A Zed & Two Noughts (1985)

 

Director: Peter Greenaway

Screenplay: Peter Greenaway

Cast: Andrea Ferreol as Alba Bewick; Brian Deacon as Oswald Deuce; Eric Deacon as Oliver Deuce; Frances Barber as Venus de Milo; Joss Ackland as Van Hoyten; Jim Davidson as Joshua Plate; Agnes Brulet as Beta Bewick; Guusje Van Tilborgh as Caterina Bolnes; Gerard Thoolen as Van Meegeren; Ken Campbell as Stephen Pipe; Wolf Kahler as Felipe Arc-en-Ciel; Geoffrey Palmer as Fallast

An Abstract Candidate

 

Is leglessness a form of contraception?

Peter Greenaway's first theatrical length film was The Falls (1980), his debut an incredible production but structured like the work he did for the Central Office of Information (COI) alongside his short films, a fake document told as a fictional catalogue using multimedia. The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) and A Zed & Two Noughts are his "first" films in terms of setting up how he would fully introduce narratives and characters alongside his obsessions. This, set up with two women dying when a swan hits their car, is a narrative first but, as mentioned, his obsessions with lists and references stays and is amplified. The grieving twin brothers, working at a zoo, are trying to rationalise this tragedy and start with an obsession with photographing decay whilst fixating on the one survivor from the crash, the female driver Alba Bewick (Andrea Ferreol), left permanently disabled as a result of the crash. It is, with a word of warning, a bleak film as a result, just in how real animal carcasses (even a dog) were acquired and are seen documented like stop motion in their decay. Thankfully, it is a film, even if you need to be willing to tackle its subject matter of death, contrasted by Greenaway's profane, perverted, joyous, libidinous, witty and profane dialogue and tone to his work.

His work is very peculiar, not just because of the subject matter, or the decision to make the leads Brian Deacon and Eric Deacon twins, predating David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers (1988) from the era, or the small role by British comedian Jim Davidson as a zoo keeper, an odd inclusion as the former game show how and contentious un-pc stand-up comedian sticks out here at an early part of his career. It is because how, even with its ruminations on life and death, as the brothers are watching a David Attenborough documentary serial about the beginnings of life, the corpse humour and obsessions with the transgressive contrast this. It is a gleeful film at times about the bleak subject, as eccentric as they come even next to Greenaway's later work, just as much from how, whilst more sexually explicit work would come, his trademarks including the subjects of desire and lust feel even more exaggerated in context of its zoological and metaphorical themes. Whether wondering about what colour a woman's underwear is to the sex worker Venus de Milo (Frances Barber) and her erotic animal themed tales, this film has a foot in life explicitly as with death, a reoccurring trend throughout Peter Greenaway's career.

There are also the tonal choices and the other obsessions. Greenaway never left his former work with documentaries even into his veteran years, and you can go to something like The Sea in Their Blood (1983), attempting to catalogue the entirely of the British coast, their culture and centuries of existence in a short film, and you see the tone and stylistic choices stayed. It literally has a narrator listing what British coastal seaweed and Welsh lobster is edible among its ethereal score by Michael Nyman, a barrage of lists and images contrasted already by Greenaway's pitch perfect sense of humour, such as the idea that people once thought geese came from barnacles, and calling them out as "credulous". With Alba's daughter listing animals from A to Z, to the Attenborough dictionaries starting at the beginning of Charles Darwin's' theories of evolution, by microbes, and climbing upwards, Greenaway fixates on structures and lists as his narratives usually contrast to the characters themselves. They may be able to catalogue the world, but human flaws and their inability to control the worlds around them is in vast contrast. Then there are the eccentric touches, in his interest in art abruptly appearing here as well, as the surgeon working on Alba, fixated and wishing to keep her even if it means taking both legs; he is obsessed with Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer and sees Alba as the ideal Vermeer woman to recreate from the canvases. Already the film has its playfulness, such as one brother in his grief releasing anything from flamingos to, on Christmas, a short sighted rhino to the anger of their boss, but Greenaway's work can be even more proudly imaginative on the subject in the vibrancy of the dialogue to the style of them.

