Greenaway, Peter – Senses of Cinema

b. April 5, 1942, Monmouthshire, Wales

P is for Peter. G is for Greenaway. – Peter Greenaway was born in Newport, Wales in 1942. His father was a builder’s merchant and ornithologist. His mother was a teacher. After the war the family relocated to Essex. In the early 60s Greenaway studied at Walthamstow School of Art in London. Trained as a painter, his first art exhibition was in 1964 at Lord’s Gallery. Over the years Greenaway has continued to exhibit visual works and conceptual pieces in galleries alongside his filmmaking, and he has often used his striking visual work as part of his films. He is also the author of a series of ten opera libretti titled The Death of a Composer. In 1965 Greenaway began work editing and making documentaries at the very official-sounding Central Office of Information (the COI). Greenaway stayed with the COI for eleven years, in the meanwhile beginning to make his own shorts, mostly in faux documentary format, in response to his work at the COI.¹ These early faux documentary shorts were inspired by Structuralist filmmakers such as Hollis Frampton, Malcolm LeGrice and Peter Gidal. In these early films Greenaway’s hobbyhorses are already thoroughly grounded – natural history and the English landscape, water, encyclopediae, lists and the nouvelle roman. There is a depth and scope to Greenaway’s interests apparent in his films which is threatening to some. Pauline Kael stated in a review that Peter Greenaway is a “cultural omnivore who eats with his mouth open.”² His early film influences also included Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman. Greenaway’s influences in the visual arts vary from a heavy influence of traditional Dutch painting to more modern artists such as R. B. Kitaj, Francis Bacon, Tom Phillips, Joel-Peter Witkin and Cindy Sherman.³ Other early influences include John Cage, Marcel Duchamp and Jorge Luis Borges. Greenaway said of one of his key Structuralist works – “I was much too cynical about Structuralism to be a good, down-the-line Structuralist as Vertical Features Remake, I hope, indicates.”⁴ We don’t have room to discuss Greenaway’s shorts here but if you want a true understanding of his features a close look at these shorts is essential. They lay the groundwork for Greenaway’s later work as a filmmaker, which is still highly dependent upon structures. As Godard said in a CBC interview with Elwy Yost – “To me there is not much difference between content and form… You can reach content through forms and you can reach forms through content.”⁵ It is in precisely this spirit that Greenaway made his first feature, the nearly 3 and a half hour long Structuralist faux documentary The Falls (1980).

The Falls

In The Falls the opening theme by Michael Nyman is at once disquieting and invigorating. A list of surnames beginning with Fall scrolls up the screen over a shakily-held shot of a black and white landscape, things categorized in sharp contrast to nature’s tendency towards unpredictable diversification. This landscape seen through a filter suggests that our glance at it is as artificial as our arbitrary categories. The names on the screen are from a directory of 92 victims of the “Violent Unknown Event” (VUE), a small cross section of a catastrophe which affected 19 million people worldwide. The Falls is a faux documentary and Structuralist work, like Greenaway’s early shorts, narrative concerns abolished in favour of lists, motifs of natural history, faux reportage and interviews with victims of the VUE. Greenaway adopted the faux documentary format after becoming disillusioned making documentaries for the COI.⁶ As The Falls progresses, we are presented with a voiceover blending fact with the fantastical. People metamorphosize into birds, or are only able to give birth “with the aid of a placenta that had developed an eggshell.” This is an unusual mix of age-old storytelling with the avant-garde, Ovid meets Hollis Frampton meets the authority of the BBC voiceover. As the case histories continue, they document the VUE and its aftereffects – sterility, disease and mutation, yet mixed with cases of immortality. A proliferation of new languages, such as “Curdine”, “Allow-ese” and “Capistan” highlights the inevitability of patterns of adaptive radiation found in nature, a radiation which is at odds with pronounced structures of lists, grids (seen visually in the background in Greenaway’s collages), set numbers (92), categories of dreams of water, and the set “facts” provided to us by the voiceover. These pronounced structures are akin to forces of selection, and thus that ultimate selection – death, which is what happens to the authority of the voice established in The Falls. The authority of the documentary voiceover dies as it’s being constructed, its earnestness at severe odds with the absurdity of the presented content. Aspirations to flight abound, but as the title suggests, they are met with failure. Note how frequent collaborator Nyman’s score, equally playing with structures and minimally recursive as Greenaway’s film, is suitably matched.

