Peter Greenaway: The Falls

The Falls is a three-hour, 30-year-old, 92-part experimental mockumentary. In the immortal words of Snakes on a Plane star Samuel L. Jackson, you either wanna see that or you don’t. I wanna see that, but then, I’m a big Peter Greenaway fan. I like his interests and/or obsessions (hardly distinct categories here). I like the way his mind works. I like the distinctive universe he’s created. I like, perhaps above all, his sense of humor.

Not every cinephile shares these opinions. I’m always surprised by how divisive all things Greenaway, both of the man and of his work, really are. In a recent piece in whatever The eXile has become, a journalist attending (one hour of) a Greenaway master class represents the opposite point of the spectrum from mine:

His is the kind of filmmaking that’s so uninvolving it requires an explanation. It had better be conveying a weighty message because it’s not doing anything else. In fact, it should be allegorical, with everything symbolizing something else, so at least you could make a guessing game of it. The giant cigar stands for patriarchal capitalism, and the opera singer is the feminized institutional culture that sings the praises of a violent and oppressive system…

David Thomson expressed a smarter but no more appreciative opinion in the Guardian:

I have a decent, yeomanly, unobtrusive loathing of the films of Peter Greenaway. I don't know why, but just thinking of him makes me want to huddle that bit closer with Falstaff, John Constable, Denis Compton and Diana Dors. Yet I have to recall that there is a devil in Greenaway — a wit, an un-Englishness that might take my four pals and make a wondrous movie about them. And, honestly, which other models of the humane and the humanist in British film could do the same? The last film-maker I can remember who was called horrid and loathsome and so on in print was Michael Powell. There's the warning.

Peter Greenaway’s working worldview, as I interpret it, is this: Cinema has, for too long, been treated as a primarily narrative medium, like literature or theater, when in fact it is richer as a primarily visual medium, like painting. I buy it because I approach films as pieces of visual art in the first place. I think Greenaway’s way of putting narrative second (at best) is a badly needed corrective to practically all other movies in existence, which don’t just put narrative first, they pull it somehow out beyond first, to the point that it distorts and wrecks everything else they might have artistically accomplished. Clearly, some people think prominent, forceful narrative is actually cinema’s sine qua non What’ev.

So instead of narratively, Greenaway organizes The Falls alphabetically. The structure is a page of a directory listing known survivors of the Violent Unknown Event (VUE), a sudden, large-scale happening that left a few million Britons afflicted by bizarre symptoms. These include conditions like skin discoloration, finger paralysis, webbed toes, diminished eyesight, improved eyesight, bone-marrow deficiency, the acquisition of hitherto unheard-of languages, and a habit of driving in circles. We watch brief profiles, absurdist mini-mockumentaries in and of themselves, on each of the 92 VUE victims whose surnames begin with “Fall.”

Greenaway has complained about modern films’ tendency to simply convert 19th-century novels into impoverished moving images, which is a more than fair objection. In The Falls, though, seems to owe just about as much to text — it’s just a different kind of text. So much of the material is biographical narration and still images that I kept imagining the whole project as a book — an annotated directory, I suppose — and wondering how much it would really lose in the transition. Turns out there is a Falls book, available from Dis Voir in both English and French.

Given the dizzyingly countless references to his earlier and later works that Greenaway makes in The Falls, I think of it as but one large component in a wider multimedia project. His more recent Tulse Luper Suitcases, an interconnected farrago of films, books, CDs, sites, and exhibitions that I haven’t even tried to figure out yet, made his predilection for that kind of thing clear. So perhaps it’s not a movie, exactly, but something more interesting than a movie. It seems to have been Greenaway’s lifelong mission to hone that elusive new form. Sometimes the elusive goals are the best.

Comments

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