Greenaway's style would stay with him long after cinematographer Sacha Vierny and composer Michael Nyman, huge figures in creating Greenaway's films, left but their contributions are necessary to consider with his eighties to late nineties productions equally. Vierny's work is striking here, Greenaway as a fan of his work on Last Year at Marienbad (1961), able to work with an idol on multiple films which were as much Vierny's in style as they were Greenaway's own in composition. Michael Nyman was the other clear voice, whose compositions over potentially distressing images, the decomposition of a swan, is contrasted by the life and ethereal grace of his pieces, someone who contributed so much to Peter Greenaway even if the later continued to show his talents as a director-screenwriter where the partnership separated. A Zed & Two Noughts in terms of standing out, even among its creator's other work, has many virtues; knowing this would only begin the diverse career of Peter Greenaway, who would continue from this and expand upon themes and ideas here, makes the film's virtues more pronounced, as its snail ridden ending could have been enough of a capstone to a career that never got off the ground after this, instead become one of the many images that linger in the director-writer's career that went onwards.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Meticulous

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

The Pillow Book (1996)

Director: Peter Greenaway

Screenplay: Peter Greenaway

Cast: Vivian Wu as Nagiko; Yoshi Oida as The Publisher; Ken Ogata as The Father; Hideko Yoshida as The Aunt / The Maid; Ewan McGregor as Jerome; Judy Ongg as The Mother; Ken Mitsuishi as The Husband; Yutaka Honda as Hoki

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Treat me like the pages of a book.

Prospero's Book (1991) can be seen as a turning point for the Welsh filmmaker Peter Greenaway. During the nineteen eighties, the former ephemeral and documentary filmmaker developed a reputation of very idiosyncratic films which got him attention and culminated in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), his most well known film and a success. Prospero's Book, his very experimental take on William Shakespeare's The Tempest, was a push in the limits of the cinematic form - his last film with composer Michael Nyman, who would add to Greenaway's  trademarks, and arguably into the nineties when his films would eventually become more obscurer again, especially as they could be difficult.

Interestingly The Pillow Book was a Film4 production, which helps in terms of visibility; what was also common however by now was Greenaway was acquiring Dutch financing for his films, into the Millennium the country of Netherlands being a huge supporter of him both in being able to still make films but also inspiration for his stories. To those who do not know him, it is befitting to know he was once working for the Central Office of Information (COI) on public information films, only to move onto his own film making, even with fictional tales. Obsessed with combining his admiration with high art (a filmmaker who looks to painting and literature constantly with great knowledge) against the crudeness corporal nature of human life and the body, he was an equal opportunity person for showing male and female nudity in-between his fixed obsessions with sex and death, alongside showing a take on lists and order which even an autistic viewer like myself has not leaned into as he has. Prospero's Book for example is structured, retelling The Tempest, around the exiled wizard's library of books and Greenaway letting his imagination run wild.

The Pillow Book, based on the ancient Japanese text by author and court lady Sei Shōnagon, is like many films of his structured on a story but obsessing over these interests of his. Nagiko (Vivian Wu) is a daughter of an author who, frankly, has developed an eroticised obsession with having calligraphy written on her own body due to her father, each of her birthdays, having a ritual recreating how a God created humankind from clay by writing their facial features and gender on his daughter's face. Her travels lead to a chance encounter with a publisher (Yoshi Oida) who forced her father into sexual favours, encountering his lover Jerome (Ewan McGregor) as she, pushed to now writing onto men's bodies as an authoress, is encouraged to publish her own work only to be angered when the publisher rejects her first attempt.

This plot gets more ghoulish, as this eventually leads to a pillow book being made of human flesh, but the most prominent aspect about production is its technical craft and form. Experimenting with the visual frame, Greenaway was a huge critic of the narrative form of cinema ushered in by the likes of D.W. Griffith, considering that it had not evolved. Greenaway became an early adopter of digital editing even when still using celluloid; here in The Pillow Book, whilst not as extreme as Prospero's Book, he takes advantage of it, having multiple screens at points in the images.

