Greenaway!

One of my Netflix DVDs this week was the recently released early Peter Greenaway film The Falls. For those of you who haven't seen this, and that probably includes pretty much all of hald dozen people who've actually seen this blog so far, this film is a 3 and a quarter hour long pseudo-documentary about something called the VUE, or Violent Unknown Event. This Event has something to do with birds, and caused many thousands of people to mutate in weird and unpredictable ways, become convinced that they can fly(and, in at least a few cases, actually acquire the ability to do so) and begin speaking in new, previously unknown languages. The film is structured as a collection of case studies, 92 in all, of VUE victims with names that begin with the letters f a l l.

The film is sometimes tedious, sometimes seems like an especially drawn out and dry Monty Python sketch, and pretty much always obssessively odd. It took me three sitting to get through the entire film, and, though I'll probably never watch it again, it was worth seeing. I'd only really recommend it to Greenaway completists(which if you are in America, is a difficult thing to be, considering how many of his major works have never been released here...I want The Baby of Macon and The Tulse Luper Suitcases, dammit. FSM only knows if Nightwatching will get an American release...)

The disk also includes Vertical Features Remake, a short film, also a pseudo-documentary, about an attempt by a group of academic film-scholars to reconstruct a lost avant-garde film by the fictional artist, Tulse Luper. Very, very odd. It plays almost like a pedantically arty ancestor to Peter Jackson's Forgotten Silver.