A Walk Through Greenaway
Somewhat diminished from his onetime status as a controversial arthouse darling, British writer-director Peter Greenaway still demands consideration, most obviously as one of the most distinctive and ravishing visualists of modern times. As a pre-emptive warning, it should be divulged that his work has never resembled mass entertainment and many find his films unpalatable, even those with a taste for independent film, art cinema, or foreign movies. Many valid reasons exist for this distaste. Characterization is representational, archetypal and/or symbolic, but rarely realistic by any means. Dialog is literary, stylized, and densely packed with academic reference and allusion, but hardly ever natural. Compositions are artificial and painterly, and though stunning can be off-putting for some due to their disregard for the standard techniques of photography and cinematography. Traditional narrative drive is usually subverted to precious conceits of formalism where the events of the plot are skewed and manipulated to fit into puzzle-like, often numerical systems. Given all of this, it is clear why many are not at all entertained by Greenaway’s works, and granted, with such aesthetic distance it is unlikely than one will to a great degree become emotionally involved with the stories he tells, and the films don’t cause one to feel in the traditional way of cinema. Furthermore, some who can tolerate the unusual detachment of a Greenaway are frankly repulsed or disgusted by his content. Greenaway hits the more extreme registers of the high and low brow, never approaching the middle. He has been derided for naked elitism and pretension for making all of his work so densely packed with academic reference and reflection of fine art, cinema, and music. He has similarly been attacked for recurring instances of perversion and scatology. An aspect of his work that can be construed as high or low depending upon one’s perspective is the copious nudity throughout his work. Hopefully one unversed in Greenaway’s work can glean by this point whether or not they despise him on principle. Having given a broad overview of a few complaints, I will now explain why Peter Greenaway is one of my favorite filmmakers. This may get redundant or sticky as, like Spike Lee, the complaints of his detractors are intrinsically linked or identical to the exclamations of his proponents. Greenaway’s films may lack the pleasures one generally seeks from cinema. However, they don’t seem to feign an attempt at them. They are largely different constructs of a highly idiosyncratic variety. Hopefully they offer their own charms to compensate, but for many it is a case of “you don’t like it if you don’t like it.” This is fine, just as a lot of folks don’t care for prison melodramas. Suffice to say, Greenaway’s unique confections have long since managed to charm me into vigorously championing his work. Approaching Greenaway’s movies on their own terms does take some attention and acclimation. The words in particular can be so alien in their content and delivery that learning to actually listen to them without zoning out is similar to learning to hear antiquated formats such as Elizabethan theater. Comparable efforts must also be made to become accustomed to the visuals and the structure. I do, however, believe that digging into them yields greater rewards than the obscure puzzle solving that dissecting them may appear to be. Greenaway’s training is as a painter, a fate he prescribes to not being able to pass muster for a film education. Though he always aimed at film, the aesthetic of classic painters informs his images more than the great cinematographers. He is more likely to place a figure at the center of an image or pose several objects in painterly tableaux than to adhere to any of that rule-of-thirds, 180-degree-rule nonsense. Furthermore, his use of lighting and color mimics the effect of painters more than the stylized naturalism of cameramen. Greenaway credits Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal,” a work of stark, emblematic images and a major character no less symbolic than Death himself (plus, is anything more formalized than a chess board?), as the movie that made him want to direct. Other primary influences he has cited include Italian giants Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, neither of whom were afraid of sprawling, painterly composition (or scatology, for that matter). Completing his fine arts education, Greenaway’s backdoor into movie magic came as an editor of industrial shorts. Perhaps it says much about his later style that his early training first came in fine arts then non-narrative editing, and not in fields of literary storytelling (though he is erudite and knowledgeable about literature, yet seems maybe more fascinated by the formal aspects of it than narrative thrust). Certainly, the formal framing devices of his later works can be construed as the fantasies of an editor or an autodidact.
