Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 8 No. 2, January 2003
Trevor G. Elkington
Between Order and Chaos:
On _Peter Greenaway's Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema_
_Peter Greenaway's
Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema_ Edited by Paula
Willoquet-Maricondi and Mary Alemany-Galway Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow
Press, 2001 ISBN
0-8108-3892-3 xxviii + 360
pp. If, as Steven Shaviro
suggests in _Doom Patrols_, 'postmodernism is not a
theoretical option or a stylistic choice; it is the very air
we breathe', then 'we are postmodern whether we like it or
not, and whether we are aware of it or not'. [1] So
how are we to define postmodernism, how can we even apply
the concept? Certainly, postmodernism, as aesthetic,
philosophy, cultural paradigm, or topic of choice, has seen
many definitions offered; perhaps, for a cluster of theories
that values multiplicity, it is only fitting that each of us
will have our own, equally valid understanding of what
postmodernism means. But the stakes are more acute when
trying to apply postmodernism as an explicit concept, as the
contributors must do in Paula Willoquet-Maricondi and Mary
Alemany-Galway's anthology of essays, _Peter Greenaway's
Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema_. To apply Postmodernism
as an organizing principle is a challenge of which the
editors and authors are keenly aware; as the editors state
in the Preface, the very idea of a work that studies a
single *auteur* through the lens of postmodernism or
poststructuralism is itself a self-contradiction, given
their paradigmatic association with 'the dissolution of the
figure of the author'. This collection then is not 'an
*auteur* study per se', but instead 'an attempt to
understand and explicate Greenaway's work in relation to the
epistemology of his time, that is, the age of postmodernism'
(vii). And although the editors claim not to be 'arguing
that Greenaway is a poststructuralist theorist, or even that
he has read or is interested in discussing poststructuralist
theory' (ix), what emerges from the collection is a sense of
an artist who is precisely that, a postmodern and
poststructural theorist sans pareil, a philosopher in the
truest sense of the word. Following a comprehensive
Introduction by the editors, the essays and interviews in
this collections are arranged as chapters and divided into
three parts. The first, 'Postmodern Mega-Cinema', consists
of four essays that place Greenaway's films within a British
context, within the context of his other works, and within
the context of global film practice. There is a tendency in
the essays presented here to focus upon Greenaway's early,
experimental short films and pseudo-documentaries, his
initial attempts at feature length film such as _The Falls_
(1980), and his works in other media. Given the relatively
scant attention paid to this body of work by scholars and
critics, it is a most welcome contribution. The second
section, 'Postmodern Features', makes up the majority of the
collection, and traces the various poststructuralist and
postmodern aspects of his work; I will return to this
section later. The third section, 'Too Many Proofs Spoil the
Truth', consists of the text of a lecture, titled 'Body and
Text: _Eight and a Half Women_: A Laconic Black Comedy',
delivered by Greenaway as part of a series organized by
British Design and Art Direction, and two insightful
interviews conducted by Willoquet-Maricondi. The
organization of the volume highlights a cohesive elaboration
of one overall topic, each chapter taking a particular
approach, all leading toward a conclusion clearly in sight
from the Introduction; if you prefer, one might look at the
essays as variations upon a central theme or motif, each
taking up and compounding ideas and themes found throughout.
