REVIEW: Two Peter Greenaway Films
Andrew KUCHLING
"Not Mozart: M is for Man, Music, and Mozart"
"A TV Dante"
Film reviews by Andrew Kuchling
Copyright 1992 Andrew Kuchling
With every work I see, my opinion of Peter Greenaway rises. As a
general rule, heavily "arty" films inspire me to seek out the filmmakers
and whack them with a rolled-up newspaper. "Not Mozart" and "A TV
Dante" are the most strongly art-oriented films Greenaway has made, and
their testimony compels me to place Greenaway high among the best film
directors.
The shorter piece first: "Not Mozart" was part of a project to
celebrate last year's bicentennial of Mozart's death. Six film
directors and six modern composers collaborated to make celebratory
movies, about half an hour in length. Greenaway's contribution, in
collaboration with jazz composer Louis Andreissen, is 30-odd minutes of
images. The similarity to PROSPERO'S BOOKS is great (in both senses of
the word); the same video techniques used to generate the magical books
is used here throughout the film; image follows image. My art
history-aware SO told me that throughout it she kept seeing
compositions, poses, tableaux, that she remembered. She found it full
of resonances with various Renaissance paintings. Me? Sorry, I just do
physics. The film has a spiderweb story. It relates how the gods
constructed objects for each letter in the alphabet; when they came to
M, the middle letter, they decided to construct Man. Man then had to be
taught Movement; once he knew Movement, what was to be done with him?
It was decided to teach him to make Music. To paraphrase a caption,
having made Man and Music, it was found necessary to make Mozart. This
summary sounds strange, but, it simply doesn't matter. I can't describe
the flow of the film coherently; afterwards you're left with an idea of
the story and a welter of images, and a memory of having seen something
intricate and beautiful.
Most of my comments above can be repeated for "A TV Dante". Each
10-minute episode (made for Channel Four in Britain; why don't North
Americans get TV like this?) uses one canto from Dante's INFERNO; the
first 8 of the 34 cantos in the complete work are transformed into film.
This project was begun in 1989; originally all 34 cantos were supposed
to be completed by 1992. Don't hold your breath waiting; I have heard
nothing further about them. I suspect this project will never be
completed; Greenaway and Tom Philips, the co-director and translator,
may have lost interest, the actors may be unable to return to the
project, or maybe financial difficulties have killed the project.
Perhaps it's best to leave them unfinished; could the tone have been
maintained throughout? It will always be a monument to artistic vision,
at any rate.
With Tom Beck as Dante and Sir John Gielgud as Virgil, his guide to
Hell, the delivery of Philips' translation is impeccable. The story is
told using head-and-shoulders shots of Gielgud and Beck, accompanied by
image superimposed on image, producing a kaleidoscopic effect. There
are even footnotes; at certain more obscure references a small screen
pops up, and a historian or cosmologist or entomologist explains the
reference, sometimes adding an ironic touch to Dante's words. This
produces the effect of TV hypertext, and helps keep everything
comprehensible, even if you've never read THE INFERNO. Stock footage of
WWII and nuclear explosions, of leopards and births, is used throughout,
making the 13th Century work feel surprisingly modern. Again, any
attempt to describe the rush of colour and shape is futile; this has to
be seen to be understood.
Both these works contain no sex, no violence, but lots of nudity,
as you'd expect from Greenaway. My SO stated that her opinion of
Greenaway increased vastly after seeing the films. I also think these
will become my favorite Greenaway pieces after PROSPERO'S BOOKS. I am
at a loss to explain why we both enjoyed them so much. Perhaps it's
because we, being 20 and 19 years old, are strongly visually-oriented,
and found these visually stimulating videos agreed with our idea of what
television should be. Is this literature for the Sesame Street
generation?
Note: I would be most interested to see if others found "Not Mozart" and
"A TV Dante" as hypnotically fascinating. Especially, would older
viewers who have not been raised on TV find them interesting? If you'd
like to comment, please e-mail me at the address below. If there are
more than five responses, I'll summarize and post to rec.arts.movies.
Andrew Kuchling
fn...@binkley.cs.mcgill.ca