April 05, 2004

• I'm going to bed now. Have fun, guys. Or not.
• me loves me some Bard, but I tend to lose focus on movies that create atmosphere. I don't know the Tempest though, what's the background on the books?
• Prospero's Books is a fantastic movie. Good call, Alnedra. Drowning By Numbers is my favorite of his movies, but that is partially because I love games and that movie is a game within a game within a game about games. I highly endore it, and any Greenaway movie.
• Oooh, really? This is one of the few movies I've ever walked out on. I was bored to death. Seemed to to be a lot of pomp and pretty, signifying nothing. I'd love to hear more about what people got out of it.
• I once heard Greenaway being interviewed about Drowning by Numbers. The interviewer suggested that the film is really about Englishness, about a certain sort of English eccentricity, and about the English habit of distancing oneself from painful emotion by treating it as a game. Greenaway flatly refused to accept this interpretation, and finally muttered rather ungraciously: "well, you're entitled to your opinion". But it is how I have always understood the film.
• I've never liked Greenaway, and my impression is that people either love his movies or can't stand them. But I'm willing to take the word of those who love them that he's a fine director... just not for me.
• One of the best films by one of my favourite directors... but languagehat is right, you either love him or hate him. My interpretation of the film was slightly different. Prospero's character changes as the film progresses, from being a man who lives through his books, on his island on the fringes of life to being someone more able to engage fully with the world, and with the people he loves (his daughter); a scholar who becomes a more compassionate and well-rounded person by looking up from his books. The books are beautiful but no substitute living life. Though it's been a while since I've seen it and the above doesn't go any way towards doing true justice to the full richness of the film. I must admit that the 'Englishness' angle had never occurred to me; Greenaway is stylistically a very 'British' director, but I don't think he deliberately sets out to be particularly 'British'. (And he's a lot more than that too).
• Two other good Greenaway films :- The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. It also has books as one of its themes (the 'lover' runs a bookshop), as well as food, nudity, revenge and death, other Greenaway staples. It was made in the 1980s, when I think Greenaway was very angry, and is partly a diatribe against (Greenaway's view of) the philistinism of Thatcher's Britain and valuing money over culture (literary or culinary!) and love. The Pillow Book. Also partly about text, and a bit of a 'skin flick' so to speak. It works better on the big screen than on DVD or video. An interesting story (inspired in part by the tradition of Japanese 'pillow books' - diaries kept by ladies of the medieval Japanese court) and with a revenge theme as well. Has the theme of the corrupting influence of money (in the shape of a publisher who blackmails the main character's father and corrupts her lover) in common with The Cook... Lots and lots of male nudity too. It's also a very visually rich film. All of Greenaway's films, in fact, are visually very rich and are unusual for that reason; in some ways they are much more like paintings (those which inspire him - Renaissance masters, ukiyo-e etc.) than 'normal' films. He's definitely one of a kind, which is why you either love him or hate him.
• I think the key to Prospero's Books is in the delivery. Nobody speaks but Prospero, others seem to speak, but they are all voices for Prospero. So I see it as the fantasty of a man who may or may not have been cast from his native land, but either way fantasizes about smiting those who he sees as his enemy and building upon those ashes an ideal kingdom/personality cult. But then, I haven't seen it in forever, so I might be making stuff up. SlightlyFoxed: I think the society reading of Drowning is reasonable, but kind of vague. I think there is something much more complicated going on, but I have never quite been able to verbalize what it is. I can't think of any other director in whose work each object is as deeply imbued with meaning. The complexity itself tends to refute any simple solution, but beg the audience to dig deeper and find, if it exists, an internal logic that drives the narrative. In Drowning you've got 1) The games, 2) the numbering (every scene is numbered in frame), the order of the death of characters, and all the other counting/number things that come along throughout the movie. A lot of these ideas span Greenaway's career and you can find similar elements in Prospero, Draughtsman's Contract, Death at the Siene (a catalog of bodies found in the Parisian river during the French revolution), 26 Bathrooms, etc. I don't know if I have a point really, just kind of rambling, but I love to talk about Greenaway.