To simplify, one notices how the essays and interviews
reveal a host of binary opposites functioning within
Greenaway's art across various media (film, opera and
theatre, installation art/exhibition, essay), and in doing
so, reveal how he continually positions his work at the
juncture between these various binary couplings: Modernism --
Postmodernism Structuralism --
Poststructuralism Text -- Image Word -- Body Architecture --
Body Mind -- Body Place -- Space Surface --
Depth Literature --
Film Theater -- Film Authenticity --
Artifice Reason --
Intuition Introjection --
Incorporation Reality --
Illusion Catholicism --
Reformation Substance --
Performance Aescetism --
Excess West -- East Order -- Chaos The list could go on and
on, a taxonomy Greenaway's work and the very concepts which
he has grappled with from his earliest experimental short
films, made with private funds or the support of the British
Film Institute. But to delineate this rigid approach to
Greenaway's works or essays misses the point entirely, for
as the filmmaker notes in one of the interviews: 'I would
just argue that all our systems are very much constructs,
even systems that are held very dear -- like religious
beliefs -- and that they are only useful in small pockets,
either for individuals and communities, historically and
geographically, they fit time and place, they are
conveniences' (302). In other words, it would be to apply a
structuralist approach to poststructuralist works. Instead,
the collection reveals how Greenaway, regardless of medium,
creates taxonomies in themselves extravagant and
fascinating, like Borges's famous 'certain Chinese
encyclopedia', but taxonomies that simultaneously reveal
their own inadequacy to represent the profound abundance of
the world and our lives. Greenaway creates systems that
delineate experience, but at the same time reveal their own
constructed, possibly arbitrary, reasoning; systems that are
doomed to self-de(con)struct just at the moment they become
useful, just as with the list provided above. To understand his works,
one must look at the transition between concepts, remain in
the flux, and delight in the play between stasis and
fluidity. Unlike a Modernist, who might look upon the
collapse of reason's grand edifices with nostalgia,
Greenaway invites us to seize upon this moment of
liberation: 'We are on our own, which I think is
FANTASTICALLY liberating, and which would also prove that
all the other checks, all the other codes, all the other
organizations of our lives are human constructs, which we
have attempted to invent in order to attack the notion of
purposelessness' (305). In these moments, he invites
comparison to Jean-Francois Lyotard, one theorist not shy of
offering definitions, as he writes in 'Answering the
Question: What is Postmodernism?': 'Finally it must be clear
that it is our business not to supply reality but to invent
allusions to the conceivable which cannot be represented . .
. The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be
witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the
differences and save the honor of the name'. [2] For
Lyotard, the path to navigating the unpresentable, or what
he calls the 'the postmodern sublime', is found in
mini-narratives, small strategies employed as needed in the
context of the moment and abandoned once they are no longer
useful, always aware of their constructed nature. As his
works expose their construction and embrace the
unpresentable that lies beyond, Greenaway begins to sound
very much like a poststructuralist (or postmodern) theorist
waging war on totality and rigidity. The pleasure and danger of
a work so wide-ranging as this collection is that it allows
one to focus upon the topics most personally engaging, which
is another way of saying I found myself looking for the ways
in which the essays spoke directly to my own research
interests. In my case, that interest lies in the connection
between phenomenology and film theory, and in this
particular instance, the ways in which Greenaway's films
echo Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notions of embodied perception,
gestalt, sensation, and the chiasm between flesh and the
world. Consequently, I found myself particularly drawn to
essays by Michael Ostwald and Paula Willoquet-Maricondi,
which deal with the tension between body and space in
Greenaway's works. However, as I hope to reveal, the points
made within these works inevitably point to a larger
conclusion offered by the collection as a whole. Whether one
focuses upon body and space, word and image, modernism and
postmodernism, structuralism and poststructuralism, theater
and film, or any of the other binaries mentioned above, one
sees again and again how Greenaway positions himself in the
flux, showing how these kinds of structural components are
constructs of human meaning. In his work _Arts de
faire_ (_The Practice of Everyday Life_), Michel de Certeau
argues for a reconsideration of place and space. For him,
place is where 'the elements taken into consideration are
*beside* one another, each situated in its own 'proper' and
distinct location . . . It implies an indication of
stability.' Contrast this then to space, where 'one takes
into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and
time variables. This space is composed of intersections of
mobile elements.' Simply put, 'space is a practiced place'.
[3] And as de Certeau argues throughout his work,
the agent of practice is the embodied self. He suggests that
a physical place, say the Place de la Concorde, only becomes
a space upon the consideration of human elements such as
time, speed, direction; that is, at the moment its rigid
imaginary boundaries are violated by self-determined agents.
In doing so, he draws upon Merleau-Ponty's distinction
between 'geometrical' space and 'anthropological' space,
here meaning the difference between a Cartesian, objective
space that can exist only as a ideal mental abstraction and
a space that is invested with incarnate consciousness
existing in the world, a space where people exist. This
distinction reflects Merleau-Ponty's central concern in _The
Phenomenology of Perception_: that Descartes's split between
the body and the mind cannot account for the way in which we
actually live, the way in which our mind is woven into our
body, which are in turn woven into the world. Merleau-Ponty
reworks Descartes, arriving at his incarnate Cogito, in
which mind, body, and world cannot be separated. As Ostwald
and Willoquet-Maricondi suggest in differing fashion,
Greenaway's works suggest a heightened awareness of the role
of incarnate consciousness in realizing
spatiality. Michael Ostwald's 'Rising
from the Ruins: Interpreting the Missing Formal Device
within _The Belly of an Architect_' discusses an organizing
structure originally conceived but not realized in
Greenaway's 1987 film: a series of eight time-lapse images.
