Anthony Enns

Department of English
University of Iowa
anthony-enns@uiowa.edu

 

Woods, Alan. Being Naked Playing Dead: The Art of Peter Greenaway.Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996.

 

It is significant that the subtitle of Alan Woods’ new book, Being Naked Playing Dead, is not “The Films of…” or “The Cinema of…” but rather “The Art of Peter Greenaway.” “Artist” is certainly a more accurate description of Greenaway’s occupation than “filmmaker”; while he is widely known as one of today’s most brilliant and unique filmmakers, he has also worked in the mediums of painting, installations, experimental television, and opera. Woods’ subtitle not only indicates this fact, but also makes clear that Greenaway’s films must be considered in light of his wider body of work, and, more importantly, that his work must be considered within the context of contemporary art rather than contemporary cinema. As Woods points out: “Greenaway’s cinema requires a critical analysis which is not restricted to cinema, but draws its terms and concepts and examples both from the history of Western painting since the Renaissance… and from a base within the very different world of contemporary art practice” (87). Through his in-depth understanding of salient issues in contemporary art and his ability to decipher the wealth of influences and references at play within the works themselves, Woods distills the complexities of Greenaway’s art into a cohesive aesthetic theory, an outline for a “new cinematic language.” He constructs a fascinating portrait of Greenaway’s working method as well as illustrates a potentially new method of film criticism.

 

Part of what makes Greenaway’s films unique is the way they address the medium of film itself. Greenaway is obsessed with the difficulties of representing reality on film, and this problem becomes focused on representations of the body. As Greenaway explains: “[there are] two phenomena I have never been able to suspend disbelief about in the cinema–copulation and death” (52). Copulation and death are the two subjects addressed by Woods’ title, and they are particularly significant to Greenaway because they mark the limit of representation, the limit of film’s ability to represent the physical world. According to Woods, naked bodies, which are ubiquitous in Greenaway’s films, are linked to mortality: “Our interest in the nude, he suggests, is more than sexual: it is also to do with our knowledge of our own mortality. Many of the bodies he shows us are dead, or at least… acting dead” (162). It is paradoxical that Greenaway’s method of addressing the artifice of film is actually a project of connecting viewers to something more genuine: the experience of their own bodies, their mortality, the human condition. Greenaway recognizes the inability of “dominant” cinema to convey this experience because of its strict adherence to narrative; narrative is unable to remind people that they are mortal, and this is why Greenaway advocates a new cinema, a “cinema of ideas, not plots.”

 

Jorge Luis Borges once said that the short story did not necessarily require a plot, but rather a “situation,” and it is this word that appears in Woods’ text in place of plot: “the situation, however artificial, becomes difficult to bear because it must be thought about rather than consumed/resolved through narrative” (201). Narratives fail because they resolve tension, whereas Greenaway uses tension to evoke thought. Narrative relies on character identification, on the viewer’s empathy with the plight of the protagonist, but Greenaway rejects such a notion: “Empathy… prevents us from dealing with, facing up to, what is really real” (176). This repositioning of the viewer in relation to the work of art is almost Brechtian, except that Greenaway’s project does not encourage political awareness so much as an awareness of the operations of nature; according to Woods, Greenaway disrupts narrative from a “Darwinian standpoint.” However, it would be wrong to interpret Greenaway’s emphasis on nature as an attempt to evoke a spiritual or a transcendent experience. Woods describes Greenaway’s use of cinematic artifice as an attempt to combine Brechtian as well as Baroque theatricality (the Baroque aesthetic combines soul and body, the spiritual and the material): “It is not spirituality which is co-existent, doubled, with corporeality in Greenaway, but the presence of mind to imagine, to represent, as well as live out, physical existence” (200). This statement best explains the difference between Greenaway and Brecht: Greenaway demands that the viewer engage his films both intellectually and physically.

 

Throughout his work, Greenaway connects the material to the intellectual, objects to ideas, as Woods points out: “[Objects] are at once matter and spectacle, idea and thing” (17). The distinction between symbols, words and things gradually becomes blurred. His use of naked bodies, therefore, is not simply the reduction of characters to objects, but rather the creation, through their objectification, of meanings: “What… gives his work its particular charge, individuality and excess is that… he invests all objects, all bodies, with intricate, inexhaustible meaning” (49). Greenaway also solves the problem of narrative through a similar objectification. He prefers to think of narrative not as a story but as a “sequence”: “Sequence is inevitable in cinema, but narrative might not be” (227). In other words, he is able to accomplish this combination of Brechtian and Baroque theatricality by reducing narrative elements themselves to objects, to physicality, and it is through their physical presence, in succession, that meaning is generated.