From his editing employment he moved in the seventies into making his own experimental shorts. Titles such as “A Walk Through H” and “Vertical Features Remake” were the hypothetical results of absurd fictitious back stories and formal premises, and would get more comment here if they were not unseen by me. Yes, they are available at the excellent Naro Expanded Video in Norfolk, and yes, I am lazy. In any case, his shorts played festivals and garnered awards in the United Kingdom. The prestige Greenaway accumulated from this acclaim culminated in what one might call an epic series of shorts, 1980’s “The Falls.” With funding from the British Film Institute, Greenaway made a pseudo-documentary consisting of 92 biographies, each around 30 seconds to 3 minutes in length. This is a very redundant format for a 3 hour film, albeit a low-budget commissioned experimental one. Yet, I was quite entertained for much of it, though in the interest of full disclosure, it did lose my attention intermittently. This is okay, according to Greenaway. He described it as being ideally suited to video (and better yet now, DVD) in that it is something you can have running on a loop, or watch parts of out of sequence, or just take it in small bits. After all, it's not really a narrative, it's 92 brief narratives. Perhaps I should explain something here: Greenaway is funny. Maybe he is not instant 'ha ha' funny, but he definitely deserves a place in the pantheon of British humor. This is often overlooked as his humor is mordant and bone-dry, to the point where those who don’t find his “jokes” funny tend to think his films are dripping with contempt and misanthropy. This may be so, but he is funny. The premise and content of “The Falls” provide perhaps a good, exaggerated entrance to Greenaway humor. The film is ridiculous, in the tradition of silly British wit most associated with Douglass Adams or Monty Python (but much dryer, like Python de-hydrated, Python jerky if you will). The premise is this: sometime in the (not really, there is no futuristic detail) future, a non-remembered catastrophe referred to as the V.U.E. (Violent Unknown Event) has caused strange symptoms in millions, such as the development of spontaneous languages, avian and flight related fixations and developments, dreams of water, etc. “The Falls” (in a mocumentary premise far more imaginative (and incoherent) than later Christopher Guest vehicles) is purportedly a government commissioned documentary (and remember that “The Falls” actually is a government commissioned fake documentary), the English language version (supposedly one of 92 different linguistic iterations), depicting short biographies of the V.U.E. sufferers, out of millions, whose names happen to begin with the letters “F A L L” (hence the title). Wow. The parentheses used in attempting to explain that should give you an idea of the fun Greenaway has with structure. Greenaway tells his 92 stories with a droll English narrator, still photographs, comically mundane talking heads interviews, faux stock footage and real stock footage. The stories are absurd and silly in the most understated way possible for the material. Intertextual shenanigans abound (after all, some of the Falls must be related) as events, symptoms, and motifs recur from slightly different angles in different biographies, while just as many are stand-alone riffs. A personal favorite recurring gag(?) of mine is that a handful of biographies end wildly divergent sagas by mentioning dreams of water, at which point all of them revert to the same stock footage of the Thames seen by moving train scored to the instrumental for Brian Eno’s “Golden Hours.” Also, remember that convoluted linguistic premise? That “The Falls” was made and then dubbed to 92 different languages, and we are only watching the English version? That pays off when we are treated to footage of interview subjects speaking English, then spoken over in a gibberish V.U.E. language (presumably from the original version of “The Falls,” which is not in English) only to be translated back into English by the droll narrator. Another layer to that, if you listen hard, the original English speaker and the narrator are not saying the exact same thing. While “The Falls” was some sort of visionary acheivement and a development from his shorts, 1982’s “The Draughtsman’s Contract” was his first “actual movie” and the work that brought him to the attention of British arthouse fans and a small international contingent. Significantly, it retained the musical talents of Michael Nyman from “The Falls.” Nyman would go on to score most of Greenaway’s movies, as well as films such as Patrice Leconte’s “Monsieur Hire,” Jane Campion’s “The Piano,” Andrew Niccol’s “Gattaca,” Antonia Bird’s “Ravenous” (with Damon Albarn), and Michael Winterbottom’s “The Claim.” Nyman has sometimes (unfairly) been percieved as a poor man’s Phillip Glass. Though he is also a minimalist, Nyman does not sound much like Glass other than having a similar knack with uncanny beautiful and impossibly simple passages. Though Glass, especially recently, has flirted more and more with traditional