In _The Belly of an Architect_, Stourley Kracklite, an
architect of limited success, attempts to mount an
exhibition of another architect of limited success, the
Modernist forerunner Etienne-Louis Boullee. Fittingly,
architecture, either in blueprint or through its realization
wood and stone, becomes a visual motif in the film.
Kracklite's younger wife begins an affair, Kracklite's
exhibit is taken from him, and he begins to suspect a cancer
growing in his stomach. As his fortunes fail, the
interactions between body and building take on a central
position: people applaud buildings, build models of them,
walk through them, plummet from their windows, and interact
with them in innumerable other ways. But unlike most other
Greenaway films, _The Belly of an Architect_ lacks a central
organizing conceit; it is this conceit Ostwald attempts to
reconstruct. Greenaway's original script and notes recorded
his intent that: 'Eight of Rome's celebrated architectural
sites chronologically structure _The Belly of an
Architect_'. [4] These eight sites not only connect
the scenes within the narrative but they also 'connect
Boullee to Kracklite, for the first seven of them were
Boullee's major inspiration' -- the eight sites 'represent
an architectural heritage of two and a half thousand years
to put Kracklite's nine-month predicament into perspective',
and emphasize, 'the ephemerality of one
foreign individual striving for significance in an eternal
city that has absorbed so many foreigners . . . While in the
finished film it is still eminently clear that major
relationships are between architecture and body, the nature
of these relationships is less obvious [without the
organizing structure]' (144). Ostwald argues that with
these images, 'Greenaway was not merely supporting the
return of the body to its historic position as the hegemonic
form generator in architecture. Reinstating the missing
formal device makes it apparent that Greenaway was
commenting not only on architecture but also on the way in
which the postmodern city must be read in both space and
time' (138). Underscoring the echoes of de Certeau, he later
writes, 'the postmodern city, a city not of places and
spaces but of vectors, speeds, and times, is the city that
Kracklite confronts head-on' (139). As the film highlights
the human body's ability to awaken the static potentials of
architecture by moving in and through them, so does the film
illustrate the transition from the modernism of Boullee and
Kracklite to the constantly volatile postmodern city, a
place in which neither architect has a natural place,
witnessed by Kracklite's suicide at the end of the film. But
rather than valorizing one vision -- be it static
architecture, arid modernism, the active body, or the fluid
postmodern -- Greenaway instead asks us to revel in the flux
between these poles, showing the ways in which the film
itself is nothing but a system reflective of its own
construction. Likewise, Paula
Willoquet-Maricondi's '_Prospero's Books_, Postmodernism,
and the Reenchantment of the World' explores body and
language as transitional media. As she suggests, _Prospero's
Books_ is 'a postmodernist 'visual essay' that critically
investigates a set of practices that became fundamental to
the establishment of modernity in the seventeen century:
these are, the hegemonic role of vision, the rise of
transcendental reason, and the concomitant Cartesian
subject's colonization and mastery of the world' (178).
Greenaway's film adapts _The Tempest_ for the screen, but in
doing so, completely owns the resulting original text in a
way that 'practices' Shakespeare: Greenaway engages the
static play as a system through which he traces human
vectors. One of the master-puzzlemaker's most complex works,
_Prospero's Books_ presents the aging scholar-sorcerer in
the act of writing _The Tempest_; in writing, Prospero
*thinks* the events of the play into existence, literally
writing his way out of exile. Willoquet-Maricondi shows her
indebtedness to phenomenology, citing Merleau-Ponty in
demonstrating how, as Prospero strives toward this pure
expression of will, he 'negates the visible --
the organic, dynamic, and unpredictable reality of the
island and its inhabitants -- only to construct the visible
according to a 'model-in-thought'. As Merleau-Ponty reminds
us, and _Prospero's Books_ illustrates, this attempt
ultimately fails' (183). The essay argues that
Prospero's ability to abstract and control through language,
to impose order upon the world through the word, insures the
very resistance to such an act. Caliban, the body to
Prospero's mind, survives to the end. As Prospero destroys
his books and thus dismantles the island that he has built
with them, Caliban emerges from the sea to retrieve two of
the books, the collected plays of Shakespeare and the text
of _The Tempest_, which Prospero has just completed.
