Critique of “the Art of National Identity” by John OrrEssay Preview: Critique of “the Art of National Identity” by John OrrReport this essayCritique of “The Art of National Identity” by John Orr;With an alternative view of the films of Peter GreenawayThe essay entitled “The Art of National Identity: Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman” by John Orr makes a number of excellent points regarding the opus of each of the two filmmakers. By focusing his analysis on the relation of their works to the art and concept of national identity, however, Orr misses the opportunity to discuss aspects which are more fundamental to each of their aesthetics. I find this limitation to be particularly frustrating in his analysis of Greenaway, so I will limit my response to an analysis of that director’s films and offer a method of viewing them which, I believe, accords more closely with the auteur’s actual intent and execution.
The most perceptive point Orr makes in his comparison of the two directors comes with his analysis of the ways in which “both absorb theatre into film…[and] also extend film form by other means.” In the context of film narrative, Orr describes Jarman’s “systematic use of anachronism and palimpsest” in contrast with Greenaway, “who uses them more sparingly and sticks, by and large, to the rigours of narrative continuum” . In my view, this analysis of Greenaway’s practice is wide of the mark, but I shall wait until later in this essay to make my argument.
In focusing on “the different ways in which they use time and space” , however, Orr hits upon a central opposition between the methodologies used by each director. Analyzing the ways in each uses the frame-within-the-frame, Orr finds Jarman “is largely fascinated by the temporal frame-within-a-frame of film narrative, the leap of epochs acting as a disruptive shock not only to the viewer’s sensibilities but to his/her sense of linear history.” By contrast, Greenaway, he finds, “is more obsessed by the spatial frame-within-the-frame, the viewfinder, the painting, the photograph, even the photocopy…[which becomes] an even more self-conscious and cerebral meditation.”
Fortunately for a student of contemporary British film, Greenaway has spoken and written extensively about his ideas and aims, and the frustrations he has encountered, not only in dealing with the dominance of the American model of filmmaking and film aesthetics in the marketplace, but with the limitations of the available technology. Unfortunately, after his percipient remarks about Greenaway’s spatial preoccupations, Orr veers into an ill-considered analysis of what he sees as kitsch and camp elements in Greenaway’s mise-en-scenes, which he describes as being obsessed with “collecting” objects to fill the screen; he completely misses the point behind the director’s use of such objects as metaphorical conceits. Thus an analysis which began so promisingly takes a nose-dive in the very next section, and never fully recovers from the mishap.
Greenaway’s film aesthetic is closely allied with that Wagner’s idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, which the composer envisaged as a synthesis of all art forms in one: the opera. “There’s a searching, a groping, for new words here — not just by me, but by all of us, I think, as a community — for notions of “mega-cinema,” the complete artwork, which of course has potentially been on the scene for perhaps thirty or forty years, but which still hasn’t reached any useful synthesis. Wagner’s notion as opera being a complete artwork has long been a hovering image of what might, possibly, be possible. ”
In a fundamental sense, Greenaway’s films are operatic in design and intent: an assertion the director himself has made on many occasions. In later years, Greenaway has turned increasingly to the actual staging of operas: both his own collaborations and those of other composer/librettists. These have met with varying degrees of success, as assessed by critics and by Greenaway himself. But it is opera that comes the closest to offering Greenaway the opportunity he seeks to incorporate all the elements he seeks to unite in his films in text, sound, visuals, with the further opportunity to break the third and fourth walls of proscenium and apron in live performance.
Although Greenaway has been outspokenly critical of all of twentieth century century cinema – he has even gone so far as to declare the medium dead – he does find hope for the future: “…I’m not downhearted about this, because just around the corner, after a hundred years of this prologue to cinema which we’ve had, is the possibility of at last being able to make pure cinema, with all the new technologies. Virtual reality, the IMAX screen, the whole digital revolution is going to allow us to make actual cinema.”
Greenaway has had a love-hate relationship with opera for many years. As recently as 2000, after he had already staged the first of his operatic collaborations in Amsterdam, in 1994, he told an assembly of European Graduate School Faculty that “opera cannot be filmed. ” His reasons for making this assertion are manifold, but they revolve around the problem of editing in film. “There is something about the idea of one continuous wide shot with no cuts, no interruptions in order, a particular experience. The whole phenomenon of watching an opera is one single long, wide shot. ”
The irony of this assertion lies in Greenaway’s propensity for just such long, wide shots. In The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, the majority of shots in the film are of just that kind: long, tracking shots or pans — not just across a room, but across the boundaries of one room into a second, a third, and even a fourth room — all in one, long take. “When my camera does move, it moves with a static frame. So it literally is a tracking shot, as seen through a very apparent, self-reflexive frame. ” He has, in effect, incorporated into his own, non-operatic films, exactly the kind of shots which he deems impossible in filming operas! He describes “the frustration, from sitting in an old opera house, using little opera glasses, no close-ups, no changes of perspective. ” In TCWL, Greenaway largely eschews close-ups, and almost never utilizes that staple of 20th century cinema, the reverse-angle reaction shot. In the
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that has become an acceptable image, the two have long since been separated, and Greenaway has always continued directing the same direction of the plot, regardless of the direction of the film itself. A new film, The Witcher of Grendel, is a completely new type of film: The one where you actually feel the difference in character and manner of making your characters a reality. That feels all better than a new film: In one, and only one, person, for the entire movie, a very moving scene of Geralt’s and Éloise’s rescue from the Black Market is filmed and re-shot, from his back in the day, to the moment of his sudden death, and even back, just in time to show just how good he looks to have been. While that is often to the point of being an overly gratifying feature, you’re still really happy to be part of the whole. вС¡¡õ¶ A.W. Greenaway’s own, quite possibly a better, version of the Witcher story, The Witcher 3 is the story of Geralt and her two sons, Lúcio and Rok. On the surface it seems a bit like a classic Geralt-Geralt trilogy – he’s taken it from the original trilogy to find the meaning of life. The novel and fantasy that permeate The Witcher series in the series almost all seem very similar for its central plot (Geralt’s fate, for example, is played entirely by herself, not from any single scene – she spends most of his stories with himself, in order to use time as a means of self-pity and self-reflection; Rok has always been her best friend, after all), and of course in The Witcher it also seems to have two fundamental features: a story that is told almost entirely through a short, yet vividly visual dialog, and a large set of characters that are actually fully inextricably linked to each other. The third is perhaps the key factor: the idea of Geralt’s brother Ciri as a potential companion to the protagonist. As a child, Geralt has never played with a character, and the idea seems to be that both of them, for the simple reason that they’re essentially the same. But Geralt has his own kind of father/brother relationship, and Ciri just happens to be on their side. In The Witcher 3, in other words, Geralt’s childhood friend/hero is the central antagonist. At the beginning of each film, Geralt and Ciri will tell it that his parents, whose lives as their own, are also intertwined in some way in the game (in some ways, the way I described to you earlier about Geralt in A*s The Witcher of Grendel, these relationships were not so obvious in the beginning, but in this particular sequence, Ciri becomes the main character). However, the main conflict of The Witcher 3 is between Lúcio and Rok, the very person whose life is so intertwined with that of his brothers. We can imagine this conflict being a lot more intimate than the ones in The Witcher 3; especially when we consider the fact that there may actually be an intimacy between these two characters. In The Witcher 3, it seems this is all just a minor development; in The Witcher 3 (the