The Falls

Following the success of The Falls, Greenaway ventured into narrative filmmaking, saying of it – “I certainly wanted to come out of the experimental-movie closet and seek a wider audience.”⁷ The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) follows the story of Mr. Neville (Anthony Higgins), a late 17th century English draughtsman commissioned to do 12 drawings of a country house and its grounds over a period of 12 days. In agreeing to do the drawings for Mrs. Herbert (Janet Suzman) while her husband is away, they draw up a contract which stipulates that Mrs. Herbert must in turn agree with Neville’s sexual demands. Starting from its opening frames, note the heavy stylization of the costumes. The wigs are marvelously poofy and women wear wedding cake headdresses rising right out of the top of the diegetic space. This stylization is an opportunity for Greenaway to be the auteur, while also adding a layer of distantiation. Greenaway finds novel forms of distantiation for every film he creates. The set number of 12 drawings in 12 days is a manifestation of Greenaway’s vestigial Structuralism. Beginning with The Draughtsman’s Contract this vestigial structuralism is ever present in his features and carries out a kind of civil war against the narrative. Hollis Frampton said of narrative – “A specter is haunting the cinema: the specter of narrative. If that apparition is an angel, we must embrace it: and if it is a devil, we must cast it out. But we cannot know what it is until we have met it face to face.”⁸ Greenaway meets this angel/demon armed with structures which don’t aim to negate the narrative, but to prevent it from swallowing the film whole. When the artist sets to work the film is further distantiated by the presence of frames within frames, Neville drawing on a grid and using a vertical planning frame, a draughtsman’s net, to compose his drawings.

The Draughtsman’s Contract

The frame holds a wire grid reminiscent of the grids found in Vertical Features Remake and The Falls, a Greenaway signature. The drawings of course are Greenaway’s own, and they possess a lot of character. Note the presence of obelisks on the grounds, a Greenaway signature. At one point in the film Neville refers to a ladder as a “meretricious vertical” and there is a sense that it alludes humorously to the presence of these phallic monuments, as well as alluding to Vertical Features Remake. The grounds are lush, sculpted, recalling Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961) but also Greenaway’s family history of horticulture. Neville soon finds an obstinate rival in Mr Talmann (Hugh Fraser), Mrs. Herbert’s son-in-law. At dinner Neville is clearly the outsider, accused of Scottish sympathies. In a confrontation outdoors, Neville also expresses Irish sympathies as opposed to Talmann’s favouring of William of Orange. Neville begins to draw items which were not meant to be in his line of vision, and which he seemed not even to notice until after they were drawn. Amy Lawrence rightly notes how fruit, often nourishing or indicative of fecundity, is used in the film in a way as to suggest vulgarity, excess and infidelity.⁹ If the “meretricious verticals” are associated with the power and sexuality of the male artist, the images of fruit are associated with female power and conspiracy. If the portrait of this artist is rather brutal, Neville’s lower station and political sympathies somewhat explain his unsavoury behavior. Greenaway said that he wanted to base the film on something he was told in art school – “Draw what you see, and not what you know…” With its theme of an artist capturing intrigue which he is blind to, The Draughtsman’s Contract is something of a low-tech Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966). Note how the camera is mostly static, as in Greenaway’s Structural films, not only an influence of documentary, but also of painting. There are some pan shots at the dinner table which are conspicuous, almost dizzying, and add to the sense of discomfort felt by Neville. Greenaway being first and foremost a painter, every shot is exquisitely composed. “As with painting, so with cinema” he has said.¹⁰ There are no wasted shots in a Greenaway film. When Mr. Talmann snidely refers to “English painter” being a contradiction in terms, this is actually a rephrased remark of François Truffaut’s on English cinema. The film stands as a triumph above such a remark.

The Draughtsman’s Contract

The opening shot of A Zed & Two Noughts shows two children pulling a dalmatian on a leash in front of a giant sign that says ZOO. Then, a tiger frantically pacing behind bars, the rotting head of a zebra on the floor. Next, we see a counting device in the hand of Oliver (Eric Deacon), a zoologist – 0674. He is counting the number of times a tiger paces across its tiny cage, part of Greenaway’s Structural conceits. It cuts to an image of a car accident with a swan dead in the windscreen and a screaming woman in the driver’s seat, Alba (Andréa Ferréol). Behind is the ZOO sign and an Esso ad with a tiger. Then we see Oliver’s brother Oswald (Brian Deacon), also a zoologist, photographing a one-legged gorilla in a cage. A counter on the camera shows the number 7. Sobbing in the aftermath of broken glass, Oliver places some of it in a tissue. The wives of Oliver and Oswald were killed in the crash. The Z on the ZOO sign is broken, then one of the Os, which leaves us with the “nought” of the title. Red and white candy cane streamers blow in the wind in front of the Esso sign, a striking reference to Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965).

