldn't afford the CGI. The ending has the potential for some emotional, thematic and narrative resonance, but the characters throughout have been too thinly conceived for it to come off as anything more than an academic shrug.

So, it's a horribly anticlimactic conclusion, but I'd nevertheless recommend this set to any Greenaway followers. Although I've missed a couple of features, I'd tentatively rank Vaux to the Sea as his most satisfying feature of the last twenty years.

[Fiery Angel]

Nice reviews....I saw the trilogy at Tribeca in 06 (?) and remember being alternately fascinated and irritated. I have the Aussie set, so I'll have to give them another spin and see what I think the 2nd time around.

[Robotron]

Although I’ve missed a couple of features, I’d tentatively rank Vaux to the Sea as his most satisfying feature of the last twenty years.

I'm not sure if you meant for the math to imply what it does here, unless you really do think the film is more satisfying than Prospero's Books, in which case I have to put it at quite a higher priority among films to see than I have it presently delegated.

[Gropius]

I’d tentatively rank Vaux to the Sea as his most satisfying feature of the last twenty years.

Agree with this assessment (although I wouldn't rank it above Mâcon): Vaux placed highly on my 2000s list. It is a shame about the third part, but I'm of the opinion that this trilogy, with all its faults, was still a more exciting project than the vast majority of contemporary film production. As you note, it recaptured some of the spirit of The Falls and the 70s shorts. Unfortunately, Greenaway seems to have been forced to retreat into safer linear narratives since, if the tepid Nightwatching is any indication, with another (pudding-y?) artist biopic in the pipeline. I have a feeling he won't attempt anything so ambitious again in his remaining years, but would of course like to be proved wrong.

[Tommaso]

I agree completely with zedz' assessment, and "Vaux" is indeed his best since "Macon" (which makes it 12 years), though admittedly there were only two features between "Macon" and the Trilogy. With regard to the the third part of TLS, I wonder whether it would not have been better to have let the Trilogy unfinished, just as he (perhaps intentionally?) never finished some of his art installation series like "The Stairs" or "Maps to Paradise".

As to "Nightwatching", I find it's a grower with a repeated viewing. How complex the film is might only become clear after watching the documentary "Rembrandt's J'accuse", in itself perhaps the most fascinating art lecture ever put onto film (or digital video, rather). And I'm still not sure whether he actually believes in that conspiracy theory or not; but if it's all a hoax, he pulled it off extremely convincingly.

[zedz]

Although I’ve missed a couple of features, I’d tentatively rank Vaux to the Sea as his most satisfying feature of the last twenty years.

I'm not sure if you meant for the math to imply what it does here, unless you really do think the film is more satisfying than Prospero's Books, in which case I have to put it at quite a higher priority among films to see than I have it presently delegated.

Well, I really dislike Prospero's Books (like, really, really dislike), which was a huge disappointment when I saw it, and I think it still lays all of Greenaway's limitations out on the autopsy table (and I thought Macon was more of the unfortunate same), so that might explain the maths!

[MichaelB]

Well, I really dislike Prospero's Books (like, really, really dislike), which was a huge disappointment when I saw it, and I think it still lays all of Greenaway's limitations out on the autopsy table (and I thought Macon was more of the unfortunate same), so that might explain the maths!

I'm absolutely with you there - in fact, I haven't seen a Greenaway film since Mâcon - so the fact that we're in sync suggests that this Australian DVD set might be worth a punt.