From: malcolm@wrs.com (Malcolm Humes)
Subject: Re: Peter Greenaway
Keywords: macabre, michael nyman, dutch baroque
Organization: Wind River Systems, Inc.
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 19:06:11 GMT

tjk5@po.cwru.edu (Timothy Kordas) writes:
>>
>>john N (whose favourite PG films are some of the shorts, like
>>`A Walk through H', Drowning By Numbers, & TDC, & who
>> hasn't yet seen `The Falls')
>                   ^^^^^^^^^
>SEE IT!!!!!!
>it helps to have seen _Vertical Features Remake_

>BTW: I watched _A Walk Through H_ _Vertical Features Remake_ and _The Falls_
>right after one another (that it in the SAME evening) and I have to say that
>I lost interest in _The Falls_ during the middle, so does anybody know if it
>is available on video anywhere--or better yet anywhere that shows it ??

Berkeley's UC theater (which is part of a Landmark chain that also books
the same films in Seattle and I think a couple other places) recently
ran two nights of Greenaway shorts including the ones mentioned above. 

As my girlfriend is an avid Greenaway (and Nyman) fanatic we had to go. We've
seen The Cook..., Drowning By Numbers, A Zed and Two Naughts, and I think
a couple of others - one about 26 bathrooms; Belly of an Architect... and I 
saw The Draughtsman's Contract alone a long time ago. 

The first night was a couple of shorts followed by The Falls. The shorts were
interesting - one about people who had died falling from windows, with
wonderfully meaningless stats about them. Another short was mostly about
the letter C or H or something like that. The Falls was sort of interesting
but soooo long it got pretty hard to watch. For those who haven't seen
this epic, it follows some 92 people whose live were affected by a VUE - 
Violent Unexpected Event. Greenaways obsessions with ornithology abound. 
People are interviewed in what appear to be fictional langauges. I really
can't bear to try to describe it further - I enjoyed some elements of it,
but it started to get boring, then almost painful. At least 30-40 people
got up and walked out before the intermission, and at that point we decided
to leave too. I'd love to have it on video so I could watch it again, or 
perhaps follow it piece by piece, but it was way too difficult to sit through.
I think Water Wrackets was another short shown that evening. 

Nevertheless, we returned the following evening for more shorts. This included
A walk through H, Vertical Features Remake, and I think perhaps something
else. This evening was a little more fun. Vertical Features remake appeared
to use some images or references to other films - one I caught was a water
tower turned into a film vault that was shown and mentioned in a short or in 
The Falls. I suspect there were other references - one character (Tools Luper?)
is referred to in Vertical Features Remake and another one. I think the 
other one he was mentioned in was A Walk through H, but I may have the title
mixed up - I think A Walk Through H was the one about a series of maps (126?)?
These films were in general much more interesting to me, but still a bit
placid and slow at times.
  
Overall I had a mixed reaction. Greenaway is the only director I can think 
of which provokes such distate and discomfort in me but who I'm still
interested in exploring further. In general these films probably helped
lower my opinion of him - so much of his work seems to get obsessed in 
exploring patterns and sequences that it gets a bit academic and loses me. 
Once you get part way through a long sequence and you know how far it's
going to go and what the process is it gets pretty dull. Sure, the subtle
variations in approach or focus are there to be explored or exploited, but
the end result to me is often films that are so trivial or distateful that
I wonder why I bothered watching them. Yet that's part of the pleasure I 
get from it too. The absurdity of it all makes it almost fun.    
 
Seeing the shorts made me draw some parallels between Greenaway and author
J.G. Ballard. Ballard also seems to have a lot of obsessions and recurrent
themes and patterns throughout his work. And after I read a half dozen works
by Ballard the brilliance of his writing seemed to be just a rehash of the same
old thing - the same obsessions shifted to a slightly different context, to
a new environment, new characters, etc. I'm starting to feel the same way
about Greenaway. 

  - malcolm@wrs.com  

 
Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies