Visual Illiteracy

In his documentary "Rembrandt J'Accuse" Peter Greenaway claims that most people (maybe our entire culture) is visually illiterate, ie not able to "read" an image properly, and going on he says that else we would not have such an "impoverished cinema". As a silent movie fan I must say he is right at that point,  visual expression was  very much neglected when the talkies arrived, early talkies tried to encorporate both means of articulation, ie words rather added a dimension to what you are seeing, but soon sadly the word would take over. One of the worst movies I have ever watched was "Last Man Standing", for I almost left the cinema yelling because I was told by the "inner voice" of the main character what I had just been seeing, but probably  Walter Hill, the director, did not trust the audience's abilities or he was just planning the commercial breaks already. Fact was that I couldn't watch because I was talked to all the time.
So in fact I'm now thinking about "Peter Greenaway J'Accuse"....

Nightwatching Part V

Visualising it

Oh, colour I adore. I can see from the movie that Peter Greenaway simply knows what he wants and how he wants the picture to look like. The hardest thing is yet to hunt for the perfect resemblance between vision and product.- Once when I was designing a poster for my school's English Drama Group and I knew the colour had to be violet and I stated so to other people, yet for lack of the colour I did it in blue. Now comes the funny part, one of us went to have the poster colour-copied, when I got a call saying that the copy cannot be done in exactly the hue but it had to be tinted, either red or yellow (it's been decades I wonder if I remember the other colour correctly). Absolutely excited I said, "For god's sake, red!" When the posters arrived, they were exactly like I had envisioned them and even the other people finally saw it - With this movie I also feel that the vision - like eg the blue and yellow of the flag (it takes my breath away) - has been translated.
Having Rembrandt in the drapery commenting on the fabric, its colour and texture - I can relate to this so very much, if I myself do this, it's pure synaesthesia, to touch it, to smell it, the colour . It's like being high on this, these are my drugs.- This is something that has happened to me before when watching a Greenaway movie, eg in The Cook, the Thief.... when the wife and the lover have sex between the rotting flesh, I definitely could smell this strange sweet odour of rotting and my husband on the other hand thought that the lover looked quite tasty in the end :)

Nightwatching - Truth in Painting

Like I've mentioned before I do not believe that movies could ever picture the historical facts, nor do I believe that it was predominantly intented in Nightwatching. To me the whole plot tells a story
 that might have been approximately like this or not.

Yet this does not imply that the movie is not telling the truth about its subject, ie Rembrandt and the story of the creation of a work of art. To me the historical murder story is just a subplot, a parergon, that enables Greenaway to discuss deeper relationships, eg between life and art or sexual desire and art or art and the art market, art and money. Maybe even down to the question if the artist is only just a craftsman and that he sometimes lacks intellectual capacities.

 Some of the really telling scenes are the opening scene, the scene when Rembrandt is asked to show his hands, and the ones  that touched me personally the most Saskia's death and the mating with Hendrikje, there is a feeling of apotheosis to this one, very delicate and very beautiful indeed.

Nightwatching Part III

Peter, I've been listening to an interview, where you stated that you do not particularly like Rembrandt van Rijn - an interesting contrast to Martin Freeman's perception he reveals on the DVD extras btw. Fact is I can definitely see why you do not actually love this person - pompous, self-absorbed. It reminded me of the fact that I used to paint monochromic abstract paintings  just in red for several years, and only one single hue of red btw. As it was at the academy and people were passing by, this was noticed of course. So one day somebody commented: "You must be loving red"."On the contrary", I replied," I hate it, but that is fine because this way I can do whatever I like to it". Yet the outcome and truth was more complicated since by the end I was adoring red.

 Maybe it's just Martin Freeman's excellent portrayal and the way he really achieved what he declaredly set out to do, which was play Rembrandt like a real person struggling with everyday problems and not the iconic painter, that made me feel deeply for this man - at the end I must admit I was in love. Yes, he is pompous and self-absorbed and frankly losing so much touch with reality as to set out to publically insult or accuse his powerful clients, makes it even worse. Self-indulgent idiot, who must show off his intelligence and who believes that nobody can get at him. And yet this is only one side, isn't it?! He could be Hamlet shouting out "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark (the Netherlands)" and there is the moral disgust he is feeling at actually the same issues Hamlet is facing, murder, double moral standards, incest,  colonialism. No, Amsterdam was not a nice place to live in and revealing it this openly - at least as far as the plot of this movie is concerned (I won't be commenting on wether I believeit to be historically correct because that's not a point that seems important to me, as this movie is a work of art and that's how it should be treated - anybody watching a movie and saying, yes ,this is the way it was, is a moron to me, sorry) - needs a disgusted and courageous person with high moral standards. So now we've got to a quite interesting point, something that varies from the usual perception of an artist as a morally at least questionable person, like in Anton Walbrook's favourite poem by his great-grandfather Wilhelm August Wohlbrück, it is the artist, who is just in giving each person his true deserts. I surely love the image of the eye at the end, and yes Peter, here you are right, we should learn to employ it properly and not superficially, and maybe I fancy also the idea that this eye might be love. Once more Martin Freeman is simply amazing in giving his character exactly this contradictory depth.

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.