Contrasting monochrome flashbacks with current day coloured ones, including the original version of the film using calligraphy for subtitles¹, there can be multiples sequences playing at one, a scene likely to have the events for that character layered for each other as much as different events in different time zones transpiring together. One such example is the frantic love sick suicide of a character being layered together as a collage of screens. It is, still to this day, incredibly innovative especially as experiments like this would lead to Greenaway's cinema managing to evolve further by the time he started using more built, artificial sets into the late 2000s and 2010s for the Dutch co-productions. Before then as well, this would be the second-to-last film with cinematographer Sacha Vierny; Greenaway for all his issues with cinema, is a huge fan of films he admires, such as Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961), rightly proclaimed by him as unique and managing to hire his hero, its cinematographer Vierny, to work with him decades after in the eighties to the end of the nineties, Vierny suited his striking visual look alongside always hiring great production designers, and clearly thinking in composition to match his interest in painting and illustration.

He also here also rode a bit of mainstream culture for once, just from the music choices which can vary between U2 to French pop, the later played with onscreen French subtitles like a karaoke bar video. Brian Eno as the composer does not hurt either, nor casting Ewan McGregor, just around the time of Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996), Greenaway even into his later obscurer years hiring some unlikely big names who clearly wanted to work with him. The one detail, the one that I do question, is that for a Japanese protagonist The Pillow Book does cast Chinese actress Vivian Wu, a choice which would be much more difficult to defend into the ongoing decades. I do wonder personally, even though there are actresses he could cast from Japanese cult cinema, even hiring Kirina Mano from Shinja Tsukamoto's Bullet Ballet (1998) for his follow up 8 ½ Women (1999), that there were a lot of issues which lead to this central lead choice. The character does speak fluent Mandarin from childhood, and Cantonese is spoken too as this is set partially in Hong Kong, but there is a sense of someone wanting to hire a higher profile lead willing to do full frontal nudity and that is why Wu was chosen. It is an odd casting choice, like when infamously Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), an American adaptation of a film about geisha culture, hired Chinese actresses to play Japanese women even if a Japanese-owned company produced it. It is the one thing which, over time, does cause one to scratch your head, and I say this knowing Vivian Wu does commit to the role brilliantly. Hers is one of those careers, eventually staying mostly within the Chinese film industry from the 2010s onwards, which is a head scratcher of pop culture just around one person. Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987) is one of her first prominent films, but it leads to one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle live action films; The Guyver (1991), a Japanese manga adaptation where she is cast as Japanese as well; the Tales from the Crypt TV series; an full motion video game oddity Supreme Warrior (1994), a first person fighting game from Digital Pictures, a company who tried and burnt themselves out (just in cash) by suggesting video games of the future had real actors and real interactive footage; the Highlander TV spin-off series, and various television show appearances from Murder, She Wrote, Millennium and ER, let alone a Peter Greenaway film where she takes admirable risk here in a sexually explicit and incredibly idiosyncratic narrative. She deserves a nod of respect for how idiosyncratic this CV I have barely covered is.

Beyond this, The Pillow Book is a thing of beauty nonetheless. Greenaway's career is full of films I could unpick a lot of detail from, enough in themselves to be big (or at least idiosyncratic) productions if someone else suddenly made them, and I have not even gotten to how distinct his voice is entirely, as Peter Greenaway is a director-writer and stamps his ideas into the material. Eventually his obsession with lists comes into play when, to torment the publisher, Nagiko starts creating books to send to him written on male bodies. That in itself is strange, as eventually you can have men with the calligraphy even hidden on their bodies or an existential text on another wondering if books have parents. The film is a grower. Once you adapt to its style, Greenaway becomes rewarding for a man who pushes the medium but, for all his criticisms of narrative cinema, always has very ornate plots with a lot of black humour and even emotion to them. Here, with one of the only ones with a female lead, it can be seen as a cliché her story is that of love, but even then this is an erotic drama about a strongly independent figure who, by the end, is proudly her own figure still, a peculiar tale to lead to this conclusion that is fascinating to watch.

