14 Jan, 3:46 PM
Peter Greenaway – In a body of work many have described as chilly or elitist, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover stands as an exemplary and impassioned film about love and life under siege, an ode to that which is rich and strange in all things, a vision beyond the strictures of conventional art-making that magnifies rather than denies its many sumptuous pleasures. That it is also an unflinching exploration of all those things we wish to avoid is a testament to Greenaway’s conviction that art is not an escape from real life, but an experience that allows us to feel it more deeply. And that sometimes it must be rammed down our throats.
Drowning by Numbers
14 Jan, 9:14 AMPeter Greenaway – The look of Drowning By Numbers is slightly unusual for Greenaway: the film was shot on location in East Anglia, mostly outside, mixing natural light with artificial in order to produce, in Greenaway’s words, “a surreal effect of trying to compete with God on his own lighting scheme.” The metaphor of competition is appropriate, since there is a protracted tussle going on throughout the film between Greenaway’s ultra-refined aesthetic and the provincial English setting. Greenaway has always been at once unmistakably English and indefinably alien (or pan-European, which for many English people comes to the same thing).
The Belly of an Architect
13 Jan, 3:56 PMPeter Greenaway – In spite of its title, the film is not only about the titular architect’s round, dyspeptic stomach, which begins to deteriorate during his stay in Rome, but also about his wife’s uterus as it carries their unborn child. The visual connections abound between these two bellies – one growing with fecundity, the other pinching and collapsing in on itself and its bearer – and rhyme with Greenaway’s other major concern throughout the film: classical and neoclassical European architecture.
A Zed & Two Noughts
13 Jan, 10:51 AMPeter Greenaway – Zoological taxonomies and alphabetical structures are recurrent preoccupations in Peter Greenaway’s work, but it is in A Zed & Two Noughts that they find their first full and obsessive expression. With typically exacting detail and symmetry, Greenaway combines these twin obsessions even in the film’s title, which is itself a wordgame of alphanumeric substitution. Extending the organizational neurosis of his prior work to the animal kingdom, the titular zoo serves as the setting for a typically violent and perverse struggle to catalog and comprehend nature itself.
The Draughtsman’s Contract
12 Jan, 8:08 PMPeter Greenaway – Greenaway is working more as a painter than a filmmaker here, showing the opulence and beauty of the natural world as a direct contrast to the faux-opulence and ugliness of the English aristocratic society. Echoes of The Falls appear, as one could easily understand the film as more of a sequence of still images rather than a traditional film.
The Falls
12 Jan, 11:21 AMPeter Greenaway – Change and transformation are at the heart of The Falls. The film posits a world where nearly one percent of the world’s population – roughly equaling the number of casualties in World War I – is dramatically changed forever by an event that no one fully understands. The Falls can therefore be viewed as an attempt to contextualize the unexplainable, to apply human logic to the illogical.
The American Dreamer
17 Dec, 1:23 PMThe American Dreamer explicates little of the making of The Last Movie, which, I imagine, it sincerely endeavors to do, but it ventures so freely into self-parody that the commentary it does lend the film is indirectly chastising. It’s unintentional criticism, and yet so remarkably tonally consistent with its companion that it should be considered a peer and not a supplement. If The Last Movie is only an artifact of untempered hubris, then the symptoms of such are clear in this film.
The Last Movie
15 Dec, 10:40 AMEasy Rider made Dennis Hopper an international success—and he responded with a sneering counter-attack. In The Last Movie, Hopper wanted to make film that, unlike its predecessor, could not be consumed and repackaged and capitalized upon. Rather than wistful nodding to the American Dream’s dying embers, the film indicts American influence and idealism as a mindless and corruptive paradox.
The Exiles
18 Nov, 10:24 PMKent Mackenzie’s project is principally an ethnographic one, but in spite of the sense of distance between filmmaker and subject this might create, the director nonetheless demonstrates a willingness to listen and to seek their input. The actors lend their lives to the film, working closely with the filmmakers to shape a film that properly reflected many aspects of their daily lives. The result is not simply a document notable for its presumed authenticity, but also one that succinctly conveys the Indians’ extreme ambivalence about their place in American life.
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