A Zed & Two Noughts

The remarkable cinematography is by Sacha Vierny, who had worked with Alain Resnais and would continue to work with Greenaway until his death. Speculating on how long the bodies will take to decompose, the brothers reduce the indigestible problem into scientific facts. On voiceover we hear David Attenborough narrating from his engaging documentary Life On Earth as the Esso billboard is plastered over with white. – If Greenaway is a son of the Nouvelle Vague, he has also created quite a new brand of filmmaking. Soon the brothers befriend Alba, who has had her leg surgically removed. If symmetry and doubling is a common theme in A Zed & Two Noughts, which alludes to our existence as creatures of bilateral symmetry, mark how Alba is presented in her hospital bed with the bedframe haloing her head. – It reads like a mockery of a religious portrait, while also suggesting more primitive creatures which exhibit a radial symmetry. As a mother, it is natural to associate Alba with such origins. On her bedside is a vivid, almost lurid shot of a plate of green apples – another reference to our origins but through a mythic lens. Next we meet Venus de Milo, “Milo” (Frances Barber) a prostitute and writer of erotic stories propositioned by zookeeper Van Hoyten (Joss Ackland), offering her 5 pounds currency and two pounds of zebra steak. Milo works out of the zoo, one of various references to bestiality. In Greenaway no taboo is left untouched. An apple that Oswald left in front of stop-motion cameras is now brown and rotted. The brothers are cataloguing details of decomposition. Meanwhile, in Alba’s hospital room, someone plays an alphabet naming game with Alba’s daughter Beta. These alphabet games not only provide Structural distantiation, but also mirror the zoo itself as a pat dictionary or encyclopedia of animals. Oliver becomes lovers with Milo. Back in the lab, Oswald’s apple has been replaced with a bowl of prawns beneath the camera’s flashing lights. Just as life evolves in the documentary both brothers have been watching, (Oswald watches it in his apartment, while Oliver watches in the theatre) the life forms they watch decay increase in complexity. Oswald also takes up with Milo. In Alba’s hospital room, her toenails on her one foot are getting a pedicure from Vermeer’s Girl With a Red Hat, Caterina Bolnes (Guusje Van Tilborgh). The shots of the Girl With a Red Hat are truly breathtaking, thanks to the fine costuming and Greenaway and Vierny’s ingenious experiments with lighting.

A Zed & Two Noughts

Greenaway was inspired by a quotation from Godard referring to Vermeer as the first cinematographer, in his manipulation of light and capturing of instants. Greenaway and Vierny made a list of 26 different ways of lighting for the film. – Morning light, afternoon light, moonlight, candlelight, etc.¹¹ Back in Alba’s hospital room she says that her surgeon wishes to be a Dutch painter. Like the Vermeer forger, his name is Van Meegeren (Gerard Thoolen). Alba becomes lovers with Oliver, and then with Oswald. The brothers rent Alba a pink apartment near the zoo. Alba announces that she is pregnant, insisting that they both fathered the child. As the brothers progress in their studies we begin to see animals – a crocodile, swan and a dalmatian – lying in a gridded enclosure under the lights of stop-motion cameras, their decay a kind of motion. These stop-motion studies refer to the animal locomotion studies of Edweard Muybridge, an important figure in proto-cinema. We recognize the grid from earlier Greenaway works and here it has even more significance under stop-motion lights, the discrete components of the grid similar to the physical structure of film stock and the discrete rows of moving images found in the devices of proto-cinema, like the zoetrope or phenakistiscope. As such, the animated decay we witness against these grids not only indicates our own mortality, but also points towards the death of cinema itself. A Zed and Two Noughts is unique for an art film in its use of biological theory as content and structuring device, reframing existential despair through a lens of natural history. In this way A Zed and Two Noughts echoes back to The Falls and if you are a fan of natural history, both films are essential viewing. This mix of existential despair, rot and natural history is tempered by images of the very cultivated – The work of Vermeer, one of the great artists of the golden age of Dutch painting. This height of human endeavor, mimicked so beautifully with Greenaway and Vierny’s experiments with 26 kinds of lighting, stands in sharp contrast to images of violent, inexplicable deaths, amputation, and the baser human instincts underscored by themes of prostitution and bestiality. The use of Vermeer not only serves to distinguish between the cultivated and uncultivated, but is one of the most effective, interesting and seamless uses of postmodern anachronism in film. This kind of anachronism as a device not only offers an element of the absurd, but also gives one a weird sense of experiencing time in a black hole, where everything is happening simultaneously. Consequently, postmodern anachronism leans towards a negation of history or stands as a commentary on its cyclical and futile nature. For a postmodern anachronism used to a similar effect, see, for example, the historical figures in Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967). Although many have undoubtedly seen David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988) they will be surprised to learn that the film is a kind of remake of A Zed & Two Noughts. After presenting his film at TIFF, Greenaway says that he was approached by Cronenberg who sat with him questioning him about the film. Soon after, he made the film Dead Ringers.¹²