Abstract Spectrum: Ghoulish/Meticulous/Playful

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

 

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1) Restored, prominently for a 2020 Indicator Blu Ray release in Britain, this subtitling whilst it does not translate everything has a distinct tone that adds to the aesthetic.

Vertical Features Remake (1978)

 

Director: Peter Greenaway

Screenplay: Peter Greenaway

Cast: Colin Cantlie as the Narrator

An Abstract List Candidate

 

For me, one of the most rewarding films in the career of Peter Greenaway is Vertical Features Remake, an early short film which I will argue is one of the most perfectly executed in his career, hidden away at a period before making feature films which leaves it easy to malign next to many great titles more know. Presented as a public information documentary, in which a fictional group known as the Institute of Reclamation and Restoration attempt to recreate a lost film by the figure Tulse Luper, it also has importance to Greenaway's career. Tulse Luper, a character created as a journeyman and polymath, would have one of his most ambitious projects based around him, The Tulse Luper Suitcases trilogy (2003-4), one which despite being a trilogy including meta-narrative additions is among one of Greenaway's obscurest productions to see. Even among those you can find with greater ease, even little details like a specific water tower film archive used in image will be returned to for Drowning by Numbers (1988).

Set to library music synth, composed by Brian Eno, in its opening credits, Vertical Features Remake looks like an actual documentary from this era were it not for the production having to correct itself constantly. It is the driest of dry humours you will need to appreciate this, effectively a structuralist avant-garde film which however has a meta textual sense of the self-referential, but if you can get past the main content of the film, it is compelling. The main content is "Vertical Features", a project by Tulse Luper which, reinterpreted over multiple tries as new theories and archival documents are found, consists of 121 shots of vertical objects in English countryside towns being shown in order in a varying time per shot and sometimes set to music. This is the aspect which is still a dense and obtuse avant-garde film to experience. Viewed in the right light, as the later adaptations get said music and vary in shot length in more varying ways, it is actually peaceful to sit through the segments like one could an installation work, but it is the one thing you have to bear in mind as they are experienced as whole short films within one forty plus minute experimental production.

The humour is entirely how many jostling voices come into this project, predating Greenaway's The Falls (1980) and his experience at the Central Office of Information (COI) suggesting to him the farce of trying to create comprehensive archives. Told entirely with narrator Colin Cantlie, and still images representing everyone outside the Vertical Feature remakes, the arguments for and against the project, and having to remake this project over-and-over, does have an intellectual concept of how one struggles with attempting to recreate the past based on merely preserved notes and artefacts. It also gets to the point one figure will even question if Tulse Luper even exists, an excuse for the Institute of Reclamation and Restoration to get funding for this self indulgent technical editing exercise, which is where the dry farcical air comes in. Combined with Michael Nyman crafting most of the score, at the beginning of his work with the filmmaker, and this is as esoteric as you can get, crossing Greenaway parodying a documentary from the time but also sincerely, in many ways, creating an experimental structuralist film, its creation of a fake history as unconventional as you can get in terms of filmmaking.

And it predates The Falls' entire structure among other shorts he was make beforehand, his debut a three plus hour film parodying attempting to catalogue the world in a more elaborate and bizarre structure with this same template. The Falls is less avant-garde film reconstruction but more science fiction narrative of a world after an unknown incident turn people into bird people, with all the use of pre-existing photos and just more actual actors to push this further. It definitely shows, right from the get-go, Peter Greenaway would have easily continued into this experimental world but found himself moving towards dramatic narratives with the experimentation in their structures and themes, finding a way to go forwards. Here, subversively, even if still difficult he may have also figured out a way to make explicitly avant-garde material much easier to digest.

