Nightwatching Part I

This is to document my review on imdb and maybe to give it some more depth because this will come to be a very complex matter and one that takes me again close to my heart and the person I used to be and hopefully still are, so let it begin.

This will not be your usual review, watch this space as I go along
watching this so far excellent movie.

The first scene I've chosen to watch was the scene in which Rembrandt
is drawing the dead Saskia, my first reaction and it was an emotional
response was that I was crying with my tears streaming down my face,
all the while I was intellectually realising that Rembrandt was
learning an important lesson at this very moment. Whereas in his works
and paintings he is the creator and god, he cannot for one iota change
or influence what is going on in the "real" world. His potency
regretfully does not stretch that far, moreover he has to submit to it
and feels as defenseless as a little child. Somehow lines from my
favourite Shakespeare play Cymbeline keep coming to my mind and so they
be here "You snatch some hence for little faults; that's love,;To have
them fall no more"! Indeed a moving scene and I'm sure that I've only
just scratched its surface. Important question raised what impact does
art have on life and vice versa?
Added August 16th: Now I've watched the opening scene I come to realise that my initial responses were correct, in a way I should have thought of much earlier. One of my favourite books is Memoires d'Aveugle:L'Autoportrait et autres Ruines/Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Basically it's the catalogue of an exhibition of drawings curated by Jacques Derrida. Its main topics are art, blindness and truth and it feels like Peter Greenaway is talking about exactly the same, add maybe the dilemma between art and life to it.
Other references watching the second scene would maybe escape people who are not really into the matter, but one of the hues of yellow is distilled from the urine of cattle that have been poisoned before. Just to show that this is a highly complex movie...

Ehre, wem Ehre gebührt, for his superb portrayal, which will still be subject of my future posts Martin Freeman needs to be tagged. His Rembrandt is a wonderful little fat man the like of William Turner or nowadays Howard Hodgkin - I believe this to be exactly the image Hodgkin once used.