A Zed & Two Noughts

The Belly of an Architect (1987) begins with Stourley Kracklite (Brian Dennehy) and his wife Louisa (Chloe Webb) making love on a train. In nearby countryside, in contrast, we see shots of graves. “What a way to enter Italy” exclaims Louisa, providing some exposition. Note how when the satisfied Dennehy says “Home of the arch!” in agreement, he slaps his fat belly. We are shown shots of buildings in Rome which pan around them, in direct opposition to their heavy and static nature. These quickly-moving shots are conspicuous in Greenaway, who often employs a static camera, composing shots like paintings. Then we see Kracklite welcomed by an architectural cake on his birthday. We discover that he is in Rome to organize an exhibition on Etienne-Louis Boullée, the 18th century French architect. They dine in front of a much older architectural wonder, The Pantheon. “Boullée’s crowning achievement, inspired, of course, by the magnificent building of the Pantheon, here behind us, was a memorial he designed in honour of Sir Isaac Newton, for whom Boullée had great reverence.” The cake they have brought him is a replica of this building, domed, bellied, like Kracklite himself. He pulls out an English one pound note with Newton on it and shows it to the other guests. Someone tells Kracklite that they heard his inspiration for the Chicago-Angelo building “came entirely from the profit on sausages.” “No” Stourley replies, “frankfurters, hotdogs, hamburgers, salami, baloney.” “In Chicago, they call it the slaughterhouse. A building suffering from excess cholesterol, like Stourley” says Louisa. Stourley denies this fact. Louisa describes her father’s wedding present, a commission for Stourley to build them a house, as “Two marble cubes and a brick sphere on stilts…” (she laughs) “Boullée would have loved it.” This description suggests that Louisa has little respect or understanding of her husband’s work, considering him to be fat and his architecture to be drole. The camera pans over a row of the guests applauding the Pantheon, but they look distracted. Caspasian (Lambert Wilson), co-organizer of the exhibit, looks searchingly at Louisa. The overall feeling is of ennui in the face of beauty… Like the consumed cake, the Pantheon is somewhat passé. They have all seen it before. After the party Louisa reminds Kracklite that he has only made 6 and a half buildings, and now organizes an exhibition on another architect who built almost nothing. (Boullée exists mostly on paper.) Kracklite suddenly has stomach pains which he blames on indigestion. We find out that Caspasian has been put in charge of a million dollars in exhibition money. From inside the “Wedding Cake” or “Typewriter” building, the Vittoriano, the intended home of the exhibition, Kracklite expresses a desire to see the tomb of Augustus. Before everyone lunches in the Vittoriano we are given several images of the building’s exteriors.

The Belly of an Architect

While buildings shot at the film’s beginning were in motion, these shots are rigid, almost unforgiving, giving a fascistic air to the architecture. Just as Kracklite takes a bite of his food, in reverse shot we have a very large bowl of very green-looking figs, as perfectly centred as the shots of the Vittoriano. Caspasian starts relating details, quite embellished, on the death of Augustus, which of course is speculated by some to have been caused by poisoned figs given to him by his wife Livia. Kracklite goes to the bathroom and vomits. Kracklite sickens as the film progresses, as his wife sleeps with Caspasian, who is siphoning funds from the exhibition. He writes postcards to the dead Boullée, asking him if he can feel a lump in his stomach… “Some days it’s spherical, some days it feels like a cube. Most days it feels like a sharp-cornered pyramid.” Is Kracklite’s illness caused by his living life theoretically, on paper? Note while the lines of the displayed architecture often appear very solid and unforgiving, immortal and triumphant in contrast Stourley Kracklite is quite flaccid, amorphous, weak and failing. This amusing perspective on his cancerous lump also implies that despite all his education and pretentions, Kracklite’s perspective is hopelessly delimited. “Did the Pharaohs suffer from stomach cramps?” he asks, a question redolent with egotism. A wild dog eating his vomit off the ground perhaps gives an indication of the actual place he will hold in history. Upon returning home and peering through a keyhole, Kracklite sees Louisa frolicking naked with Caspasian. He grabs a chair and they move to the bed at the back of the scene for another really long shot. As he watches his chair breaks and tubes of papers scatter on the floor. A boy in a toga helps him clean up the mess. In return, he gives him a gyroscope. Climbing up to peer in the keyhole, the boy’s inquiring eye is stopped by the lighthouse model on a table in line of view of the bed. This is a new and very witty kind of shot – a de-sexing shot, which has value as a modern device but which also might be a commentary on how unextraordinary and repetitive are the sex scenes in films. Later, Kracklite is seduced by Caspasian’s sister Flavia (Stefania Casini) and we are treated to another de-sexing shot, this time behind a tripod. Across from Flavia’s apartment is the beautiful Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, a building with fascist associations. Note how the arch, an indicator of strength, is multiplied row upon row, sculpted in stone, in strict opposition to Kracklite’s deterioration. It is interesting to note how the symmetrical compositions in The Belly of an Architect heavily connote a sense of fascism, while in A Zed & Two Noughts the theme is used to represent our existence as bilaterally symmetric beings. Greenaway is a director who often repeats thematic or visual material to startlingly different effect. One might be surprised to find Dennehy, often type-cast as a cop, in a Greenaway film. He said of the venture – “I’ve been in a lot of movies but this is the first film I’ve made.” Greenaway has stated that despite this more American Hollywood acting style that “The film is just as layered.”¹³ One thing of interest to note is how the film presents a devolution of artistic forms according to their permanence. Architecture gives way to images of sculpture, then painting, then photographs, then photocopies.¹⁴ This devolution is the opposite of the evolution of complexity in lifeforms found in A Zed & Two Noughts. It is apparent by the end of the film that Kracklite is surrounded by fascists, but how much of a fascist is he himself? There is one way in which Kracklite stands for American appetite and consumerism, although even if the Italians are thinner (as Louisa says her father was thin) they are culpable in other ways. Greenaway has said that The Belly of an Architect is a highly personal film, full of references to his family, as both his parents died of stomach cancer.¹⁵