The beauty of the English countryside against very rigid experimental art is a fascinating juxtaposition to have, unlike other real experimental films which have pure coloured shapes and sound only, and the set-up as effectively a piss-take on the subject also makes the content have a greater depth. An argument is made by the end Tulse Luper's project, for a group known as Session Three to develop a "dynamic landscape", was actually a condemnation of his own group's plans by showing the potency of the landscape already, alongside hints at colleagues being likely to have destroyed or altered his work through their own goals. It is still, by parody and making an avant-garde film within a film, Peter Greenaway tackling subjects that will appear in his narrative works, where a lot of protagonists struggle in terms of making pure art or life goals fighting against individuals who wish for purely political, financial or emotional victories. It is, know to me for a long time, a secret masterpiece in Greenaway's career even for the simple fact that, effectively a short film, it is the right length, has no chaff even with four "remakes", and is artistically perfect as it is.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Meditative/Playful

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

8 ½ Women (1999)

 

Director: Peter Greenaway

Screenplay: Peter Greenaway

Cast: John Standing as Philip Emmenthal; Matthew Delamere as Storey Emmenthal; Vivian Wu as Kito; Annie Shizuka Inoh as Simato; Barbara Sarafian as Clothilde; Kirina Mano as Mio; Toni Collette as Griselda; Amanda Plummer as Beryl; Natacha Amal as Giaconda; Manna Fujiwara as Giulietta the Half Woman; Polly Walker as Palmira; Elizabeth Berrington as Celeste, Emmenthal Maid; Myriam Muller as Marianne, Emmenthal Maid; Don Warrington as Simon; Claire Johnston as Amelia, Philip's Wife

Canon Fodder

 

That's an unrecognisable blasphemy in Japan!

A word to describe Welsh filmmaker Peter Greenaway? Esoteric. The former employee of the Central Office of Information (COI), Greenaway made short work on architecture and current trends in the seventies alongside progressing to experimental short films. His debut The Falls (1980), a three hour plus fake documentary set within a Britain hit by a bizarre disease that turned people half bird, pretty started off with his intentions he would carry throughout his career. An obsessive compulsive interest in lists; an insanely encyclopaedic view of art, literature and other mediums; a profane and at times controversial attitude to the body, be it equal opportunity nudity to violence which came in films that came after The Falls, and a pitch black sense of humour.

What changed over the decades is that he wrote narratives with actors soon after The Falls. This did not stop him from pushing the experimentation, to an extreme by the nineties as he would eventually fragment and multi-layer the screen (in Prospero's Books (1991)), or to discovering computer editing for The Pillow Book (1996). He also found talented individuals for behind the camera; this is after composer Michael Nyman has moved on in the early part of the decade, but 8 ½ Women is important as the last collaboration with cinematographer Sacha Vierny, famously the cinematographer of Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and who Greenaway first worked with from A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) to this film. (The film is co-shot with Reinier van Brummelen, and Vierny would pass in 2001 not long after).

8 ½ Women, even as a fan, was the one Greenaway film I was hesitant to revisit as its the film, in a career of someone who pushed buttons and upset people, which has two men (banking mogul grieving over his wife's death, and his son) build a harem of eight and a half women catering to their fetished images of women. Paying for them, or even using blackmail, to have them in the elder's home, they varied between Toni Collette as a former nun to Kirina Mano from Shinya Tsukamoto's Bullet Ballet (1998) playing a woman obsessed with kabuki theatre and wishing to be more "feminine", becoming a member of the harem as a stereotypical geisha. Thankfully, even if it involves throwing Federico Fellini under the bus, the film is skewering this premise from the get-go, mocking their fetishes when this idea stems from the elder's lack of sexual experience, having watched Fellini's legendary film 8 ½ (1963) in a theatre to grieve the loss of the mother/wife figure, referring to a sequence of Marcello Mastroianni's lead having a fantasy sequence, one where the women of his life are in a harem including those who eventually become ignored and rebel back.