instrumentation, Nyman has always retained a more classical feel than the popular god of minimalism. Less pretentiously stated, Nyman doesn’t use synths as much. So he’s different, okay? Both great, both different. In addition to Nyman’s score, “The Draughtsman’s Contract” boasted wonderful period detail and composition in its late seventeenth century manor setting. Upon that, add purposeful obvious anachronisms and a living statue prowling throughout the piece, uncommented upon. Yes, this is absurd in a way never before seen. The characters are arch (we can even say bitchy) and manipulative. Anthony Higgens delivers a great turn as the titular draughtsman, cocky, cavalier and eventually in over his head. This is the first of many charismatic performances in Greenaway films that put partial lie to the complaint that his characters are inanimate props for ideas. Not to say that Higgens’ Mr. Neville (only one lowly character in this film is lowly enough to have something as lowly as a first name) is not a prop for ideas. He is a wickedly funny representation of the artist as dictator. Trading 12 draughts (drafts) of a manor for sexual favors from the wife of the estate (who claims to intend for the drawings to be a gift to her husband), Neville draws exactly what he sees, so he disrupts everybody’s routines with imposing demands that his selected tableaux not be even slightly disturbed. One might observe that his skill is so absolute and uncompromising that he would be made obsolete by cameras. Greenaway works in a skewed nod to Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow Up” when clues to the possible murder of the absent lord of the manor begin to unwittingly surface in the draughts, seeming to implicate the draughtsman himself. The film becomes something of a class satire with heavily abstracted Agatha Christie mystery. Needless to say, the hapless draughtsman eventually receives brutal comeuppance. Though not a blockbuster by any means, “The Draughtsman’s Contract” was a moderate international success, announcing the arrival of a quirky new auteur. As with many quirky people, artists or otherwise, more and more would eventually tire of his rigorous idiosyncracy and turn on him. But at this stage, Greenaway’s new style was still generally seen as refreshing, and his first conventional narrative feature offers a good introduction to the things that he gets very right. The visuals are near-perfectly arranged and realized, and shots are often held stationary for long stretches. The protagonist’s compulsive viewing through a grid frame can easily be applied to Greenaway’s symmetrical perfectionism. Beautiful detail in colors, costumes, and scenery, to the extent that this looks like an expensive film (it is not). The music is fine, and the stylized dialog is very fun to listen to. 1985’s A Zed and Two Noughts is a stately, melancholy romp involving twin zoologists, their new (and newly leg missing) lover Alba, a whore named Venus de Milo, and a wacky scheming villain who, in a Greenaway film, becomes an iconic representation of a wacky scheming villain. A lot to dig into here, so lets just get into it. If I lose you and you care to figure it out, you may indeed want to see this movie. The title is a longwinded, arcane way of spelling out “ZOO.” Which is the setting of the film. The “two noughts” can also refer to the twin protagonists, Oswald and Oliver. As to what to construe the “zed” as, there’s plenty of possibilities and I have no specific idea. Of course zed (or “zee” as some call it) is the end of the alphabet, and quite a lot in this movie has to do with death and decay. Also, the zed can be represented as the twins’ shared lover, whose actual initials evoke the beginning of the alphabet, as she is named Alba Bewick. This may seem utterly pointless, teasing alphabetical ephemera out of the “story,” but this is the type of thing Greenaway has endless fun with. That and beautiful, striking film. Back to this Alba Bewick. She loses a leg in a car accident that claims the respective lives of the twins’ wives, providing quite a meet cute for her and the protagonists. Said accident opens the film in a beginning I have never seen before or since, the old “woman in car screaming with swan on broken windshield.” In case you’re disoriented, the scene soon segues into a newspaper photo with the helpful and informative headline “SWAN CRASH TWO DIE.” In case you’re already wondering, Alba does at some point change her name to Leda. She also conceives twins and names both Oswald and Oliver as the fathers. Oh, and she has her remaining leg amputated. None of this may seem like anything an actual person might do, and this is correct. But in this film, with its obsessive motifs of twinning, pairs and symmetry, of course Alba would have an aesthetic amputation to preserve her bodily symmetry. Alba becomes the primary sexual receptacle for the grief stricken twins (whose last name I didn’t want to reveal until I got into this “2” stuff, but it is Deuce), but they also use the services of the prostitute Venus de Milo, who is named after a statue with no arms. And Alba eventually