serious

I went to hear Peter Greenaway talk the other afternoon. As I’ve mentioned before, I used to like his early work very much, and was pleasantly surprised by The Baby of Mâcon.

Greenaway's presentation, entitled "Cinema is Dead, Long live Cinema," lasted a couple of hours, and offered what he termed "provocations" on familiar themes: the conservatism of film, the various tyrannies that afflict the cinema (the frame, the text, the actor, the camera, but also the narrative and the director), and his fundamental interest in painting. I say that these themes are "familiar" because many of the same observations can be found, often word for word, in his Cinema Militans Lecture of 2003.

Sometimes he was a little over the top, as in his repeated suggestion that the first act of civilization had been a painting, and the last act would most likely be a painting, too. And not least in his declaration that the cinema died with the introduction of the remote control. Sometimes he was spot on, for instance in his observation about how little the cinema had changed since its invention in the 1890s compared to the many developments in literature and painting over the same period. Even so, he omitted the entire history of avant-garde or experimental film, let alone the non-narrative elements of mainstream cinema. Throughout, he gave the impression that his was a lonely voice heroically standing up to history.

He also talked about some of his ongoing projects, including Stairs, an installation in Geneva that consisted of a hundred small staircases in public places at the top of which which people could view some aspect of the city "framed." This is one of a series of projects that he described as "stripped down cinema." Others, some of which may or may not be realized, focus on projection (in Munich) or the prop (in Trieste).

Finally, he showed a few clips. But these were what was most disappointing.

They included a "son et lumière" installation projected onto Rembrandt's Night Watch. Greenaway didn’t call this a "son et lumière," but really that's all it was. And surprisingly, given his antipathy to text or narrative, the effect of the installation was above all to generate a narrative out of the pictorial image. At the beginning all is dark, cocks then crow to signal dawn, lights reveal figures, steps, a dog barks, and so on. Yes, it revealed aspects of the painting that are not evident at first glance, but no more or less so than any other attempt to enliven a painting for pedagogical purposes. Eve Sussman's 89 Seconds at Alcázar is a much more interesting (and more properly cinematic, in all senses of the term) animation of a classic painting.

Likewise the trailer of Greenaway's upcoming film Nightwatching (which can be seen here) hardly raised many expectations that would make me see it once it's out of post-production. As a costume drama dealing with the context of an old master, it's not obvious how different it is from, say, Girl with a Pearl Earring. Except instead of Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson: Martin Freeman, from The Office.

But perhaps Night Watching is merely a bid for commercial (semi-)success to finance what Greenaway really wants to be doing? Well, if that's a project like The Tulse Luper Suitcases, a multimedia work with its own website and video game, then as far as I'm concerned, judging by the clip he showed, he needn't bother. For all Greenaway's talk of the "well-wrought image," the screen was simply busy: with multiple overlays of the same shot from different perspective, chessboards, drawings, images of water, subtitles, and so on. The idea may have been to produce some kind of palimpsest, but the diaphanous quality of each layer suggested an overall insubstantiality. Moreover, it lacked the humor of Greenaway's rather similar first film, The Falls, much of which was a parody of the public information films that Greenaway started out making while in the employ of Britain's Central Office for Information.

I fear that Greenaway now takes himself rather too seriously. No wonder, if he thinks it's his duty single-handedly to save cinema from itself.

The Baby of Macon

I used to be quite a fan of Peter Greenaway's work--Drowning by Numbers, The Falls, Belly of an Architect and (especially) A Zed and Two Noughts. At one point I tried to interview him, but passed up the chance because I was only offered a phone interview, which didn't seem to be quite the same. And then along came Prospero's Books, and I felt that his work was just increasingly self-indulgent. A little later I saw The Pillow Book, and was still far from impressed.

Where I was at the time, The Baby of Mâcon never showed when it was on release. In fact it hardly showed anywhere--in the USA, only New York and Los Angeles. But I read some reviews and didn't get the sense I was missing much.

I've just seen it. And though I saw the film in far from ideal conditions--in my office, on a TV with a PAL video very imperfectly translated to NTSC--it blew me away. It's an extraordinary movie.

The Baby of Mâcon boasts all the pageantry and lavish, colour-coded sets and costumes of, for instance, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. Here the setting is the cathedral and the playhouse rather than a restaurant. There is much in the way of pomp and circumstance. Greenaway's point, in part, is to show the performativity of religion, and more generally of power, and also the slippage between performance (staged, "unreal") and performativity (the rituals by which the real is constructed). And then, everything is meticulously choreographed by the director himself.

A child is born, by apparent miracle, and extraordinary power and influence is attributed to it. As well as being the object of more or less innocent adoration, the child also draws the desires of those who would use him to further their own cynical ends. His sister claims to be his mother, insisting that his was a virgin birth. His mother is shut away, along with the tramp-like father. Hovering around the scenes is a naive duke and a sceptical bishop's son, the latter soon to be killed by the putative virgin mother, the former to be the self-declared mother's own downfall, effectively sentencing her to death by gang rape.

It was the gang rape that caused so much controversy at the time of the film's release. But there's nothing voyeuristic about its portrayal, and what's shocking about the scene is what in fact should be shocking: the callousness and the dehumanization in the very idea of thoughtlessly proposing this as "punishment." There is much more that's equally un-nerving here: not least the (literal) carving up of the child immediately after its death, but also (perhaps more insidiously) the fact that even when alive its pronouncements were always only ventriloquized from off-stage. The child himself, so much the centre of attention, is given no lines to speak for himself. He is both fetish and subaltern.


But no description will really do this film justice. It is visually sumptuous, narratively provocative, and overall profoundly disturbing. Go see it if and when you have the chance.