 

This objectification of narrative elements can also be understood as the transformation of spatial meaning into temporal meaning. Greenaway not only invents a new cinematic language, he also teaches his viewers how to read it. He introduces a model of viewership based on the medium of painting rather than cinema: “When you go to the National Gallery… you don’t stand in front of the painting and emote. You don’t cry, you don’t shout, you don’t scream. Why should we demand those sorts of relationships in the cinema?” (81-2). Paintings, according to Woods, convey spatial meaning; they exist outside of time in a “continuous present.” Cinema conveys temporal meaning; meaning is created through the movement of objects in space over time, through narrative. Woods believes that “[Greenaway] retains as much simultaneous, spatial meaning as possible, and reinvents it for a temporal meaning” (123). Woods connects Greenaway’s rejection of the temporal limitations of cinema, a rejection of narrative and ephemerality, to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin was critical of film because it denies the viewer the ability to contemplate the image: the moving picture constantly distracts the viewer and controls both the direction and the duration of the viewer’s perception. Woods posits Greenaway as a potential solution to Benjamin’s dilemma: Greenaway’s films do not attempt to control the viewer’s perception, but rather, through the rejection of narrative and an emphasis on repetition and physicality, Greenaway demands that his images be contemplated: “The distancing effect involved in the picture’s treatment of the material–and, for us, in our own distance from the period in which it was painted–demands that it be considered, rather than consumed” (81).

 

Benjamin also believed that contemplation was the experience of the object’s authenticity, its “aura”: “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art” (221). The “aura” of the work is its physicality, its presence in time and space, which the film image obliterates. Greenaway often says he enjoys the making of films, but he is always disappointed in the result–he refers to the finished film as a “dissatisfying by-product” of the process of its creation–and what is disappointing to Greenaway about film is that it has no substance: “it is a frustration that cinema has no substance… it can have no intimacy with history” (93). Much of Greenaway’s artistic work outside of filmmaking involves exhibitions and books which chronicle the making of his films; they are an attempt, in other words, to give physicality to film: “What is unique… is his increasing interest in finding ways of reconstructing for his audience the physical realities of the set, the props, the bodies which, in film, are… insubstantial traces, reduced to light” (87). And his interest in exhibitions, in the physicality of film, also reflects Benjamin’s notion of cinema as distraction, as detrimental to contemplation:

 

We cannot inch a little to the left, to see the dining-table from the south side... this is a deeply impoverished situation, when we know that tables can be viewed from north, west and east as well... We could use a contemplation of the phenomenon of the exhibition to improve the status of the cinema. (140)

 

The physical presence of the film allows viewers to control their own perception of the work of art not only temporally, but also spatially. The film, embodied in the exhibition, is then able to have an intimacy with history as well as the viewers, and at the same time the viewers are allowed a greater intimacy with the experience of their own bodies.

 

After disrupting narrative and emphasizing physicality and corporeality, Greenaway discovers the possibility of creating meaning through the repetition and referencing of objects and ideas. This can be clearly seen in an exhibition entitled 100 Objects To Represent the World, in which Greenaway attempted to list 100 objects which could represent every aspect of human culture. Greenaway’s description of this process explains how meaning is generated through objects:

 

Since every natural and cultural object is such a complex thing, and all are so endlessly interconnected, this ambition should not be so difficult to accomplish as you might imagine. For example... the fountain-pen inside my pocket is a machine that can represent all machinery; it is made of metal and plastic which could be said to represent the whole metallurgy industry from drawing-pins to battleships, and the whole plastics industry from the intra-uterine device to inflatables. It has a clip for attaching it to my inside jacket pocket and thus acknowledges the clothing industry. It is designed to write, thus representing all literature, belles lettres, and journalism. It has the name Parker inscribed on its lid, revealing the presence of words, designer-significance, advertising, identity. (20-21)

 

Greenaway’s films ask the viewer to search for clues, to seek out references to other works of art, and to establish links from one film to the next. These games of referencing become the meaning of the films, their physicality, their embodied narrative. These endless references are reflected in the organization of Woods’ book, which does not trace Greenaway’s career in chronological order but rather constructs a web of associations, beginning with simple topics such as “water” or “curtains,” which lead him from one work to the other and from one association to the next in an apparently inexhaustible cycle. What is truly wonderful about Woods’ book is the way it reflects Greenaway’s own aesthetic: meaning is not generated through the construction of a narrative, but rather through the associations and links between objects and ideas.