has no legs. There’s all sorts of little symmetries running through this beast. The Deuce brothers, shattered by the death of their wives, spend the course of the film fixated on death and deterioration. Lest we think Greenaway is only playing elaborate games with us, this theme has real poignancy, as the scientifically inclined Deuces attempt to quantify and understand the unknowable, an impossible goal followed, in clinical, unflinching and morbidly fascinating observation, to its only logical, as well as tragic, conclusion. This thread, the meat of the story I suppose, makes a fascinating comparison to a later masterpiece in the “psychological deterioration of brilliant twins in the sciences” genre, David Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers.” The conclusion of “A Zed and Two Noughts,” remains one of the most bizarrely beautiful and strangely moving I have ever seen. Certainly it is the best use of any number of snails since Luis Buñuel’s “Diary of a Chambermaid.” I must admit to some surprise in this and other Greenaway productions as to the lingering power of films that seemed at first to be entirely intellectualized constructs featuring characters who seem to be two dimensional props for ideas. And yet, the more thought that is devoted to a Greenaway, the characters and situations develop a power beyond their obvious academic fascination. There are after all stories here, Greenaway is just not interested in the tired format of telling it to the viewer. For an incomplete metaphor, his films are like MagicEye images, where the more one fixates upon and looks beyond his formalist patterns, the more one is likely to see a beautiful three dimensional image of the proverbial “bunch of dolphins.” The bunch of dolphins here being a surreal and touching tale that took on a new life in mutating into an urban legend. Check the message boards of snopes.com, under “horrors,” and you will find a community who has never seen this film retelling the story under the topic “time-lapse suicide.” The film was also an aesthetic breakthrough in some ways. It is the first set in Greenaway’s own particular timeless, stylized England. And it is his first shot by the man who would become his preferred lensman, Sacha Vierny, the virtuoso European cinematographer behind such films as Buñuel’s “Belle du Jour.” In addition to perfect, mind-melding realizations of Greenaway’s static tableaux, Vierny lends a stately fluidity that would become a Greenaway trademark, visible in many pleasing horizontal pans and an unforgettable circular vertical final portrait of the Deuce brothers. Significantly, Vierny plays an integral part in realizing the unconventional lighting schemes of Greenaway. For this film, Greenaway replicated the constant lighting scheme of Vermeer, a low angle from the left side. Nyman contributes his usual exceptional score. The “usual exceptional” paradox is purposeful, as it is maybe a key to Greenaway’s critical misrepresentation as, with so many dependable marvels contained within each work, it may be easier to harp on that which is lacking, and Greenaway, to rub salt in the wounds of pedestrian criticism, seems contentedly unconcerned with. To quote “A Zed and Two Noughts” in paraphrasing an ages old mindfuck: “Do you think a zebra is a white animal with black stripes, or a black animal with white stripes?” For a change, Greenaway’s next theatrical effort, 1987’s “The Belly of an Architect,” was not scored by Nyman, who was busy elsewhere. Wim Mertins capably provides the main accompaniment, replacing the rejected score of Glenn Branca, whose fingerprints still linger over a few cues. Vierny does strikingly compose and illuminate Rome, a setting as different from Greenaway’s previous British locations as it is ideally suited to the aesthete leanings of Greenaway, Vierny, and the film’s focus on architecture. Lead Brian Dennehy, the titular belly, brings a new possibility of recognizable humanity to the semi-abstract Greenaway canon. Previously, Greenaway employed theatrically trained British actors for their capacity with the heavy, arcane literary dialog he tended to write. It is perhaps a rare glimpse into Greenaway’s personal passions and sympathy with the plight of the perfectionist artiste that he cast the direct, sympathetic, and brilliant in the American method sense Dennehy as his own artistic alter-ego, Stourley Kraklite (martyred much like fellow Greenaway stand-in Neville in “The Draughtsman’s Contract"). Greenaway, in fact, credits Dennehy with opening his mind to the possibilities of affecting performances and some semblance of human appeal in his films. Dennehy, who would have deserved an Oscar nomination had the movie been released in the United States, achingly portrays the disintegration of his architect struggling to mount a proper retrospective of his hero Etienne-Louis Boulee against the adversity presented by his younger financier/power-hungry-rival, Caspian Speckler, who proceeds to claim domain over both Kracklite’s exhibit and wife. As well as the adversity of stomach cancer. -George Booker
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