The Early Films of Peter Greenaway: The Falls

Parrot, pigeon, puffin, pelican, peregrine, palm cockatoo...

"The Falls": an epic film that is a gargantuan send up of the minutiae of extreme scholarship. The 92 biographies of victims of the Unexplained Violent Event [UVE], which may...or may not...have something to do with birds, proceed with icy, statistical, bureaucratic force. The actual characters are absurd and/or implausible. The balancing act of whit and whimsy and statistical cataloguing is masterful. The UVE is never fully explained even though we have 3 1/2 hours of detailed examination [Clearly more work must be done...AAAAHHHHRRRRGGGGHHHH!]. It's much much much ado about nothing... and hysterical. Even the 92 examples here are connected by cross referencing and roundabout links. It's all very complicated. But of course even though archival footage is used and real people and events are sprinkled throughout, it is all made up. So sit back and just enjoy the ride. It's a film about people who learn Klingon or argue over details in "Lord of the Rings". But also about historians who's expertises are about a single year or event and scholars of single artists or even single works of art. It's about a human activity. It's about being a thinking ape. It's wonderful! March 20, 2007

An inventory of future projects

British director Peter Greenaway considers "The falls" the most emblematic film of his career: it's an inventory of his most beloved obssesions; a synthesis of his previous work as filmmaker and a seed of future projects.

THE FALLS ( 1978 ), his first feature length movie, is a catalogue of 92 invented biographies of people whose names begin with the word " falls " and affected by an unknown illness ( the U.V.E. ) in some way connected with birds and flying. This is, in fact, a seminal work of Greenaway's particular mithology and at its time a game of mirror where he blends bizarre situations, human mutations, archive footage, documentary techniques, humourous self-references ( he introduces in a new way stuff of his previous films ) and conceptual playing inside of a structure whose peculiar characteristic and form - as Greenaway has told- can be reformulated and extended "ad infinitum". But the movie is also a sardonic and creative demostration of scepticism where Greenaway plays to rub out the border between fiction and reality. " The falls " is probably the film that better reflects Greenaway's conception of cinema, so as his voluptuous personality and enciclopedic wisdom: his passion for catalogues and dictionaries; his interest in structuralism theorising and conceptual games; his taste in weird artefacts, bizarre invention and the theatre of absurd; his love for painting and barroque visual invention and his miscellaneous erudition and fine humour.

The score has been composed by Michael Nyman. August 1, 2006

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