Eisenstein in Guanajuato (18.)
Directed by Peter Greenaway.
Starring Elmer Bäck, Luis Alberti, Maya Zapata, José Montini, Cristina Velasco Lozano, Rasmus Slätis, Jakob Öhrman, Sara Juárez. 103 mins. Released on Blu-ray and DVD from Axiom Films.
A lot of people would mark the parting of the ways with composer Michael Nyman as the point when Peter Greenaway's output started to move into decline. The tease of the title of his latest project is the suggestion that he has teamed up with Nyman's great rival Philip Glass and made a spin off from the American minimalist's most famous piece Einstein On The Beach. Now, on reflection, that is a fairly tenuous little semi pun, but it is a very high brow fairly tenuous semi pun, which makes it very appropriate for a discussion of Peter Greenaway. High brow, tenuous puns and aphorisms are, according to his deriders, what he fills his films with instead of drama and humanity. They are bitter, little people – but they have a point.*
Eisenstein in Guanajuato sees Greenaway enter further into Ken Russell territory – the fictionalised artist biopic. Post revolution, Sergei Eisenstein was the Soviet Union's foremost filmmaker, pioneering a system of rapid editing dubbed montage: like Michael Bay, but without Mark Wahlberg or big robots. He created collectivist narratives – Strike, Battleship Potemkin and October – that celebrated Soviet ideology. He was the state's propagandist – again, just like Michael Bay. Feted by the American Left he was invited to Hollywood to make films, and when that didn't work out, in 1931 he ended up in Mexico being funded by Upton Sinclair to make an epic.
Which is where Greenaway chooses to set his film. In the margins there is a lot of details and facts about Eisenstein's life and career, but the centre is pure fantasy. Greenaway's Eisenstein (Bäck) is a comic figure, an indulged and chubby faced child with wild frizzy hair, an Andy Zaltzman lookalike, always in his one white suit. (In photographs the real Eisenstein's high forehead and electric shock hair made him resemble the Child of the Bride of Frankenstein.) He is also a virgin and repressed homosexual about to be brought out of himself by his Mexican guide Palomino (Alberti.)
At the start a narrator, presumably Greenaway himself, tells us that his film October was renamed Ten Days That Shook The World in the West and that this film could be called Ten Days That Shook Eisenstein. But Eisenstein spent the best part of a year in Mexico and whatever the ten days are, isn't made clear. Near the end we find out that he has shot over 250 miles of film, which is a shock to the viewer because we don't see him doing anything resembling a day's work. Greenaway's Eisenstein spends the whole film lazying around the hotel, going for the odd stroll, showering, lying in bed and being buggered by Palomino.
(There has always been lots of full frontal nudity, male and female, in his films but I did wonder if this could this be Greenaway's coming out film – a radical filmmaker who is a little stiff and set in his ways, goes to a new climate and finds himself opening up to the idea of passion. Probably not. It is though the nearest thing we have to a love story in his cinema.)
It is one of his more relaxed, easy going ventures. It's approachable and pleasant but largely unengaging: not a great deal appears to be going on and there isn't much to get stuck into. It's not as long winded and tedious as Nightwatching, but neither is it as thrilling and provocative as Goltzius and The Pelican Company. There are a few striking moments. At the start the film flits beautifully between colour and black and white; often a triptych split screen is used to allow for images to be superimposed to give context to a scene; most striking there is a lateral tracking shot that keeps panning past the same set of characters as they appear in different parts of the set.
He's a true innovator, somebody who pushes at the parameters of cinema. Often though, when you see one of his great set pieces, you wish it was in a better film.
Something did go wrong with his film making. With The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover he had managed to make a radical, avant garde piece of cinema that had attained wider audience acceptance. All of his theorising about how there could be a vibrant, urgent, alternative to the dull, unimaginative, dramatic strategies of what he called Dominant Cinema, had been realised. And then what did he do? The most boring and predictable thing a British film director could do: Shakespeare. All his digital cinema paint box gimmicks couldn't disguise that Prospero's Books chief virtue was Gielgud's oratory.
I'm sure that the split with Nyman was a big part of the problem – The Baby Of Macon might have got the recognition it deserved with a Nyman score to bash through objections – but I wonder if ultimately he chickened out. Having forced apart an opening to really take on Hollywood, he gradually retreated away into noodling around making indulgent little fripperies about art and artists.
Or it might be that his sensibilities were always too outre to consistently connect with audiences and his occasional successes were freak overlaps, outlandish coincidences. In the interview with him that is among the extras on the discs he keeps talking about the little games he is playing, the little homages he is making (for example the film is apparently completely symmetrical, with the first half mirroring the second and it all meeting in the middle with a Soviet flag being planted in Eisenstein's bare backside.) It's time to concede that for all his gifts, his fleeting moments of genius, Peter Greenaway's Idea Of Fun is his own, and his alone.
Extras.
A 20 minute interview with Greenaway, talking a good game as he always does.
A 25 minute interview with actors Bäck and Alberti.
*I like to think of myself as one of the last living Peter Greenaway fans, a devotion shown in the fact that when the promotional blu-ray for this finally dropped through my letter box it was the end result of 11 months of persistent pestering. I tried to review its fleeting big screen release in the summer but couldn't make the single press screening. (What do you mean pay to go and see it? Who do you think I am?) Then there was protracted email correspondence trying to get a disc for the home release, the date of which kept getting put back.
