Two Peter Greenaway Films
"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 fnord@binkley.cs.mcgill.ca
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