The Belly of an Architect

Drowning By Numbers (1988) begins with The Skipping Girl (Natalie Morse) skipping outside of a house at night. She is wearing a wide-skirted white dress like that of the Infanta Margaret Theresa in Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas (1656). As she skips she counts and names stars, “One – Antares, two – Capella…” On a post in the foreground, cleverly muddying the frame, hangs a dead bird. This introduces the theme of counting which is a unique part of this film’s structure. Walking by on the road, the elder Cissie Colpitts (Joan Plowright) questions the girl about her star-counting. As she walks further along the road, note the elegiac tone of Michael Nyman’s score, which sets the mood for the film. You also might catch, in the greenish moonlight, a white number 1 on a tree trunk. This is the beginning of a counting game of numbers throughout the film, some standing out and others more hidden, some only spoken in the dialogue. Discovering her husband Jake (Bryan Pringle) drunk and naked with Nelly/Nancy (Jane Gurnett), each in a tin bathtub, Cissie drowns Jake in the tub, Nelly/Nancy now passed out in the other. The room is littered with apples and gourds. – It is autumn.

Drowning By Numbers

On tables we see still lifes which are also cluttered, of fruit, moths (some on Nelly/Nancy’s knickers), nuts and other articles. Drowning By Numbers is a film very crowded in its compositions, its many still lifes reminiscent of certain Dutch paintings which were meant to show privilege and which were associated with overconsumption and gains from colonial atrocities. There is also the tradition of telling a moral lesson immorally in painting, and which Greenaway stated was his intent in Fear of Drowning. The elder Cissie Colpitts soon convinces Madgett (Bernard Hill) the coroner to declare the death a drowning after a heart attack, although she confesses her guilt. She rebuffs his sexual advances, although hinting in the future that she might change her mind. On the voiceover Madgett’s son Smut (Jason Edwards) relates the rules of games to the viewer, including his game of numbering and celebrating corpses. “The best days for violent deaths are Tuesdays” he explains in a cheery voice. “They are the yellow paint days… Saturdays are second-best, or worst. Saturdays are red paint days.” Smut is a burgeoning Karlheinz Stockhausen, or a young Ted Bundy, perhaps a bit of both. As the film progresses Cissie Colpitts’ daughter (Juliet Stevenson) and niece (Joely Richardson), also named Cissie Colpitts, drown their husbands as well, and lead Madgett on in a tale modeled after The Billy Goats Gruff. Some are intimidated by Greenaway’s counting game in Drowning By Numbers, when it is in reality one of the most original and delightful distantiation devices in cinema. Greenaway has said of his methods – “If a numerical, alphabetical or colour-coding system is employed, it is done so deliberately, as a device, a construct, to counteract, dilute, augment or complement the all-pervading obsessive cinema interest in plot, in narrative, in the “I’m now going to tell you a story” school of filmmaking, which nine times out of ten begins life as literature, an origin with very different concerns, ambitions and characteristics from those of cinema.”¹⁶ The message is really quite plain and simple – Consume the film before it consumes you. The counting game, while providing both distancing and amusement, could also be seen as a tribute to film’s existence through time, something that distinguishes it from its sister arts of photography and painting. For visual inspirations, Greenaway not only alludes to Dutch painting as he does in many of his other films, but was inspired here by a tradition of children’s illustrations such as Arthur Rackham and Maurice Sendak. Other landscape influences were the English landscape painters Samuel Palmer, Stanley Spencer and the Victorian painters of the 1850s such as John Everett Millais, Holman Hunt and Maddox Brown.¹⁷

