Peter Greenaway, famously known for his film THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE, AND HER LOVER has a new film at the Film Forum this week – REMBRANDT’S J’ACCUSE. The pseudo-documentary follows Greenaway, acting as a kind of art history forensic expert, as he dissects Rembrandt’s painting “The Night Watch.” He catalogues 33 mysteries of the painting, unearthing evidence that Rembrandt intended for it to be an accusation of murder and that this act in fact provoked Rembrandt’s ultimate downfall and death. Greenaway’s “talking head” appears in a little box within the frame, speaking with a Hitchcock-like authoritarian tone and uses facts, supposition, and a little false logic to make his case. In his precise and slight absurdist way, he rebukes both mainstream cinema and the history of art, and one can’t help but get the impression that Greenaway is just having so much fun…

Peter Greenaway’s Rembrandt’s J’Accuse – Trailer from SubmarineChannel on Vimeo.

Greenaway often openly criticizes the feature film as a model for cinema, complaining that the film is too dependent on the text. In a recent interview in New York Magazine he says “We’ve ended up with bedtime stories for adults, and there’s sort of an umbilical cord between the cinema and the bookshop…” He basically argues that narrative in film is overrated and has acted as a kind of straight jacket against innovation. His argument to expand our notion of cinema and stop making what he calls “illustrated books” is not so far from what we’ve been hearing since Russian filmmakers like Eisenstein and Vertov came on the scene in the early 1900’s. It’s tempting to agree with Greenaway, as if there’s a whole continent of unexplored cinematic experience that we are on the verge of discovering with our now cheaper and more accessible technology. Yet the draw of narrative is a strong one and done well it can pull us into work that is peculiar (like Greenaway’s). Perhaps his arguments about cinema are like his work, somewhere between fabrication and fact and in that tension lies their interest.

Many years back I saw a Greenaway retrospective while living in Prague. I was one of the few who sat through the entire 3 hour long screening of THE FALLS. A strange and wonderful mock documentary made in 1980, it consists of 91 biographies of sufferers of a mysterious occurrence known as the Violent Unknown Event (VUE). Greenaway lists the symptoms and peculiar behaviors of these victims in his absurdist anthropological breakdown of each of their lives. Things like… many of the victims now speak their own language causing, as you can imagine, much confusion. They also are obsessed with birds and some of them take on bird habits, growing feathers or even trying to fly. For a look at how Greenaway has had fun with narrative – here’s an excerpt on the character Armeror Fallstag:

-LR