Directed by Peter Greenaway.
Starring Elmer Bäck, Luis Alberti, Maya Zapata, José Montini, Cristina Velasco Lozano, Rasmus Slätis, Jakob Öhrman, Sara Juárez. 103 mins. Released on Blu-ray and DVD from Axiom Films.
A lot of people would mark the parting of the ways with composer Michael Nyman as the point when Peter Greenaway's output started to move into decline. The tease of the title of his latest project is the suggestion that he has teamed up with Nyman's great rival Philip Glass and made a spin off from the American minimalist's most famous piece Einstein On The Beach. Now, on reflection, that is a fairly tenuous little semi pun, but it is a very high brow fairly tenuous semi pun, which makes it very appropriate for a discussion of Peter Greenaway. High brow, tenuous puns and aphorisms are, according to his deriders, what he fills his films with instead of drama and humanity. They are bitter, little people – but they have a point.*
Eisenstein in Guanajuato sees Greenaway enter further into Ken Russell territory – the fictionalised artist biopic. Post revolution, Sergei Eisenstein was the Soviet Union's foremost filmmaker, pioneering a system of rapid editing dubbed montage: like Michael Bay, but without Mark Wahlberg or big robots. He created collectivist narratives – Strike, Battleship Potemkin and October – that celebrated Soviet ideology. He was the state's propagandist – again, just like Michael Bay. Feted by the American Left he was invited to Hollywood to make films, and when that didn't work out, in 1931 he ended up in Mexico being funded by Upton Sinclair to make an epic.
Which is where Greenaway chooses to set his film. In the margins there is a lot of details and facts about Eisenstein's life and career, but the centre is pure fantasy. Greenaway's Eisenstein (Bäck) is a comic figure, an indulged and chubby faced child with wild frizzy hair, an Andy Zaltzman lookalike, always in his one white suit. (In photographs the real Eisenstein's high forehead and electric shock hair made him resemble the Child of the Bride of Frankenstein.) He is also a virgin and repressed homosexual about to be brought out of himself by his Mexican guide Palomino (Alberti.)
At the start a narrator, presumably Greenaway himself, tells us that his film October was renamed Ten Days That Shook The World in the West and that this film could be called Ten Days That Shook Eisenstein. But Eisenstein spent the best part of a year in Mexico and whatever the ten days are, isn't made clear. Near the end we find out that he has shot over 250 miles of film, which is a shock to the viewer because we don't see him doing anything resembling a day's work. Greenaway's Eisenstein spends the whole film lazying around the hotel, going for the odd stroll, showering, lying in bed and being buggered by Palomino.
(There has always been lots of full frontal nudity, male and female, in his films but I did wonder if this could this be Greenaway's coming out film – a radical filmmaker who is a little stiff and set in his ways, goes to a new climate and finds himself opening up to the idea of passion. Probably not. It is though the nearest thing we have to a love story in his cinema.)
It is one of his more relaxed, easy going ventures. It's approachable and pleasant but largely unengaging: not a great deal appears to be going on and there isn't much to get stuck into. It's not as long winded and tedious as Nightwatching, but neither is it as thrilling and provocative as Goltzius and The Pelican Company. There are a few striking moments. At the start the film flits beautifully between colour and black and white; often a triptych split screen is used to allow for images to be superimposed to give context to a scene; most striking there is a lateral tracking shot that keeps panning past the same set of characters as they appear in different parts of the set.
He's a true innovator, somebody who pushes at the parameters of cinema. Often though, when you see one of his great set pieces, you wish it was in a better film.
Something did go wrong with his film making. With The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover he had managed to make a radical, avant garde piece of cinema that had attained wider audience acceptance. All of his theorising about how there could be a vibrant, urgent, alternative to the dull, unimaginative, dramatic strategies of what he called Dominant Cinema, had been realised. And then what did he do? The most boring and predictable thing a British film director could do: Shakespeare. All his digital cinema paint box gimmicks couldn't disguise that Prospero's Books chief virtue was Gielgud's oratory.
I'm sure that the split with Nyman was a big part of the problem – The Baby Of Macon might have got the recognition it deserved with a Nyman score to bash through objections – but I wonder if ultimately he chickened out. Having forced apart an opening to really take on Hollywood, he gradually retreated away into noodling around making indulgent little fripperies about art and artists.
Or it might be that his sensibilities were always too outre to consistently connect with audiences and his occasional successes were freak overlaps, outlandish coincidences. In the interview with him that is among the extras on the discs he keeps talking about the little games he is playing, the little homages he is making (for example the film is apparently completely symmetrical, with the first half mirroring the second and it all meeting in the middle with a Soviet flag being planted in Eisenstein's bare backside.) It's time to concede that for all his gifts, his fleeting moments of genius, Peter Greenaway's Idea Of Fun is his own, and his alone.
Extras.
A 20 minute interview with Greenaway, talking a good game as he always does.
A 25 minute interview with actors Bäck and Alberti.
*I like to think of myself as one of the last living Peter Greenaway fans, a devotion shown in the fact that when the promotional blu-ray for this finally dropped through my letter box it was the end result of 11 months of persistent pestering. I tried to review its fleeting big screen release in the summer but couldn't make the single press screening. (What do you mean pay to go and see it? Who do you think I am?) Then there was protracted email correspondence trying to get a disc for the home release, the date of which kept getting put back.