Drowning By Numbers

At the beginning of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover vehicles pull into a parking lot in front of a restaurant, Le Hollandais. A gangster Spica (Michael Gambon) and his thugs are smearing a man, Roy, with dog shit and forcing it into his mouth. Spica’s wife Georgina (Helen Mirren) tells him to leave him alone. Leaving Roy lying on the ground smeared with feces, the group enter the restaurant to the haunting sound of a boy soprano Pup (Paul Russell) who works in the kitchen – “Have mercy upon me.” The fragility of the voice is in stark contrast to the scene of violence we have just witnessed. The haunting music is again by frequent Greenaway collaborator Michael Nyman. At their dining table Spica scolds one of his men for not eating properly. They are all wearing red sashes over their shoulders as in the very large painting behind them, and similar black suits with white ruffled blouses, the colours having transformed twice since they’ve been indoors. Georgina wears a modern red dress and a black hat. The painting is by Frans Hals, The Banquet of the Officers of the Saint George Militia Company (1616). The painting depicting a Dutch civic guard, Spica and his men are a variation of just such a group, rife with brutality and corruption. Spica goes on to say – “Gawd. Why can’t I have some bloody quality in my associates?” Georgina begins an affair with the quiet bookseller Michael (Alan Howard) after he follows her to the ladies room, an affair which continues in the kitchen’s storerooms evening by evening, with the complicity of the kitchen staff. Michael is the exact opposite of the violent and scatological Spica. The affair continues until discovered by Spica, when the lovers escape in a truck full of rotting meat. What distinguishes The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover the most from Greenaway’s other films is the innocence of the lovers and the child Pup, who as a boy soprano connotes and mirrors their innocence, giving it a voice. Although the lovers are painted heroically, a tradition found in a lot of Hollywood films, the film evades the traps of sentimentality that such a formula often evokes in several ways. The viewer is distanced by a highly stylized colour scheme and the theatrical set and lighting. There are no shots here of lush English gardens or countryside. Each shot is highly artificial, and all the action takes place nocturnally, under artificial light. In the parking lot the light is blue. The kitchen is all green. In the bathroom, it is white, and in the dining room red overwhelms, being the dominant colour of the film. While this dominant red and the melodramatic plot which unfolds in its sordid light are lurid and operatic, the performances of Mirren and Howard are given somewhat coolly, tempering any expression of sentimentality. In contrast, Gambon’s gangster is on full boil for the entirety of the film, as colourful and loudmouth as James Cagney in White Heat (1949). The narrative is also kept fresh by changes of colour experienced by some of the characters as they move between rooms, Georgina’s clothes changing colour the most often. These changes of colour to otherwise identical wardrobe items are something that occurs to Bulle Ogier’s enigmatic double character of Pauline/Emilie in Jacques Rivette’s Out 1: Noli me tangere (1971) and are perhaps a direct reference to this film. As it does with Ogier’s character, these changes of colour to Georgina’s dress underscore a sense of conflict in her character, being caught between a brutish husband and her gentle, bookish paramour. Spica’s dress also changes at times in the film, as well as his men, but not quite as frequently. It suggests that Spica also has inner conflicts, although in his case deeply buried and denied. In contrast the character of Michael is always in the same brown suit, a solid and reliable colour. He knows who he is, and presents the same face wherever he goes. The use of postmodern anachronism is effective here as it was in A Zed & Two Noughts, a kind of companion film to The Cook in its many images of decay. Amy Lawrence correctly notes that gangster films are “obsessed with issues of style”.¹⁸ The same stylistic fervour is found in The Cook. It just so happens that the style it uses for the gangsters comes from a 17th century Dutch painting. As in Greenaway’s earlier use of postmodern anachronism, it evokes a sense of history’s recursiveness. While Greenaway is not normally a political filmmaker, in truth the film is partially a commentary on Thatcher England.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover

Prospero’s Books begins showing drops of water alternating with a view of Prospero writing in a calligraphic hand. On voiceover, the voice of John Gielgud as Prospero reiterates the written text – “Knowing I lov’d my books, he furnished me from mine own library with volumes that I prize above my Dukedom.” Here text, which we know Greenaway has had a dubious relationship with since his Structuralist shorts, becomes not only words but a striking image inferring well the power of written language, language coming from the mouth and hand of a magician. Next we see one of 24 of Prospero’s books shown in the film, A Book of Water. In it are drawings of “shipwrecks, floods and tears”… We see the elderly Gielgud’s hand, palm up, diaphanous over the written text behind… A breathtaking use of multiple exposures. The books are displayed in rectangular insets within the widescreen frame, often with animation added, which Greenaway achieved post-production using the latest in high def video technology and Quantel Paintbox. Prospero’s Books was a cutting-edge film for its time. At this point, only a minute or two into the film, some of the audience might be lost, overwhelmed by the spectacle. Don’t fret. Think of the structure as being like a minimal painting by Ad Reinhardt, the video inset like a filmic jewel set off by its surrounds. The composition differs in that its discrete elements are in motion. Hold on for the ride and simply enjoy the view. The film follows the plot and language of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (circa 1610) almost to a tee, except for the addition of the books of the film’s title, which are purely Greenaway’s invention. While a lot of Greenaway’s films focus on themes and images and the actors themselves often giving inconspicuous performances, Prospero’s Books, starring John Gielgud, is of course quite actorly. His final film appearance, he was 87 years old. Now behind the production credits, crowds of people wander through the half-dark, nude, dressed or semi-nude, some people doing dance.

Prospero’s Books

It is a film crowded in its compositions, like Drowning By Numbers, but instead of communicating a sense of excess, neglect and overconsumption as it does in the other film, in Prospero’s Books the crowded images communicate a sense of burgeoning life, harmony and abundance. In its use of nudity, of all types of people, through the whole spectrum of human ages, it truly separates itself from a Hollywood blockbuster where nudity is almost always the equivalent of a beauty contest. Of all of Greenaway’s features, Prospero’s books is perhaps the one most replete with visual references. Artists referred to include Bronzino, da Messina, Michelangelo, Piranesi, De La Tour, Botticelli, Bernini, da Vinci, Velázquez, Géricault, Rembrandt, Breughel, Rubens, Titian, Veronese, Raphael, Poussin, Fuseli, Giorgione, Mantegna (in another Dead Christ shot) and Muybridge.¹⁹ While the film unapologetically employs a kind of postmodern pastiche of visual styles, it also uses both modern (in the voiceover descriptions of the books) and Elizabethan English, somehow seamlessly. Prospero’s Books, being a literary adaptation, is unique in Greenaway’s work, as a filmmaker who has spoken about cinema’s “slavish dependence on literature.”²⁰

