Greenaway retrospective in San Francisco
j...@rational.com
Announcement for people in the San Francisco Bay Area: the Castro Theater
in SF starts its Greenaway retrospective today (May 30).
The Castro Theater is at Castro and Market Streets, phone: 415-621-6120.
Even in you're not in the Bay Area, you may enjoy reading these
descriptions of the films and Greenaway's description of his career from
the Castro`s program schedule. (Almost all of these films, except the
shorts and the new feature "The Pillow Book", are available on videotape.)
Enjoy!
-- Jim
The Films of Peter Greenaway, May 30-June 19
--------------------------------------------
The Castro Theater presents a retrospective of the work of British
filmmaker Peter Greenaway in anticipation of the presentation of his
latest film, "The Pillow Book".
In his own words, Greenaway describes his career:
"I began my filmmaking when I was an art-student studying to be a mural
painter, and had ambitions to make every film-image as self-sufficient
as a painting ... I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to
try to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great
attention to formal structures, composition and framing, and most
importantly, insisted on attention to metaphor. Since film is not
painting--and not simply because one moves and the other doesn't--I
wanted to explore their connections and differences.
"I had no money. Such ambition and such lack of resources makes for
irony or disaster. The irony has become endemic. I was interested in
all forms of Natural History, my literary interests were strong on
lists, classifying, encyclopedias, and the nouvelle roman, and my
twentieth century heroes outside of cinema were John Cage, Duchamp, and
Borges. Inside cinema, they were Hollis Frampton and Alain Resnais.
"The influence of all this can be seen in the early films from
'Intervals' to 'The Falls', and indeed can be seen ever since. However,
after 'The Falls', the cultural baggage has proliferated. Conspiracy
theory, de-romanticized sex, equal participation of the female, the
trauma of death, and an unapologetically baroque view of the world in
all its richness and complexity have now become some of the constant
characteristics.
"What is also constant--then and now--is the irony--irony as tolerance,
as non-dogma, that 'this is only cinema, not life', that there are no
longer any certainties--if indeed there ever were--and surely no single
meanings--except to the very simple-minded who endearingly want things
kept straightforward and clear-cut.
"If a numerical, alphabetical, or color-coding system is employed, it is
done deliberately as a device, a construct, to counteract, dilute,
augment, or complement the all-pervading obsessive cinema interest in
plot, in narrative, in the 'I'm now going to tell you a story' school of
filmmaking, which nine times out of ten begins life as literature, an
origin with very different concerns, ambitions, and characteristics from
those of the cinema.
"And, whatever else these early films demonstrate, the interests in
exploring the language of cinema, indeed of manipulations of the visual
image of all sorts, is there, and has remained the most persistent and
significant item in all the subsequent filmmaking."
Friday-Saturday, May 30-31
--------------------------
A ZED AND TWO NAUGHTS (1:00, 5:20, 9:30)
Ex-Siamese twin brothers (Brian and Eric Deacon), left widowed by an
auto accident outside the Rotterdam Zoo, begin an investigation into
death and decay, taking up with the driver of the other car (Andrea
Ferrol), who herself lost a leg in the crash and has a doctor with
designs on the other. As always, Greenaway creates a provocative,
beautiful, and compelling work. (1985) 115 minutes.
THE DRAUGHTSMAN'S CONTRACT (3:10, 7:35)
Greenaway's intricate black-comedy/murder-mystery set in 17th century
England, "The Draughtsman's Contract" was the first of his films to
receive wide distribution in this country. Anthony Higgins plays an
arrogant draughtsman who agrees to execute a series of renderings for a
wealthy woman if she'll agree to submit to his sexual desires. He finds
out that he's way out of his league in the power exchange. With Janet
Suzman, Anne Louise Lambert, and Hugh Fraser. (1982) 103 minutes.
Sunday, June 1
--------------
DROWNING BY NUMBERS (12 noon, 4:40, 9:20)
Peter Greenaway celebrates the peculiar English obsession with game
playing and love of landscape in this audaciously quirky film about
three generations of women (all named Cissie Colpitts) who--with love
and solidarity--drown their husbands. While counting from 1 to 100,
Greenaway suggests that the good are not rewarded, the wicked are rarely
punished, and the innocent are always abused. With Joan Plowright,
Juliet Stevenson, Joely Richardson, and Bernard Hill. (1988) 118
minutes.
