In my previous blog entry I state how Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman are my biggest influences in film making, so I thought I would post up this essay that I wrote as part of my Level 4 coursework whilst researching 'art cinema'. It goes into greater depth about how I see the works of Greenaway and Jarman and in particular a comparison between each directors production of The Tempest.
Peter Greenaway is a hero of mine, I admire him and his work enormously, and along with Derek Jarman they are my most consistently favourite film directors. I love Greenaway's theatrical / tableaux style and use of multimedia within a feature film format, and I have always been captivated by Jarman's experimentations with the visuals of film and corruption of the narrative form. Thanks to the Film on Four strand on Channel 4 in the early eighties I got to see the films of Greenaway and Jarman, along with many other incredible films from British and European directors, such as Good and Bad at Games, Accounts, Letter to Brezhnev, My Beautiful Laundrette, Rita, Sue and Bob Too and many many others. Amongst my other favourite directors are Billy Wilder, Ken Russell, Pedro Almodovar and Francois Ozon.
Peter Greenaway is a hero of mine, I admire him and his work enormously, and along with Derek Jarman they are my most consistently favourite film directors. I love Greenaway's theatrical / tableaux style and use of multimedia within a feature film format, and I have always been captivated by Jarman's experimentations with the visuals of film and corruption of the narrative form. Thanks to the Film on Four strand on Channel 4 in the early eighties I got to see the films of Greenaway and Jarman, along with many other incredible films from British and European directors, such as Good and Bad at Games, Accounts, Letter to Brezhnev, My Beautiful Laundrette, Rita, Sue and Bob Too and many many others. Amongst my other favourite directors are Billy Wilder, Ken Russell, Pedro Almodovar and Francois Ozon.
Derek Jarman
Peter Greenaway
Peter Greenaway
and Derek Jarman are both very well respected British directors whose
work is widely regarded as art cinema due to the style and editing that
each brings to their films, including non-linear narratives, flashbacks,
voiceovers, language used, fantasy sequences and unrealistic settings
in some scenes.
Greenaway
has a very distinctive style which uses many technological
post-production ‘signatures’ to create an absorbing, fascinating
abundance of information on screen. In addition to
striking shot composition and lighting to create beautiful shots he also
regularly multi-layers picture in picture, on screen text, on screen
diagrams, ambient sound and voiceover. Greenaway also uses
unconventional filming techniques such as long tracking shots that take
viewers between sets where action takes place. In his
film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) Greenaway uses a
tracking shot that takes the viewer from the car park at the rear of
the restaurant through the kitchens and into the dining room. The effect of this is like a traditional ‘mystery play’ where the audience follows the actors as they go from set to set. Another
signature in Greenaway’s films are sequences running through the films;
number sequences and the names of stars and consolations in Drowning by
Numbers (1988), the writing or copying of books in The Pillow Book
(1996) and Prospero’s Books (1991) and the stages of decay shown in time
lapse in A Zed and Two Noughts (1986).
Although
generally highly regarded as one of Britain’s finest film makers,
Greenaway’s use of formal techniques has always received mixed reception
from critics. For some, the formalist aspects of
Greenaway’s films work to great effect, as this review of Greenaway’s
film The Pillow Book (1996) from the Time Out Film Guide website shows:
“This is as defiantly esoteric as any of Greenaway's films, and as visually dense as Prospero's Books,
with frames within frames, computer graphics, subtitles, projections
and superimpositions all vying for the eye in a sumptuous, seamless
collage of gold, red and black. The result is ravishingly gorgeous…”,
whereas Andrew Pulver of the Guardian, whilst reflecting on the film The
Baby of Macon (1993) in his online review for The Guardian website,
referred to Greenaway as a “joyless, cold-hearted stylist”. I
personally love the work and style of Greenaway’s films and projects,
relishing in the feast of beautifully crafted imagery, information and
suggestion that each frame of each scene provides.
Greenaway manages to create films that can be watched many times over and still offer something new to view.