Throughout the film we have seen the ways in which
incarnated cogitos enact the texts of the books themselves,
and indeed Prospero writes _The Tempest_ into existence only
so that he can physically enter that world to exact revenge
and emerge from exile. He enters, physically, the realm that
his mind has created, in a way echoing Berkeley and
paralleling Merleau-Ponty's idea that body and mind are not
truly separate. The essay concludes that 'Greenaway further
weakens the totalizing potential of
ocular-vision-become-worldview [of Descartes, et
al.] by drawing attention to the primordial role of the
body in experiencing and tacitly knowing the world' (199).
Or as Greenaway states of the body in one of the concluding
interviews: 'It's the center of our existence. Without it,
we can make no perspectives' (307). Furthermore, in his
'Body and Text' essay, he argues: 'I believe the body must
be up there earnestly and vigorously rooting for its
supremacy, text or not text' (292). These essays point to two
of the ways in which Greenaway's works fluidly move between
binary poles, the ways in which his works simultaneously
construct and deconstruct artificial organizing structures
as a way of pointing out how meaning itself is constructed.
Similar gestures are made throughout the volume. Mary
Alemany-Galway's essay, 'Postmodernism and the French New
Novel: The Influence of _Last Year at Marienbad_ on _The
Draughtsman's Contract_', discusses the connection between
Greenaway's breakthrough film from 1982 and Alain Resnais's
film from 1961. Alemany-Galway argues for considering
_Marienbad_ to be a transitional point between modernist art
cinema and postmodern/poststructuralist cinema; likewise,
she links this film to the various formal games played by
the French New Novelists, which she in turn sees as a
transitional moment between modernism and postmodernism. By
arguing that Greenaway's film 'brings the narrative
strategies of the New Novel to the screen but keeps a
certain fullness of the real that engages the audience's
emotions' (116), the author effectively argues that
Greenaway once again straddles a binary opposition, in this
case between finite representation and infinite reality, or
between the illusion of narrative control and the chaos of
existence. _The Draughtsman's
Contract_, set in 1694, displays the rigid structuralist
elements found in novels like Queneau's _Exercises in Style_
or Perec's _A Void_, [5] while at the same time
pointing out, as these novels do, that the meaning we make
in the world are primarily reflections of our own minds. The
protagonist of the film, Mr Neville, is contracted by the
wife of Mr Herbert, a nobleman, to draw a series of images
from her husband's estate. In exchange for his services, the
noblewoman offers her sexual favors. The draughtsman
concocts a series of draconian rules governing the behavior
of the people of the estate, an attempt to limit and control
the conditions under which he sets pencil to paper. His
rules, and the drawing he hopes to create, thus become an
attempt to create the perfect, objective representation of
the various aspects of the estate. However, as Mr Neville
soon discovers, people cannot be controlled; they happily
violate his rules and leave evidence of their passing in
each of his drawings. Moreover, the draughtsman is soon
caught up in the affairs and personal politics of the
estate, realizing only too late that his drawings are in
fact evidence of the nobleman's murder and an implication of
his complicity. Moreover, just as the draughtsman attempts
and fails to construct objective representations through
artificial imposition of order, and likewise fails to remain
aloof of the estate's political machinations, the film
reveals its own artificial constructions, failing to reveal
the answer to the central mystery of Mr Herbert's death.
As Alemany-Galway points
out, nowhere are the limitations of objectivity more
apparent in both films than in their mise-en-abyme elements.
In _Last Year at Marienbad_ the main characters stop to
discuss a statue of a couple with a dog, and all the
possible meanings that can be derived from it, concluding
that no answer carries more value than any other. This
moment of reflexivity suggests that any meaning that can be
derived from the film must be multiplicitous and
non-hierarchical. Likewise, in _The Draughtsman's Contract_,
Mr Neville's viewfinder, a drafting tool that imposes rigid
lines upon the scene to be recorded in order to aid perfect
perspective, is constantly blocked, disrupted, and otherwise
foiled. As the author notes, the viewfinder, 'with its
emphasis on measuring and squaring off the view, is an apt
metaphor for the ways in which the bourgeoisie sees nature
as an object that can be measured, quantified, and owned'
(123). But the film itself draws attention to this
limitation; the viewfinder also becomes a metaphor for the
film's inability or unwillingness to solve its own mysteries
-- in this case, who is responsible for the death of Mr
Herbert, the owner of the estate? Or as the author puts it,
'all filmic reality is a visual construct' (125), and any
sense made therein in is an artifact of human intervention.
