Post by Capo on Jul 22, 2007 23:11:06 GMT
A Zed and Two Noughts
Peter Greenaway 1985 UK / Netherlands
The wives of two zoo-ologists, who happen to be twins, are killed in a car crash. The driver, who lost a leg and wants to lose the other, has an affair with both.
Thematically dense, intellectually engaging and always challenging film, in its audacity, in its originality, in its merging of high art and avant garde tendencies with fictional narrative conventions. It's a collection of ideas or preoccupations in two chaotic hours, with arresting imagery, cinematography which demands and commands attention, and a dark and perverse tale of emotional weight. One might say it lacks soul, one might say it packs quite a punch - it depends on how close you hold Greenaway's thematic obsessions: death, decay, amputation, twinship, the uniqueness of so-called freaks, and an obsessive need to acquire information in order to understand life. Formally, on top of this - 'this' being essentially three different films in one - are explorations of the verticality and horizontality of the frame, compositional symmetry (to reflect the twins), the artificiality of the medium, and an obsessive experiment into litghting; Vierny's cinematography captures 26 different uses of light - moonlight, daylight, candlelight, car headlamps, etc. It's quite a masterpiece, really.
Peter Greenaway 1985 UK / Netherlands
The wives of two zoo-ologists, who happen to be twins, are killed in a car crash. The driver, who lost a leg and wants to lose the other, has an affair with both.
Thematically dense, intellectually engaging and always challenging film, in its audacity, in its originality, in its merging of high art and avant garde tendencies with fictional narrative conventions. It's a collection of ideas or preoccupations in two chaotic hours, with arresting imagery, cinematography which demands and commands attention, and a dark and perverse tale of emotional weight. One might say it lacks soul, one might say it packs quite a punch - it depends on how close you hold Greenaway's thematic obsessions: death, decay, amputation, twinship, the uniqueness of so-called freaks, and an obsessive need to acquire information in order to understand life. Formally, on top of this - 'this' being essentially three different films in one - are explorations of the verticality and horizontality of the frame, compositional symmetry (to reflect the twins), the artificiality of the medium, and an obsessive experiment into litghting; Vierny's cinematography captures 26 different uses of light - moonlight, daylight, candlelight, car headlamps, etc. It's quite a masterpiece, really.