 

What possibly makes Greenaway unique among contemporary filmmakers, and what may be the foundation of his “new cinematic language,” a language of bodies and objects rather than characters and stories, is that he rejects the emphasis on interpretation and content which pervades film criticism, as Susan Sontag pointed out in her essay “Against Interpretation.” Sontag believes the notion of content in a work of art is obsolete: “the idea of content is today mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism” (5). She argues for a criticism of appearances, of surfaces; for example, her description of Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s film Last Year at Marienbad, a film that Greenaway greatly admires: “the temptation to interpret Marienbad should be resisted. What matters in Marienbad is the pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy of some of its images” (9). Greenaway’s films also offer a wealth of sensuous imagery that does not ask to be interpreted, but rather to be witnessed, to be experienced, to be contemplated. Woods believes that the language of contemporary film criticism is inadequate to discuss Greenaway’s work: “there seems to be no equivalent set of continuing dialogues between Greenaway and contemporary film directors” (13). Woods also points out that Greenaway does not see himself as following cinematic tradition: “I can think of no other director so apparently uninterested in, impervious to, almost the whole range and history of Hollywood product” (15). Woods seems to be calling for a new type of criticism to discuss Greenaway, a criticism informed by the history of Western painting and contemporary art practice, a criticism, as Sontag suggests, of surfaces rather than content. In this way, Woods’ book not only makes a compelling argument for the significance of one of today’s most challenging filmmakers, but also for a new method of applying the tools of art history to works of cinema, of valuing ideas over plot, figure over character, spatial meaning over temporal.

 

The book concludes with two interviews with Greenaway, the latter of which was conducted during the editing of his most recent film, The Pillow Book (1996). Throughout both interviews, Greenaway struggles to articulate his concept of cinematic language, of the vocabulary intrinsic to the medium of film. He states repeatedly that film should be more than simply the illustration of text, more than simply stories told visually, and The Pillow Book stands out as a perfect example of this concept. By using multiple screens, text overlays, and changing aspect ratios, The Pillow Book is a uniquely cinematic object, and the relationship between text and image is central to both the narrative and the structure of the film. The film tells the story of a calligrapher’s daughter who is obsessed with having her body written upon. She later becomes a writer herself and uses other people’s bodies as paper. According to an article by Greenaway in Sight and Sound, the Japanese hieroglyph is the central metaphor of the film: “the text is read through the image, and the image is seen in the text–very possibly an ideal model for cinema” (15). Words are more than the things they signify; they are also images themselves. Thus the hieroglyph written upon the body illustrates the blurring of the distinctions between images, texts, and bodies, or between symbols, words and things. The Japanese hieroglyph could also stand as the central metaphor of Greenaway’s cinematic language: cinema is more than simply the illustration of text, but also text as illustration, symbol as object, image as a body itself, carved out of light. Greenaway arranges elements on celluloid as a painter would on canvas, using graphic tools to draw attention to the surface of the screen image, to the artifice of film. Like Marienbad, the images of The Pillow Book have a pure, untranslatable and sensuous immediacy, but they also clearly advertise the artifice behind them, and the importance of artifice, for Greenaway, is ultimately connected to bodily experience. Artifice pulls viewers out of the waking dream of traditional cinematic narrative; it asks them not to consume the film, but to consider it, to contemplate the screen as they might contemplate a canvas, and to recognize, through their experience, the reality of their own nakedness.

Works Cited

 

• Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
• Greenaway, Peter. “Peter Greenaway on The Pillow Book.” Sight and Sound 6.11 (1996): 15-17.
• Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.
• Woods, Alan. Being Naked Playing Dead: The Art of Peter Greenaway. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996.