The question of where Greenaway is going is to prod and skewer this fantasy of his film's two leads, beginning with the question if cinema is a way for a director to create his sexual fantasies, and the stereotypes of feminine identity in male fantasy, including a debate on whether a Jane Austin heroine would be more sexually exciting then one from a Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy work. 8 ½ Women plays to the double sided coin of the harem fantasy, that a) a man even if he had one might not be able to keep up physically and mentally to the fantasy, and b) that these women are strong and independent figures who buckle the image and argue back, especially because of Palmira (Polly Walker), the only harem member who is not bribed or blackmailed into this scenario, but willingly did so for a lark. The film has aged, but not necessarily of the premise, where the women eventually turn the tables on their male dominants with ease, whether secretly planning to poison them or with Giaconda (Natacha Amal), a woman who loves having children and being pregnant, who is so fertile that it forces the men to have to contemplate children. As Palmira has become the object of obsession for the father, distract entirely by her, the sense of the film aging is more that Greenaway's caustic and corpse black sense of humour here has a couple of moments which will raise eyebrows, such as a character believing he can keep a concubine by blacking himself up like Othello or that a large part of the humour is two very privileged men, one entirely closed in, making crass remarks about the outside world.

The knife-edge Greenaway manages to walk on is that we see the humanity of our lead males in spite of some tasteless witticisms, that the harem is an inherently misguided decision but only because it stems from two men grieving the loss of a loved one, the establishing first half a lengthy part of bonding between father and son. Once the harem is created, it is entirely clear their fantasy will crumble, due to real women not being like the fantasy, some taking umbrage to their position, and even a supernatural amount of earthquakes, also involved as the son (Storey Emmenthal) evoked one is speech and has seemingly caused them to follow him around.

The female cast, far from marginalised and in various states of undress, are not props just from the fact that Greenaway was always open to having his male cast do full front nudity, both in his obsession to replicate and evoke classic art, and as a scholar of what we call the human flesh and all inside it in gristly detail. That and that he casts a surprising batch of distinct figures for the titular women. Vivian Wu, lead of The Pillow Book, returns as the accountant; it is still strange casting her as a Japanese character again, despite being Chinese, but she is good in a smaller role. Kirina Mano, who I did not realise was here, is probably most known for Bullet Ballet, standing out there, but is distinct as a character here too whose mostly speaking in the state of kabuki half sung voice. The rest of the cast is an eclectic mix, from European actresses like Barbara Sarafian, the prolific Canadian-American actress Amanda Plummer, playing a woman who liberates horses from owners and has an openly sexual relationship with a pig named Hortace, to Polly Walker, another prolific and hard working actress for cinema and television who carries a huge bulk of the film in terms of the lead female character. She is also the one who has the most scenes as an eroticised state as, whilst frank in talk, this film is more restrained in spite of its premise in terms of sexual content and even nudity for Peter Greenaway, which has an effect of the film avoiding becoming potentially crass.

It helps Greenaway, despite his claims over the years of cinema being dead and arguments that it is an inadequate medium, has always both been a distinct visual director who explored the medium, and also a distinct and good writer. He can be crude and erudite at the same time, wisely always taking a structured plot with a reliance on actors, building up on his ideas through listed or ordered themes to progress, and a lot of corpse black humour. A lot of the film, despite having aged in ways, is still funny in the modern day like contemplating the human prick as a piece of architectural brilliance, meant to be as absurd and thoughtful as that sentence sounds. In terms of his cinema, this is one of his most straightforward narratively. By this point, he had pushed the medium in some very experimental films, and would so past this through his career, but 8 ½ Women does not necessarily challenge structurally as others do. It has taken from his previous use of digital editing and layering the images from The Pillow Book, but baring touches like having images within images, showing pachinko players in scenes in the first half set in Japan, or superimposing parts of the screenplay itself over the images, he is more restrained after the radical nature of his nineties films.

From then on, this plays as a rebuttal to all the initial set up, where not long after the harem is set up it is clearly doomed to fail. The moment the two male leads acquire their goal, the soon after it starts to crumble, and we follow on with both tragedy (and even final happiness) for the characters even if through a very questionable choice of life decisions, Greenaway taking no sides even if some of the material will come off as profane or questionable for some viewers. It is in a position, unfortunate to also disappearing in time, of being a Greenaway film not talked about, which is surprising knowing films from this period and throughout his career (especially Prospero's Book) which are more divisive and more talked of which have not even gotten the basic decency of a sole DVD as 8 ½ Women at least got in the director-writer's homeland. As with all his films, this does add a great deal to find and see.