• It’s a major leap forward for Greenaway and a clear precursor to the cook, the thief, hjs wife and her lover
  • Like most of the rest of his films there’s a symbolic death ritual finale
  • Also like most of the rest of his work there is a large amount of cataloging in the film- Greenaway is a pure artist but there’s also a mathematician in there- he’s very numerical and formal in his approach
  • Rhythmic in the editing
  • Personally the cataloging thing fits my brain (hence the website and Excel charts of movie’s I watch, etc)
  • Greenaway is one of the most instantly recognizable auteurs—perverse and postmodern—there’s an abundance of twinning and detailed mise-en-scene staging
  • Bird obsession in all of his films
  • About 20 minutes in there’s a jaw-dropping shot of a row of columns that likes like something from Welles, Dreyer or Tarkovsky
  • Again, there’s clear self-referential auteurism here- in a newspaper article Greenaway basically lays out the plot of his next two films (including belly of an architect)
  • His fascination with the Zebra is clear with the juxtaposition of color
  • There’s an in-film documentary on evolution and we have photo montages of decay
  • The mise-en-scene is masterpiece worthy- gorgeous, symmetrical, and absolutely packed—a master of set piece arrangement
  • I wonder what Greenaway thought of Cronenberg’s dead ringers which came out after and also perverse doctor twins
  • The Vermeer painting is a character in the film—he’s painting the frame here and copying like he did in draughtsman
  • Nothing in the film or frame is accidental or just shows up once-it’s so formally sound and tight- it all comes back
  • The score is a bit of a jig and reminds me of Aronofsky’s requiem for a dream
  • There’s reoccurring shots of the hospital bed- beautiful work
  • The twins grow more similar and dress more and more the same as the film goes along- they don’t look anything alike to begin with
  • Masterpiece