Goltzius and The Pelican Company (18)
Directed by Peter Greenaway.
Starring Ramsey Nasr, F. Murray Abrahams, Kate Moran, Guilio Berruti and Anne Louise Hassing. 128 mins. Streaming on subscription with BFI Player.
Norman Tebbit once claimed that nude paintings in art galleries were the posh equivalent of Page 3 girls. Though not obvious bed fellows, his view finds some kind of support in this latest project from Peter Greenaway, which makes the case that the root of all art, innovation and religion is basically pornographic. It's an extravagant, repelling combination of theatre and digital cinema, knocked up in a big shed in Croatia.
The plot is a battle of wits between two men: the Margrave of Alsace (Abrahams not doing the accent) and celebrated 16th century Dutch engraver Hendrik Goltzius (Nasz, very much the accent.) Goltzius wants to secure the future of his printmaking business by making a set of illustrated volumes representing erotic tales from the Old Testament. With his Pelican Company, a travelling group of printers, writers and performers, he visits the Margrave to seek funding. To push the deal through he offers six theatrical presentations of the tales, performed by his company. Live sex shows, basically.
When we first meet the Margrave he is sitting on a toilet, in front of his whole court, performing the daily ritual of his six o' clock ablutions. This is a quintessential Greenaway image. His films celebrate the achievements of art and culture while revealing the lowest depths of human behaviour and reducing the distance between the two to almost nothing. This simultaneous veneration and debasement is what gives his film their unique force.
The film opens with the notion, "new technology must get into bed with lechery,” that Pornography is the demon engine of civilisation, or at least the visual arts. It is a conceit that has clear and obvious contemporary relevance but much of the film addresses issues that may seem rather arcane and incomprehensible. There is plenty to exasperate and frustrate the viewer but then the course of Greenaway never ran smoothly and overall Goltzius is an assault on the senses that is reminiscent of his best films.
It marshals strands from all his work, though is closest to Prospero's Books, The Baby of Macon or a TV Dante. It is like the film record of a theatrical performance. It was shot in a large warehouse or abandoned municipal space in Croatia. We are constantly aware of the performing space and the artificiality of the sets and the performance. Any notion of Realism is aggressively banished. On top of that is a layer of digital manipulations to give an extra richness to the images.
It is also a macabre treatise on the morality of acting. Everybody in the story is selling themselves, bartering for or with sex. Just about everybody in the cast is stripped and made to perform public sex acts; everybody is debased in some way. The common complaint about his films is that they are cold and unemotional but they are also incredibly raw. They is no hiding place for the performers and though the dialogue and the staging seem incredibly stilted, they exhibit enormous vitality.
Appropriate that this should be released in the same week as Michael Bay's Transformers 4. Here are two directors who have battled to escape the rigid constrictions of conventional narrative and tried to see cinema in its own terms. Both offer visual spectacle as an alternative to storytelling. The problem is both tend to alienate viewers by not communicating what is important or of relevance in their spectacles, what they should care about.
For Bay I guess it is because he really doesn’t give a toss why Hong Kong is getting levelled or where those Dinobots sprang from. For Greenaway it is partly because you are assumed to know the artistic and historical allusions that are casually thrown out. There is a carelessness about the way he will arbitrarily throw in a development that the audience is entirely unprepared for and leave us to work out how we are supposed to interpret it. Really, a printing company that did live sex shows to raise money? Is that that historically accurate? Who knows? The film doesn't make any effort to persuade you of it, which is a recurrent issue viewers have with his later films: you never knew where you stand.
The 21st century has been tough for Greenaway, or at least those who would count themselves fans of his films. After the death of cinematographer Sacha Vierny in 2001, he frittered away years on the largely unseen indulgences of his Tulse Luper Suitcases project and then made Nightwatching, a Yellow Dog of a film in which he attempted to go back to what he did best and found he was no longer any good at it. Goltzius is as frustrating, willful and alienating as anything he's ever done, but it does send a little charge of excitement through fans. It's been a long wait but once again there is an excitement to his work.
