This will take the discussion off topic a little but I wanted to add some of my opinions/defence of Greenaway here. I like the way that all of Greenaway's films seem to deal with initially very simple, almost childish, approaches to their subjects perhaps initially dictated as much by budget and available resources as by the subject matter itself. For instance, just taking the early works as examples for now, the journey through a landscape created by panning over maps with narration in A Walk Through H, the disagreements about the final version of a lost film based on unearthed research materials in the incredibly structuralist Vertical Features Remake, or the fantasical water-based world of hierarchical dynasties and bloodthirsty wars described over images of streams and lakes in Water Wrackets.
However these simplistic, pared down approaches to this material contrasts with the incredible complexities they reveal as they progress. The many ways of structuring footage in the various Vertical Features is based on incomplete, fragmentary knowledge of the original creator's intentions (as well as personal, geographical and institutional biases of those involved in the project - all seem as far from the originally envisioned restoration of the film as they were at the beginning, yet at the same time all of their various takes on the material have some merit, and perhaps pay the greatest complement to their, possibly non-existant, inspiration by having been born from that initial uncompleted idea); the imagery of
Dear Phone appears as text interspersed with pictures of isolated telephone boxes which provides both content and context but in isolation from one another (Greenaway describes on the DVD as this being structured like a book where because of the manufacturing process you get bundles of pictures bound together in their own sections and only somewhat related to the text directly around it, instead needing the reader to relate word and image together meaningfully); and of course
The Falls (and
H Is For House) which reveal both the benefits and drawbacks of simple alphabetical ordering to bring a representative, unbiased sample together, but also to draw in much irrelevant or esoteric information too, and represent information in a non-chronological, arbitrarily related way (except when family names occur together and have to be unpacked in a bunch, much like the telephone booth pictures in Dear Phone) that occasionally through strange fateful twists of language bring illuminating pieces of information into close proximity with each other.
This ordering also takes the old quote of "a film needs a beginning, a middle and an end...but not necessarily in that order" to an extreme, suggesting that every moment of the material is all three - there is no particular beginning, or end goal to be reached, but there is a 'middle' of accumulating knowledge while the search is going on, or still considered worth continuing with. We wouldn't expect a dictionary to reach an exciting climax at the letter 'Z' just because all other books are structured in that manner to hold an audience's attention in a linear fashion!
The shorts don't stand in isolation from the features however. Greenaway has said that they all take place in the 'same world', and they do all feel of a piece, with elements of other ideas inside them. Taking the magnum opus of The Falls as an example again - various entries reference A Walk Through H (as being a lost, and perhaps apocryphal, film!) and the Goole Water Tower from Vertical Features Remake, as well as looking forward to The Tulse Luper Suitcases, the death of an architect, Van Hoyten and Amsterdam Zoo and one entry even includes a Cissie Colpitts (by virtue of a name change to a surname beginning with "Fall..."), which is the shared name of the three sisters in Drowning By Numbers.
As well as showing how the most simplistic structures we are grouped into (of society, of relationships, of information) have the most complex resonances there is also an interest in the rituals and orderings, the rules that govern behaviour and daily life. They are are at the same time completely arbitrary in the way that they are created and imposed
and essential to functioning with others.
At this level (and this is where I think some of the articles quoted in the thread have a superficial point) Greenaway's films seem most interested in the intellectual - the yearning for the abstract idea that solves the puzzle, to find the perfect order out of the meaningless chaos. Yet there is a wry sense of self awareness about the just how absurdly impossible (and perhaps undesirable) such a sterile system actually may be in practice, which is something that often leads to the ironic endings of his films (which would be tragic if they were often not also so funny! This is where the articles commenting on Greenaway's 'going to kill myself in a few years' or 'cinema is dead' comments (deliberately?) miss the inherent resonances with his body of work), undermining these attempts of the characters to create order, meaning or a place in their society that they can comfortably fit into. But that doesn't mean that the attempt to structure or find meaning shouldn't be admired!
