Not Coming to a Theater Near You
What do you think she meant when she said “a huge black monster with giant claws”?
What do you think she meant when she said “a huge black monster with giant claws”?
Peter Greenway’s work has a particular – and, to my mind, inimitable – quality that is simultaneously surreal and literal. The opening credits to this film, which exhibit the filmmaker’s continued obsession with numerology, display 8 ½ views of Tokyo Pachinco palaces. This occurs on top of the screenplay’s text, which describes the same. My description of this scene is precise, but the scene persists in an indescribable abstraction.
It is this, I guess, oddness that attracts me to Greenaway’s work—its emblazoned aestheticism captured in dull camera staging, or how an obsession with symmetry (or numerology) regularly overwhelms his films’ fundamental structures, narratives, and characterizations. And in all, it is contestable that Greenaway is less interested in cinema as a componential art than he is in its individual components, taking them and manipulating them into a ribald mixture both totally innovative and conventionally uncinematic.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: IFC
31 May 2007 12:23 PM | Submit Comment
