Promoting Intellectual Film Culture Since 1973
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3 x Peter Greenaway
Greenaway: The Early Films, United Kingdom 1969-1980 Director Peter Greenaway Total runtime 326 minutes DVD: USA, 2006 Produced and Distributed by Zeitgeist Films (region 1) Aspect ratio 1.33:1 Sound Mix Mono 2.0 Extras Disc One. New digital transfers of A Walk Through H, H Is for House, Windows, Intervals, Dear Phone and Water Wrackets. Video discussions of each film by Peter Greenaway. Extensive collection of Greenaway paintings 1968-1978 and collages. Notes for unmade projects. Original BFI production catalogue essay and the original press book. Liner notes by Greenaway. Extras Disc Two. New transfer of The Falls, plus Vertical Features Remake. Video discussions of both films by Greenaway. Extensive collection of Greenaway’s paintings from 1975-1990. Archival materials on The Falls. Original BFI production catalogue essay and the original press book. Liner notes by Greenaway.
This DVD release marks the US home video debut of these eight early Greenaway films, ranging in length from a few minutes to over three hours. As expected, the promotional material emphasises the thematic, structural and stylistic connections between this collection and the director’s later work from The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) onwards.
The earliest film, Intervals (1969/1973) employs a static camera, jump cuts, repetitive images and a ticking metronome as it explores the notion of alphabetic categorisation. Filmed in Venice, Intervals has no shots of the famous canals or water of any kind, which could be read as essential to the film’s structure and meaning or merely a sly joke.
Windows (1974) looks at death by defenestration, whether through accident, suicide or murder. Interviewed on the disc, Greenaway explains that he was inspired by the state-sanctioned killings of political prisoners in South Africa. Despite this grim historical backdrop, the film itself plays as a light-hearted mock-documentary.
H Is for House (1976) contemplates solar influence and fruit in the setting of an English country garden. The emphasis on cataloguing and repetition underlines the arbitrariness and absurdity of ordering systems.
Dear Phone (1976) outlines a domestic drama through a sequence of narrative texts, both spoken and written. Human interaction is reduced to a series of telephone conversations, where the cost of phone calls and beer becomes of paramount importance.
Water Wrackets (1978) narrates a neo-mythological fable of water-based tribal conflict and construction. The film’s most notable feature is its striking, often abstract aqueous imagery.
A Walk Through H (1978) is the most ambitious of the pre-Falls works. Having previously favoured fixed camera positions and framing, Greenaway makes assured use of slow tracking shots and a rostrum camera. The narrative progression is conveyed through voiceover and a series of idiosyncratic maps whose precise function is not immediately clear. The references to Amsterdam Zoo, ornithology and swans anticipate A Zed & Two Noughts (1985); the film also marks an early appearance of the enigmatic Tulse Luper, in the form of narrative references and textual and cartographical adornments. The maps on display are described in terms of their acquisition rather than their creation. They serve as biographical guides both to and for the unseen central character. The result is a succinct encapsulation of Greenaway’s preoccupation with memory, numbers and mortality.
Vertical Features Remake (1978) centres on an elusive film made by Tulse Luper – examining the patterns of vertical structures – which may exist only in fragments or be lost altogether. A series of remakes is proposed, based on Luper’s papers and diagrams, only to be found wanting. While Vertical Features Remake contains the expected emphasis on structure, organisation and numbers, the film seems derivative and uninspired.
The Falls (1980) is an epic ersatz documentary, chronicling 92 victims of the VUE (Violent Unknown Event) and their bizarre injuries, mutations, new abilities and linguistic revolution. This is the ultimate expression of Greenaway’s interest in names, categories, numbers, language and identity. The camerawork is more dynamic than in previous films and there are onscreen performers, cast variously as interviewers, interviewees and commentators. Eschewing a direct explanation of the VUE, Greenaway offers a series of “clues,” linking this global catastrophe with birds, flight, the Icarus myth, Tulse Luper and the shady Fox and Crow organisations. The absurdist black humour and Michael Nyman’s driving score anticipate Greenaway’s later work and fans of A Zed & Two Noughts and Drowning By Numbers, in particular, will find much of interest here.