Drawing upon Derrida's notion of 'free play', the essay
points out the resistance between formal control and chaos
in the two films, concluding that, 'the only way out is to
try to present all the options -- to present all that one
sees and knows, and *that one does not see or know
everything*. That is, to present the contradictions and the
limits of seeing, knowledge, and representation. Nature will
always be more than can be captured by representation'
(135). Greenaway's films present
rigid systems of order and classification, only to disrupt
them through the chaos of ruptured narrative, demonstrating
once again how he places his work at the point of juncture,
or rupture, between these two poles. Likewise, Lia M. Hotchkiss
discusses Greenaway's most controversial film in her essay
'Theater, Ritual, and Materiality in Peter Greenaway's _The
Baby of Macon_', pointing out the film's many levels of
intertextuality and reflexivity. She distinguishes between
strategies of *introjection*, in which one work envelopes
another, and strategies of *incorporation*, in which the
works become enmeshed. _The Baby of Macon_ exhibits both
behaviors, as a way of revealing greater and greater levels
of artificiality and construction within the film itself.
The film centers around a theater performance, set in Italy
in 1659 for the court of the de Medicis, dramatising events
which occurred in the French village of Macon 200 years
earlier. The play, a lurid story of rape, revenge, murder,
religious fervor, and heresy, is introjected into the story
of the de Medici court, and on that level, the film becomes
what Hotchkiss calls a 'Chinese box', one layer of narrative
enveloping the next in ever decreasing circles. However,
introjection quickly gives way to incorporation, as the
members of the court, Cosimo de Medici III most notably,
become drawn into the events of the performance, and the
line between performance and reality blur. The actress
portraying a character who is to be repeatedly raped off-set
as punishment for her transgressions is *in fact* raped by
her fellow performers, despite her cries that the audience
cannot see them and they need not continue performing, and
there is reason to suspect later in the film that several of
the on-stage murders include the actual deaths of the
actors. Given these, and other similarly graphic events, the
film ran afoul of censors and has not received commercial
distribution in many countries; it is difficult to obtain
even in video formats, and, in this way alone, the essay is
invaluable for the information it provides on this film. But
more significantly, Hotchkiss illustrates how the film is a
crucial piece in the larger puzzle of Greenaway's works. At
the conclusion of the film, the audience in the de Medici
court is revealed to be yet another performance for an even
larger, previously unseen audience, who bow to yet another,
and another, apparently ad infinitum, with the clear
implication that the film's audience is yet another level of
spectatorship and voyeurism. As demonstrated in the essays
previously discussed, the film thus frustrates easy
delineations between theater and film, performer and
spectator, illusion and reality. Greenaway's postmodern use
of intertextuality blends the two types outlined by
Hotchkiss, moving freely between introjection and
incorporation, and, on all levels, the film constructs and
thwarts meaning. In this, as in all of Greenaway's work, a
war is being waged upon totality. Part of the pleasure of
his films comes from admiring the clockwork-like precision
with which these formal devices are constructed. An equal
part comes in the pleasure of watching them
self-destruct. Regardless of the level of
interest in Greenaway and his work, scholars of
poststructuralism or postmodernism will find scores of
enticing ideas throughout this anthology. Knowledge of his
films is useful but not necessary for understanding the
larger issues. Given the detailed references to previous
criticism, a bibliography of secondary literature on
Greenaway would have been helpful, though not necessary, and
this minor complaint is offset by the inclusion of a
comprehensive list of Greenaway's works across his various
media. The volume deftly illustrates how poststructuralism
and postmodernism can be applied to one *auteur* without
sinking into reduction or simplification, and expands not
only our understanding Greenaway, but also how these
theories behave when practiced. University of
Washington Seattle, Washington,
USA Notes 1. Steven Shaviro, _Doom
Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism_. (New
York: Serpent's Tail, 1997), p. i. 2. Jean-Francois Lyotard,
'Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?', trans.
Regis Durand, in _The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge_ (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota
Press, 1988), pp. 81-82. 3. All quotations Michel
de Certeau, _The Practice of Everyday Life_ (Berkeley,
California: University of California Press, 1984), p.
118. 4. Peter Greenaway, _The
Belly of an Architect_ (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p.
vii. 5. See Raymond Queneau,
_Exercises in Style_, trans. Barbara Wright (New York: New
Directions Publishing, 1981); and George Perec, _A Void_,
trans. Gilbert Adair (New York: Harpers Collins, 1995).
Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2004. Trevor G. Elkington,
'Between Order and Chaos: On _Peter Greenaway's
Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema_', _Film-Philosophy_,
vol. 8 no. 2, January 2004
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n2elkington>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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