There is the sense of a love of language, architecture, cinema, art, food, religious ideas, gender differences and sex as abstract concepts or intellectual ideals that can inspire the very best of humanity, but also the bitter awareness of the way that all these potentially positive ideas, with all their inherent power, are often co-opted and corrupted (or faked) by societal, ritual, monetary practicalities - a painting only becomes important for what it is worth not what it might mean or inspire; a personal covenant becomes an unthinking obediently held but misunderstood posture that everyone must conform to; the mobster/politician co-opts art not because they like it but because it inspires the right feelings about them in the subjects that they wish to rule over, or can be used as an ostentatious display of wealth to simply show off not because they might have any interest in the object itself (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover is perhaps the most explicit example of this).
That is why Greenaway's films are both incredibly beautiful and quite horrific, often at the same time - distant from the immediate action and hard hitting at the deepest levels of ethics, morality and communication. In a sense the ideas are tamed and the dangerous power that they hold, and might inspire in a viewer, is managed (which makes Nothing's comments on the 'managing' of Greenaway's films themselves in recent times quite apt in a way!)
This might annoy Nothing, but I see quite a relationship between Greenaway and Lars von Trier, though I like Greenaway a bit more. Both are interested in revealing the arbitrariness of morality and societal structures, to expose the mechanics that keep the world ticking along. I think there is a genuine interest and care for this world within both of their bodies of work, even if there are no illusions that this 'ticking along' often involves collateral damage along the way and a casual attitude to those destroyed, left behind or abandoned in the constant flow of the world. In filmic terms there seems like a move from a very controlled world almost empty of human beings, or with human beings used as props, to incorporating the human being as centrally important to their respective filmic universes. They're the chaotic, violent, sometimes insane centres around which the more antiseptic, brutally efficient mechanisms of society are structured around. (there are also the carefully managed clashes and melding between 'high' and 'low' culture - with Greenaway the use of David Attenborough or John Gielgud against the popular comedians used as gang members in Cook, The Thief, or Jim Davidson in A Zed And Two Noughts. Von Trier has the clashes between 'star names' and the circumstances in which they find themselves) This incidentally is where I think a lot of people miss the element of true feeling in both Greenaway and von Trier - the interest in and care for the individual characters but at an unbridgeable remove creates a far more moving connection to their archetypal plights than you could get in any wildly emotive, desperate to involve the audience in the drama, film (For example perhaps Precious would have been better if done in the style of Baby of Macon!) The distance, sometimes wryly amused, sometimes bitterly condemnatory, sometimes resigned, often artificially imposed as if in laboratory conditions, often creates the greater emotional impact, at least for this viewer.
There is also the idea of creating 'movements' which might inspire other people to follow their example. Von Trier of course has Dogme but Greenaway is even more fascinating as his 'movements' have their own inbuilt futility to them, and are often woven both inside the fabric of the world of his films and in the making of the films themselves. The arbitrary numbering of 92 (92 boxes in the Tulse Luper Suitcases, various permutations of the number in Vertical Features Remake, the 92 entries of The Falls, etc) suggests both an impossible and unobtainable target. The Falls is perhaps the key to this (and much of the rest of Greenaway's work, with its
Ballardian undertones) as it also has the theme that von Trier took up later with his US(A) trilogy of following a particular concept through to the bitter end - forcing a kernel of an idea to become novel simply by focusing onto it and expanding it into a central theme of the film.
There is also the feeling that events when they occur are truly messy, nasty, uncoordinated and unpredictable, yet with hindsight they get reinterpreted by artists, writers, filmmakers and historians into meaningful and coherent structures that may themselves be inherently and fatally flawed by the imposition of such a structure to the chaos (on perhaps a lower ambition level many of Oliver Stone's films seem to have elements of this idea, consciously or not on the part of the filmmaker himself), whether that is the various explanations given for the VUE (Violent Unknown Event) in The Fall, the number game of Drowning By Numbers, the ritualistic fashion display of The Pillow Book, the theatrical or architectural framing of Baby of Macon or Belly Of An Architect, or the tableaux framings of The Cook, The Thief and seemingly Nightwatching.