The Draughtsman’s Contract, United Kingdom, 1982 Director Peter Greenaway With Anthony Higgins (Mr. Neville), Janet Suzman (Mrs. Herbert), Anne Louise Lambert (Mrs. Talmann), Neil Cunningham (Mr. Noyes), Hugh Fraser (Mr. Talmann), Dave Hill (Mr. Herbert), David Gant (Mr. Seymour) Runtime 108 minutes DVD: USA, 2008 Produced and Distributed by Zeitgeist Films (region 1) Aspect Ratio 1.66:1 [Note: some sources claim that the aspect ratio on this release is actually 1.72:1] Sound Mix Mono 2.0 Extras Restored anamorphic transfer, created from Hi-Def elements. Peter Greenaway commentary and video introduction. Four deleted scenes. Behind-the-scenes footage and on-set interviews. Interview with composer Michael Nyman. Restoration demonstration. Production photos and Draughtsman’s sketches. English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired. Original theatrical trailers. Essays by Greenaway and director of photography Curtis Clark.
A Zed & Two Noughts, United Kingdom, 1985 Director Peter Greenaway With Andrea Ferreol (Alba Bewick), Brian Deacon (Oswald Deuce), Eric Deacon (Oliver Deuce), Frances Barber (Venus de Milo), Joss Ackland (Van Hoyten), Jim Davidson (Joshua Plate), Agnes Brulet (Beta Bewick), Guusje van Tilborgh (Caterina Bolnes), Gerard Thoolen (Van Meegeren), Ken Campbell (Stephen Pipe), Wolf Kahler (Felipe Arc-en-Ciel), Geoffrey Palmer (Fallast), David Attenborough (Documentary Narrator; voice only) Runtime 115 minutes DVD: USA, 2008 Produced and Distributed by Zeitgeist Films Aspect Ratio 1.85:1 Sound Mix Mono 2.0 Extras Restored anamorphic transfer, created from Hi-Def elements. Peter Greenaway commentary and video introduction. Behind-the-scenes footage from ?O, Zoo!, a documentary film by Philip Hoffman. The complete “Decay” sequences. Snail sketches by Greenaway. English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired. Original theatrical trailer. Essays by Greenaway and film critic Jonathan Marlow.
Previously released on DVD by Fox Lorber, The Draughtsman’s Contract and A Zed & Two Noughts are reissued in the US by Zeitgeist Films in definitive home video versions. The transfers and extras are taken from the British Film Institute’s region 2 UK releases, supervised by Greenaway. The films have rarely looked or sounded this good, though in the case of The Draughtsman’s Contract, there were minor video and audio glitches on the disc under review. A Zed & Two Noughts suffers from occasional speckles and the image sometimes lacks sharpness, though this may be down to the available film elements.
Set in 1694, The Draughtsman’s Contract combines its meditations on formalism and symmetry with an enticing country house mystery, demonstrating an assurance that matches the characters’ blend of primness and vulgarity. Favouring tableau compositions and long takes, Greenaway also employs elegant tracking shots, as if exploring the canvas of a painting too wide for his frame. Moments anticipate the unsettling physical details of his later films, Mrs. Herbert retching after her first sexual liaison with Mr. Neville. The familiar preoccupations with lists, schedules and categories are present and correct, recalling in particular H Is for House.
Depicted as both arrogant and naïve, Mr. Neville is a tenant farmer’s son whose professional and social success is down to talent and ambition, rather than birth or marriage. Still contending with the class barrier and ingrained snobbery, his behaviour has an element of subversion. Usually dressed in black, Neville disrupts the harmony of the garden landscape and the Herbert household on multiple levels. He treats nature – whether a tree or Mrs. Herbert’s body – as mere material for his work and recreation. Preoccupied with his own games, Neville realises too late that the other characters are playing for higher stakes to secure their property and wealth. His fate is anticipated in the opening credits, with a “humorous” anecdote he would have done well to heed. Neville is not the player but the played.
A Zed & Two Noughts offers a variation on the Violent Unknown Event, as two car passengers are killed and the driver seriously injured when a swan flies into their windshield. Greenaway’s second feature film makes no concessions to the mainstream, with minimal story and character development, and self-consciously arch dialogue. The Draughtsman’s Contract is set in a specific time and place; A Zed & Two Noughts is marked by spatial dislocation and ambiguity (Rotterdam locations; French, British and Dutch actors; English texts and currency). Zoological study tainted with grief becomes nihilistic obsession, fuelled by references to Old Testament and Greco-Roman mythology. Widower twin brothers, the Noughts of the title, gradually return to their original conjoined state, two minds with but one thought. Underpinned by Michael Nyman’s baroque score, the cryptic allusions and visual flourishes deliver an intriguing if willfully obscure meditation on life, death, evolution, amputation, Vermeer’s “cinematic” lighting, the incompatibility of symmetry with decay, and the importance of snails in nature’s grand design.
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