THE BELLY OF AN ARCHITECT (2:20, 7:00)
"The Belly of an Architect" displays Greenaway's obsession with art,
food, sex, and mortality in his inimitable visual style. The film is
set in an exquisitely photogenic Rome, the Eternal City, museum and
mausoleum of Western Art and Culture. Brian Dennehy plays a famous
American architect who goes there to mount an exhibition and immerses
himself in work to the exclusion of his wife and life. Photographed by
Sacha Vierny. (1987) 118 minutes.
Monday, June 2
--------------
THE SHORT FILMS OF PETER GREENAWAY (Complete Shows: 7:00, 10:00)
"Intervals" (1973, 7 mins.) One of Greenaway's earliest works, shot in
Venice in 1969, it is a thought-provoking montage of images of crowded
Venetian butcher and barber shops.
"Windows" (1974, 4 mins.) A beautiful series of views onto the superb
English summer countryside is juxtaposed with a voice-over dryly telling
of the "37 people in the Parish of W who were killed as a result of
falling out of windows".
"H is For House" (1976, 7 mins.) A deceptively straightforward
celebration of family and country life in which a gorgeous pastoral
landscape is set to the music of Vivaldi and a spoken alphabet.
"Dear Phone" (1976, 17 mins.) Images of the much-loved red English
telephone booth--photographed in every conceivable setting--are overlaid
with a cunning narration of stories connected to each phone box.
"Water Wrackets" (1978, 12 mins.) Over exquisite, mystical images of
rivers, streams, and swirling water, we hear the serenely narrated story
of an ancient Tolkien-like civilization accompanied by the haunting
sounds of the wind in the trees.
VERTICAL FEATURES REMAKE and A WALK THROUGH H (Complete Show: 8:10)
"Vertical Features Remake". A partially autobiographical absurdist
fantasy that could have been conceived by Lewis Carroll, "Vertical
Features Remake" is the story of a project undertaken by the fictional
Institute of Reclamation and Restoration to reconstruct the four
versions of a film entitled "Vertical Features" developed by one Tulse
Luper. The result is both a startlingly imaginative structural film and
a hilarious parody of that genre, illustrated with wonderful sketches by
Greenaway himself and by Michael Nyman's humorously inventive score.
(1978) 46 minutes.
"A Walk Through H". Subtitled "The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist",
the film records an extraordinary symbolic journey through a mysterious
bird-filled country undertaken by an ornithologist following a trail
blazed by the legendary Tulse Luper. "You could call it a cross between
a vintage Borges 'fiction' and a Disney True Life Adventure, but that
wouldn't get close to its humor or the compulsiveness of Michael Nyman's
romantic score." --Tony Rayns. (1978) 40 minutes.
Tuesday, June 3
---------------
THE FALLS (8:00)
Peter Greenaway's legendary first feature "The Falls" is a brilliant
synthesis of narrative and experimental techniques. A tour-de-force
epic shaggy-dog montage, illustrating a vast, cunning chronicle worthy
of Borges, Nabokov, or Pynchon, "The Falls" pretends to be a documentary
about 92 characters, all of whose surnames begin with the letters
F-a-l-l and who are among the 19 million victims of the "Violent Unknown
Event" or VUE. The victims' stories are told in biographies ranging in
length from five seconds to five minutes.
The VUE, with an epicenter that was either in a Yorkshire "boulder
orchard" or outside the Goldhawk Road tube station in London, left its
victims with the ability to speak one or more of 92 different newly
coined languages and caused a number of physical and mental changes as
well, most having something to do with birds and/or flight--including
the Danish woman who persisted in trying to teach her dogs to fly.
"It's not really necessary to interpret 'The Falls' to enjoy it, not if
you enjoy Lewis Carroll, 'Sight and Sound' magazine, Magritte, the BBC,
the kind of jokes small children love, linguistics, and disaster
journalism." --Vincent Canby, New York Times
Written, directed, and edited by Peter Greenaway. Photographed by Mike
Coles and John Rosenberg. Music by Michael Nyman and Brian Eno. (1980)
185 minutes.