In The Baby of Mâcon (1993) we are met with the 17th century Cosimo III de’ Medici (Jonathan Lacey) and his entourage watching a play about the town of Mâcon, which, beset with plague, famine and sterility, has these cycles broken with the birth of a child to an old, ugly, bald woman whose head is covered with a cloth. Seeing an opportunity in the situation, the woman’s daughter (Julia Ormond) claims that the child (Nils Dorando) is hers through a virgin birth. She is mocked by the bishop (Philip Stone) and his son (Ralph Fiennes), although she and the child gather many followers. Over the course of the play/film, the aristocrats move from their seats in the audience beyond the proscenium onto the stage itself. At the play’s beginning, they are dressed in a vibrant red. If in The Cook the red in the dining room is indicative of violence and operatic emotions, in The Baby of Mâcon the red rather seems to evoke a sense of privilege and opulence in the aristocratic spectators. It maybe also suggests that they come to the theatre seeking blood. One might also note that the swath of red of these aristocrats gives off a womb-coloured glow. The aristocrats are the ones with a fruitful existence, while the poor, wearing brown in a different section of the audience, have lives of drab punishment in comparison. In the second act Cosimo is dressed in white, and his wig has become white. At one point in the action, he vomits a fetching white vomit into a hanky. This whiteness perhaps indicates the blank slate state and suggestibility of the spectators. In front of the stage people hold up banners, reminiscent of Brechtian theatre. In the third act Cosimo and his men adopt the black of executioners, a logical progression from being empty and suggestible, as he condemns Ormond’s character to be brutally raped and hanged. Cosimo expresses some remorse and doubt, but he ultimately bends to the word of the bishop. The Baby of Mâcon is notable for its array of religious inversions. The auctioning off of the child’s urine and blood is a mockery of communion. The association between human fertility/infertility with the state of the land comes from ancient, pre-Christian beliefs when sacrifice was used to appease the angry gods. After the sacrifice was made, it was believed that order and fertility would be restored to the land. In The Baby of Mâcon, this situation is reversed. – The child is sacrificed, and as a result, infertility and misery return to the land. The murder of the child is like the murder of a sacred king in old sacrificial cults, Christianity being a later exemplar. We also see a powerful inversion of the Van Eyck masterpiece The Ghent Altarpiece, where the figures of the holy boy’s parents in the places assigned to Adam and Eve in the painting are old, sickly, covered in sores and murdered in their alcoves flanking the altar. In The Baby of Macon, Greenaway doesn’t have the audience stepping over the proscenium for nothing. In encouraging a more active participation in the play/film he also encourages a more active participation in life, apart from all kinds of conditioning which leads us astray.

The Baby of Mâcon

The Pillow Book (1996) follows the story of Nagiko (Vivian Wu) and is based on the writings of Sei Shōnagon. Nagiko has a fetish for lovers writing on her body, an obsession rooted in an Oedipal complex, as her father wrote on her face when she was a little girl. Moving between flashbacks of Nagiko’s childhood in black and white and colour, the film uses the layered video techniques found in Prospero’s Books. There is an interesting visual mélange of the modern and ancient, pillow shots of urbanity clashing with ancient texts. In flashback, Nagiko’s aunt introduces her to Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, telling her that when she is 28 the book will be a thousand years old. Her aunt reads her a list of elegant things from the book – including duck eggs, and shaved ice with syrup in a silver bowl. Encouraged by her aunt, Nagiko starts her own Pillow Book, making her own list of splendid things. Painted by an old man who gives Nagiko advice on calligraphy, Nagiko steps into the rain and we see the calligraphy wash away, as ephemeral as paper or, perhaps, the body itself. Having no interest in her fetish, Nagiko’s husband sets her diary about her “trivial” life on fire, setting fire to their house. Moving to Hong Kong, she becomes a successful model. One day at her favourite haunt, Café Typo, she meets translator Jerome (Ewan McGregor) who speaks 4 languages but who is a poor calligrapher. Getting rejected from a publisher, Nagiko discovers that it is her father’s publisher, who raped him in exchange for publication. To her horror she discovers that he is lovers with Jerome. Using Jerome as her book, he visits the publisher and comes back elated, saying he is thinking of an edition of 3000. Nagiko is jealous. Nagiko writes the next two books on a couple of Swedish tourists. The Pillow Book is a sensual, textual and polyvisual delight, sharing with Prospero’s Books an elaborate use of video insets and calligraphy which is at once text and image. Both films also use intriguing imaginary books as part of their structural material.

The Pillow Book

Polyvisual frames are also featured heavily in the trilogy of films The Tulse Luper Suitcases (2003-2004) which was also a multimedia project including a website. Here we encounter a figure who has lurked in the shadows of Greenaway’s films since his Structural shorts. Ornithologist, writer of stories, archaeologist and a “professional prisoner”, Luper (JJ Feild) is attributed in the films as authoring many of Greenaway’s works, establishing the man as an alter ego. The action moves from Utah (where the mountains sometimes look like a Maxfield Parrish painting) to prisons in Europe during WWII. The films are the most distantiated of Greenaway’s works and thus won’t be for everyone. At the film’s beginning, and throughout the films, Greenaway novelly provides audition footage of actors. Talking heads are plenty in the film, another echo of early adventures in faux documentary. At times, the head is shown tripled in frontal, side and ¾ view, deconstructing the authority of the talking head. As an imaginative structuring device 92 suitcases are shown through the films. If Greenaway previously tied this number to a misreading of a John Cage work, here he says that it’s the atomic number of uranium. The Tulse Luper Suitcases can be disorienting. At times recursive speech is met with fast cuts, or translucent rectangles migrate over the frame, instantaneously changing the form and colour of what is shown beneath. At one point, being beaten by a jealous husband, small white numbers appear at points of impact then afterwards are connected with lines. Unfortunately we do not have the space to discuss the trilogy here in depth. Recommended: To get a full appreciation of The Tulse Luper Suitcases, watch the rest of Greenaway’s oeuvre beforehand.

