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I resurrect this ancient thread, perhaps ill-advisedly, as it seems to be the Peter Greenaway Thread, for the recommendation of the Baby of Macon, which I saw a year or so ago and is possibly the most head-twisting film in terms of mucking about with fictional frames of reference I've ever seen. So if you like that sort of thing (and many people on this board seem to) you may wish to watch it. But be warned, it's about as nasty as The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and is even more unsettling through its lack of story-telling coherence. A friend of mine remarked, half-way through: "He really doesn't *like* women, does he?" which took me aback, though I supposed I had to pay attention to this comment as she is female and I am not.
Also there is Belly of an Architect which is a more more typical Greenaway in the vein of Zed and Two Noughts (which for some reason has never
particularly impressed me) and Drowning by Numbers (my favourite by far and strangely entangled in my brain with other works such as Kit Williams' Masquerade, Alice in Wonderland and a late 70's early 80's TV programme called The Adventure Game (season I only) into a "genre" that probably only I can see, abstrusely straddling English country gardens, puzzles, wit and nonsense. Perhaps it should have a name. It might include Momus), and is well worth a look, although it may not be worth mentioning here, as Greenaway fans are nearly always obsessive completists.
Baby, however, isn't very well known at all, even by Greenaway fans, and it's truly very weird. It was during this film that I realised how much better Greenaway is than other film-makers at portraying violence, almost everybody else manages to squeeze violence through a sort of cinematic toothpaste tube into something distorted and titillating, Greenaway never fails to show violence for the ugly, worthless thing it is. He *subtracts* the art from violence.
I've always found it slightly peculiar that people think of Greenaway as "arty", given that cornerstone of his understanding of violence. It's everybody *else* that's being pretentious, using violence as a means to an end. He just leaves it up on the screen, unadorned and naked, giving the audience no cues as to how they are to "intepret2 the scene.
Oh, and I saw The Draughtsman's Contract again recently, and was suitably impressed. Greenaway's films rarely fail to grow on repeat viewing (with the exception of Zed and Two Noughts which I think is a dud). It's possibly his most conventional feature and probably the most fun to decipher... |
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