• I saw The Draughtsman's Contract when it first came out, and was completely blown away by it. It is still high up on my list of the ten best films I have ever seen. Visually it is extremely beautiful, but I also find it historically convincing: you really get the impression that the characters are living in the seventeenth century (e.g. they have distinctively seventeenth-century concepts of honour and reputation). I blush to admit this, but it was a powerful influence on my decision to study history at university, and eventually to do a PhD on a seventeenth-century topic. I am also a great admirer of Greenaway's early avant-garde films, particularly The Falls. More about The Falls here. Even languagehat might enjoy the film, as there is a lot in it about imaginary languages (one of the conceits of the film is that some of the characters have started to speak in bird-language). But something went disastrously wrong with Greenaway's work about the time of Prospero's Books. Up until then, he had made some marvellous films centred on particular locations: the English country garden in Contract, the zoo in A Zed and Two Noughts, the East Anglian coastline in Drowning by Numbers. Then suddenly he turned his gaze inwards, and started to make films that were shot entirely indoors. It's as though he had lost interest in engaging with the outside world, and decided to play with his own little toy theatre instead. The word that comes to mind is "claustrophobic". No, actually the word that comes to mind is "wank". The last Greenaway film I saw was The Baby of Macon, which was utterly awful. The wit and humour of the earlier films had entirely disappeared. Even worse, the historical subtlety of The Draughtsman's Contract had disappeared as well, to be replaced by a set of crude anti-Catholic stereotypes, e.g. corrupt cardinals swishing around in long robes, ignorant peasants making the sign of the cross. (There is also a pointless and gratuitous gang-rape scene at the end.) I haven't been able to bring myself to watch any of the later films, fearing similar disappointment.
• SlightlyFoxed: I certainly agree with you about his later work. For me it ends with Prospero, but I wasn't much taken with The Cook, & co. either. I agree that the work since has been nothing more than a shadow of the early stuff. I thought 8 1/2 Women was total garbage, as was The Pillow Book. Why he felt the need to start making movies with Hollywood stars is well beyond me. But I have just stopped watching the new ones. I know they will make me sad. There are enough of the old films that I haven't seen to track down and that is good enough for me.
• Another memory of that Greenaway interview. The interviewer suggested that The Draughtsman's Contract was a spoof of the classic English murder mystery (think Agatha Christie), in that there are lots of clues but no ultimate solution. Greenaway was unimpressed. "Of course there's a solution! If you don't know who the murderer is, you obviously haven't been watching the film carefully enough." Collapse of interviewer. I must have seen the film six or seven times, but I still don't know who the murderer is.
• This conversation has ensured that I will start actively watching his movies again. I am sure I don't know (or recall, if i ever knew) who the murderer was. but i haven't seen the movie in about eight years, so perhaps i can be forgiven. It is sad that so few of his older films are commonly available on DVD.
• who the murderer was Ha! Not telling!
• I really dislike Greenaway, but that's just me.
• I have noticed people either love Greenaway or not. Nobody's really neutral, or just like some parts of his films. For Prospero's Books, other than Sir John Gielgud, what really caught my imagination was the use of colours and and extremely rich layering of references to the text. I can't really bring any good examples now (my memory being what it is, and my notes probably serving as compost somewhere), but one thing that stuck was the engagment scene of Miranda and Ferdinand. The goddesses and their gifts, parading before the young couple, and how rich and lush everything looked.
• Not one of Greenaway's admirers.
• I must stop monopolising this thread, but .. It's sad that so few of his older films are commonly available on DVD. I don't know whether you are aware of this, shotsy, but the British Film Institute recently released a two-volume DVD of The Early Films of Peter Greenaway. I haven't seen it yet, but it looks rather good, and you can find out more about it here at the BFI website. They also have DVDs of Contract and A Zed and Two Noughts. And Greenaway's current project, The Tulse Luper Suitcases, is showcased here. It sounds completely mad (I mean this as a term of high praise) and seems to mark a return to his avant-garde roots, which can only be a good thing. So I live in hope.
• I like him a lot, but every so often there's an image or a moment which goes over the top and dispels the effect. Caliban rolling around apparently attempting to show us his red-painted testicles from every possible angle, while somehow maintaining a conversation, springs to mind. And the Book of Motion, with ham-fisted literalness, literally shaking all over the place like something out of a cartoon. I suspect that without Michael Nyman's music for the earlier films, there would have been many more moments that struck me as suddenly risible in this way.