The Tulse Luper Suitcases

Nightwatching (2007) follows the life of Rembrandt van Rijn, his wife Saskia (Eva Birthistle) and their household. The film relates a conspiracy as told in the famous titular painting. The action begins at a time when Mary Stuart, daughter of the king of England, arrived in Amsterdam. “When monarchies are in trouble, they send their females begging” says Rembrandt. At an outdoor party where a gun backfires in his face, Rembrandt is commissioned by a civic guard to do a painting of them, for which he wants 9 months of time to complete. This is the second painting of a civic guard featured in Greenaway, the first of course being featured in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. Mark how at the outdoor gathering a kind of table painting is created, with all the guests sitting on one side, the lighting dark and dramatic. A very theatrical lighting is used throughout the film, as it was in A Zed & Two Noughts or the night scenes in Drowning By Numbers, but in this case evoking the paintings of Rembrandt. The costumes are not as heavily stylized as in some other Greenaway works and it also lacks the same kind of self-referentiality, making it one of Greenaway’s more approachable works. Like The Draughtsman’s Contract, it is a period drama about a conspiracy notable for its language, although its interiors are more theatrical, especially in the scenes in Rembrandt and Saskia’s bedroom, which is often bare except for a bed. Greenaway has long been a director much more allied with the theatre rather than the novel. When Rembrandt, having a nightmare, says that he sees “miles… and miles – fuck! – And miles of painted darkness… Lit by spasms of light” it is particularly gripping and poetic. As the plot continues Rembrandt’s wife Saskia gives birth to a son, Titus. Although Rembrandt confesses to the viewer, breaking the fourth wall, that it was like an arranged marriage, Saskia being his art dealer’s cousin, he says that it’s a marriage that works. He meets outside at night regularly with an “angel” Marieke (Natalie Press) who throughout the film tells him of children being sold or prostituted out of the nearby orphanage, and of the culpability of her father Kemp (Christopher Britton), one of the conspirators portrayed in the painting, a sergeant and keeper of the orphanage. She points to the places where Rembrandt and his wife will be buried, having special access to the future. It is a dark film, in both its lighting and content. If it is not heavily Structural, Greenaway hearkens back to his inventive methods in using the material of a painting upon which to base the entire narration of the film.

Nightwatching

Filmography

Shorts

Death of Sentiment (1962)
Tree (1966)
Train (1966)
Revolution (1967)
5 Postcards from Capital Cities (1967)
Intervals (1969)
Erosion (1971)
H Is for House (1973)
Windows (1975)
Water Wrackets (1975)
Water (1975)
Goole by Numbers (1976)
Dear Phone (1978)
Vertical Features Remake (1978)
A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (1978)
1–100 (1978)
Making a Splash (1984)
Inside Rooms: 26 Bathrooms, London & Oxfordshire (1985)
Hubert Bals Handshake (1989)
Rosa: La monnaie de munt (1992)
Peter Greenaway (1995) – segment of Lumière and Company
The Bridge Celebration (1997)
The Man in the Bath (2001)
European Showerbath (2004) – segment of Visions of Europe
Castle Amerongen (2011)
Just in Time (2013) – segment of 3x3D

Features

The Falls (1980)
The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982)
A Zed & Two Noughts (1985)
The Belly of an Architect (1987)
Drowning by Numbers (1988)
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)
Prospero’s Books (1991)
The Baby of Mâcon (1993)
The Pillow Book (1996)
8½ Women (1999)
The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1: The Moab Story (2003)
The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 2: Vaux to the Sea (2004)
The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 3: From Sark to the Finish (2004)
A Life in Suitcases (edited version of The Tulse Luper Suitcases series) (2005)[10]
Nightwatching (2007)
Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012)
Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015)
Documentaries –
Eddie Kid (1978)
Cut Above the Rest (1978)
Zandra Rhodes (1979)
Women Artists (1979)
Leeds Castle (1979)
Lacock Village (1980)
Country Diary (1980)
Terence Conran (1981)
Four American Composers (1983)
The Coastline (also known as The Sea in their Blood) (1983)
Fear of Drowning (1988)
The Reitdiep Journeys (2001)
Rembrandt’s J’Accuse (2008)
The Marriage (2009)
Atomic Bombs on the Planet Earth (2011)

b. April 5, 1942, Monmouthshire, Wales

Filmography

Shorts

Features

Suggested Reading

Endnotes