Wednesday, June 4
-----------------
THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER (12:15, 5:00, 9:45)
Peter Greenaway's outrageous black comedy "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife
& Her Lover" is an extravagant, excessive tale set in a lavish gourmet
restaurant in which a gangster receives his appropriately Jacobean
comeuppance. Erotic, violent, shocking and funny, it stars,
respectively, Richard Bohringer, Michael Gambon, Helen Mirren, and Alan
Howard. Costumes by Jean Paul Gaultier. (1989) 124 minutes.
PROSPERO'S BOOKS (2:35, 7:20)
Peter Greenaway's brilliantly realized version of Shakespeare's "The
Tempest", "Prospero's Books" combines the transcendent verse of
Shakespeare, the wizardry of John Gielgud, and the miracle of film
itself to conjure up a wondrous and deliriously powerful masterpiece.
Gielgud assays the role of Prospero--omnipotent magician, inventor, and
manipulator of characters, exiled by his enemies to a remote island with
his young daughter and 24 books to sustain him in this fable of revenge
and reconciliation. With Erland Josephson, Michel Blanc, Isabelle
Pasco, Ute Lemper, and dancer-choreographer Michael Clark as Caliban.
Score by Michael Nyman. (1991) 129 minutes.
Thursday, June 5
----------------
THE BABY OF MACON (7:00, 9:35)
Barely seen in this country, Peter Greenaway's "The Baby of Macon" is a
scabrously searing spectacle of the vanity, greed, and lust that lays
beneath the costumed veneer of society and its rulers. Inspired by
controversies over the exploitation of children in advertising
billboards, Greenaway explores the historical antecedents, the child
martyrs of the 17th century. The film unfolds as a play performed in a
cathedral for an unruly and raucous audience including an aristocratic
young Cosimo de Medici (known historically for his fanatical piety and
sadism). As the play progresses, the townspeople's hunger for
talismanic protection, the church's hunger for profit, and the
aristocracy's hunger for power luridly come to the fore. Written and
directed by Peter Greenaway. Cinematography by Sacha Vierny. With
Julia Ormond, Ralph Fiennes, Philip Stone, and Jonathan Lacey. (1993)
122 minutes.
Friday, June 6 through Thursday, June 19
----------------------------------------
THE PILLOW BOOK (Daily: 1:30, 4:15, 7:00, 9:40)
It may be that there are two simulations in life that can be, sooner or
later, guaranteed to excite and please--sex and text, flesh and
literature. Perhaps it is a commendable ambition to try to bring these
two simulations together, so close together in fact that they can be
considered, at least for a time--perhaps for the length of a film--as
inseparable.
Peter Greenaway's latest film "The Pillow Book", is a contemporary story
set in Kyoto and Hong Kong at the very end of the 20th century, but it
evokes a Japanese pillow book written at the end of the 10th century, a
thousand years before. The original was written by Sei Shonagon, female
courtier at the Japanese Heian Dynasty Imperial Court. A collection of
memories, of lists, of literary quotes, and amorous adventures, all
related in a laconic style that seems very modern, but also, from a
milllenium's remove, like a work of paradisiacal science fiction.
A calligrapher in Kyoto writes a birthday greeting on his daughter's
face and her aunt reads to her from The Pillow Book and encourages her
to keep her own journal. The grown daughter searches for an ideal
calligrapher-lover to use her whole body as his paper. In Hong Kong,
she meets Jerome, an English translator who convinces her that she
should be the pen and not the paper--she should write on his body and he
will carry her writing to a publisher.
Since this is Japan, the texts are beautifully calligraphied in
characters that elegantly fit the curves and shapes of the body--first
female and then male. Since this is Peter Greenaway, the story of
Nagiko's own pillow book is provocatively macabre and disturbingly
graphic. As they do in Japanese painting, word and image constantly
interweave in this love story--as does color and black & white, the past
and the present, fact and fiction. The history of Japanese painting is
also said to be the history of Japanese calligraphy. To draw a text in
Japan is also to write an image. Greenaway uses this central metaphor
to explore themes of death, desire, and authorship over the millenium.
(1996) 123 minutes.
-----
"Oh yeah? Well, I've had about enough of morons and | Jim Pellmann
halfwits, dolts, dunces, dullards and dumbbells--and | Rational Software
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