Directed by Peter Greenaway.
Starring Ramsey Nasr, F. Murray Abrahams, Kate Moran, Guilio Berruti and Anne Louise Hassing. 128 mins. Streaming on subscription with BFI Player.
Norman Tebbit once claimed that nude paintings in art galleries were the posh equivalent of Page 3 girls. Though not obvious bed fellows, his view finds some kind of support in this latest project from Peter Greenaway, which makes the case that the root of all art, innovation and religion is basically pornographic. It's an extravagant, repelling combination of theatre and digital cinema, knocked up in a big shed in Croatia.
The plot is a battle of wits between two men: the Margrave of Alsace (Abrahams not doing the accent) and celebrated 16th century Dutch engraver Hendrik Goltzius (Nasz, very much the accent.) Goltzius wants to secure the future of his printmaking business by making a set of illustrated volumes representing erotic tales from the Old Testament. With his Pelican Company, a travelling group of printers, writers and performers, he visits the Margrave to seek funding. To push the deal through he offers six theatrical presentations of the tales, performed by his company. Live sex shows, basically.
When we first meet the Margrave he is sitting on a toilet, in front of his whole court, performing the daily ritual of his six o' clock ablutions. This is a quintessential Greenaway image. His films celebrate the achievements of art and culture while revealing the lowest depths of human behaviour and reducing the distance between the two to almost nothing. This simultaneous veneration and debasement is what gives his film their unique force.
The film opens with the notion, "new technology must get into bed with lechery,” that Pornography is the demon engine of civilisation, or at least the visual arts. It is a conceit that has clear and obvious contemporary relevance but much of the film addresses issues that may seem rather arcane and incomprehensible. There is plenty to exasperate and frustrate the viewer but then the course of Greenaway never ran smoothly and overall Goltzius is an assault on the senses that is reminiscent of his best films.
It marshals strands from all his work, though is closest to Prospero's Books, The Baby of Macon or a TV Dante. It is like the film record of a theatrical performance. It was shot in a large warehouse or abandoned municipal space in Croatia. We are constantly aware of the performing space and the artificiality of the sets and the performance. Any notion of Realism is aggressively banished. On top of that is a layer of digital manipulations to give an extra richness to the images.
It is also a macabre treatise on the morality of acting. Everybody in the story is selling themselves, bartering for or with sex. Just about everybody in the cast is stripped and made to perform public sex acts; everybody is debased in some way. The common complaint about his films is that they are cold and unemotional but they are also incredibly raw. They is no hiding place for the performers and though the dialogue and the staging seem incredibly stilted, they exhibit enormous vitality.
Appropriate that this should be released in the same week as Michael Bay's Transformers 4. Here are two directors who have battled to escape the rigid constrictions of conventional narrative and tried to see cinema in its own terms. Both offer visual spectacle as an alternative to storytelling. The problem is both tend to alienate viewers by not communicating what is important or of relevance in their spectacles, what they should care about.
For Bay I guess it is because he really doesn’t give a toss why Hong Kong is getting levelled or where those Dinobots sprang from. For Greenaway it is partly because you are assumed to know the artistic and historical allusions that are casually thrown out. There is a carelessness about the way he will arbitrarily throw in a development that the audience is entirely unprepared for and leave us to work out how we are supposed to interpret it. Really, a printing company that did live sex shows to raise money? Is that that historically accurate? Who knows? The film doesn't make any effort to persuade you of it, which is a recurrent issue viewers have with his later films: you never knew where you stand.
The 21st century has been tough for Greenaway, or at least those who would count themselves fans of his films. After the death of cinematographer Sacha Vierny in 2001, he frittered away years on the largely unseen indulgences of his Tulse Luper Suitcases project and then made Nightwatching, a Yellow Dog of a film in which he attempted to go back to what he did best and found he was no longer any good at it. Goltzius is as frustrating, willful and alienating as anything he's ever done, but it does send a little charge of excitement through fans. It's been a long wait but once again there is an excitement to his work.
