Greenaway: The Early Films
Reviewed by Shawn Badgley, Fri., June 30, 2006
Greenaway: The Early Films
Zeitgeist Video, $35.99
"I have grown to believe that a really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter, for painting requires a certain blindness, a partial refusal to be aware of all the options," Mrs. Talmann tells Mr. Neville in 1982's The Draughtsman's Contract. This is that awkward moment when someone looks at Peter Greenaway, Mrs. Talmann's really intelligent creator, and feigns the halting recognition of coincidence – hey, you used to be a painter, didn't you? – as Mrs. Talmann continues and the auteur all but pops onscreen to self-reflexively punch things home. "An intelligent man will know more about what he is drawing than what he will see, and in the space between knowing and seeing, he will become constrained, unable to pursue an idea strongly, fearing that the discerning – those who he is eager to please – will find him wanting if he does not put in, not only what he knows, but what they know, as well."
Ten years previous, Greenaway collaged (that is to say, didn't quite paint or draw) If Only Film Could Do the Same, a work considered ephemera worthy, with several others, of supplementary inclusion here. I have no idea what it is, exactly, that film is unable to accomplish in this case – in general, the possibilities have proven endless – but I suspect it has something to do with what Mrs. Talmann would later talk about. After all, Greenaway the artist knew a lot. He knew more than what he was seeing and was aware of all the options; in fact, he seemed to know everything about film except how to make one to both his satisfaction and that of an audience he desperately wanted. As an avant-gardist so puzzled by conventional narrative that he decided to throw nothing but puzzles back at it, he struggled to reconcile image and text, to communicate and create worlds with the "deeply artificial" medium instead of simply telling stories with it. To pursue an idea strongly – to later be able to make The Draughtsman's Contract or The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover or The Pillow Book – he had to figure out how to travel in that space between.
This two-disc set collects what he came up with. Disc one comprises six shorts, "interviews" that are actually "lectures," and assorted archives; disc two, The Falls, "Vertical Features Remake," and same. Though it's 1980's The Falls – 195 minutes of filmic perfection posing as a documentary from the "committee investigating the Violent Unknown Event" – that's rightly the marquee name (and beautifully suited to DVD), it's "A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist," a 1978 short, that steals the show. Though companion pieces, the former is cold, calculating, and compulsive; the latter, like hugging an autistic kid. In it, the camera combs the rich, dreamlike details of variously warped maps painted, drawn, and collaged by Greenaway. Narrated by Colin Cantlie, scored by the brilliant Michael Nyman (in the first of many collaborations with Greenaway; Brian Eno would join them for The Falls), and spliced with images of migrating birds (the skeleton key to his own personal mythology), "A Walk Through H" is as emotional as things get here. And, as evidenced in the accompanying British Film Institute's 1978 catalog notes, it was Greenaway's professional break and his personal breakthrough. "What has been rediscovered, readmitted for modernist film-making is the pleasure of art and the history of its means and materials," wrote Peter Sainsbury at the time. "Unaligned with any of the formal or informal groupings of independent film-makers, Greenaway has provided a new reference point for their work." Fittingly, Nyman's notes are incomprehensible, as if math and music were literally universal languages, while Greenaway's are a preamble to his own declaration of independence.