Drowning by Numbers
A Zed and Two Noughts
Another aspect of Greenaway’s works is his consideration of the ideal location and format for the film to be screened in. Greenaway has long believed that “cinema is dead!” and that film as an art form will soon be relegated from the big screen. This is not a negative attitude. I
was lucky enough to attend Greenaway’s ‘The Language of Display’ talk
at the V&A Museum, London in April 2011, upon hearing his thoughts
and ideas, I strongly agree with his viewpoints, namely that future film
productions will concentrate more on integrating with computer games,
and with online streaming to home TV and mobile devices, and that with
cinema technological developments such as surround sound, big screen TV
and more recently 3D having become available and affordable in our
homes, big, multiplex cinemas will close and cinema is going to revert
back to independent picture houses showing what will become
‘traditional’ films to students and film fans in a swing that will
(hopefully) see the formation of groups of film enthusiasts meeting,
viewing and discussing films in picture houses reminiscent of the Kino
International in Berlin or the Cinematheque Francais in Paris. Straightforward,
commercial films will still be produced but (as is happening now) be
released simultaneously on DVD, Blu-Ray, game console format and
available for online streaming on the same day as the cinema release. Reasons for this decision have included consumer economics and the introduction of the internet and file sharing.
Greenaway
has another, what I think is far more exciting, reason for changing the
way films are produced, which indulges his passion for formal
techniques and ultimately deny them receiving a conventional cinema
release. Greenaway believes that the experience of what is
able to be captured and manipulated on film shouldn’t be limited to the
rectangular box which is the frame of the screen. By
using techniques in filming and editing Greenaway has begun to produce
films with their significant screening location in mind, as with his
2006 Rijksmuseum project which involved Nightwatching and Rembrandt
J’accuse.
The
project involved several simultaneous films / projections depicting
characters and events that furnish a museum exhibition and provide an
interactive, walk through cinematic experience. Again, like the mystery plays.
I
feel that this mode of exhibition would have been a wonderful way to
have presented the film Prospero’s Books and would highlight the form in
Greenaway’s work. In similar style to the Rijksmuseum I
can envisage an enchanting event had Prospero’s Books been screened as
several projections in say the Maritime Museum in Greenwich or in the
British Library at Kings Cross. This way of presenting
films is a very real and happening phenomenon: rock concerts and music
spectaculars in locations such as Hyde Park, Sherwood Forest or
Edinburgh Castle are extremely popular, and as with most big concerts
rely heavily on film sequences to huge effect as part of the staging
(with fans downloading the film clips after the concert). As
well as concerts, theatre has gone ‘on location’ such as the acclaimed
2011 production of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and the staging of
The Railway Children at York Railway Museum, and subsequently at
Waterloo Railway Station to accommodate the inclusion of a real steam
train into the production and providing a spectacular, interactive
experience for the audience, in similar vein to the way Greenaway thinks
films could be displayed. With technological advancements
in equipment required for showing films, notably that films are now
digitally stored and can be screened from portable devices, small ‘pop
up’ cinemas in unusual locations (for example underneath flyovers and in
the open air in Hyde Park) have become popular summer events around
London and mean that such interactive, walk through multi-screen film
events as Greenaway proposes are a very realistic idea.
Films On Fridges pop-up cinema in east London
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2011/aug/22/pop-up-cinemas-top-tips
Derek
Jarman began his career as a painter having studied at Slade School of
Art and was approached by film director Ken Russell to work on his film
The Devils (1971) as a set designer. Always fascinated by light and colour Jarman would experiment with these in his paintings and his films throughout his career. In
the early seventies Jarman began making short films such as the Art of
Mirrors (1973) and Garden of Luxor (1972) which displayed
experimentations with the way light and reflected light affects darkness
and colour on screen, and how they are seen by the viewer. Jarman used these lighting and reflecting techniques to create moods within his scenes in his films. These lighting designs, along with his direction and staging methods created visually beautiful images on screen. An
excerpt from the book Film Studies: The Essential Resource (Bennett,
Hickman and Wall, 2007) sums this up perfectly: “In films such as
Caravaggio and The Last of England, Jarman emphasised a painterly
technique which employed composition and lighting as its principle tools
in a way quite contrary to the mainstream”. Jarman also
enjoyed experimenting with the visual effects of using different
cameras, film stock and transfers, most of his early films were shot on
Super-8 and his early feature films Sebastiane (1976), Jubilee (1977)
and The Tempest (1979) shot on 16mm.
The Garden
Jubilee
Many
of Jarman’s films explore the sacrifices that people will go to; for
love: Edward II (1991), for their beliefs: Sebastiane (1976), and for
their children: The Tempest (1979), as well as exploring the cultural
and socio-economic state of Britain in the seventies and eighties, as in
the films Jubilee (1977) and The Last of England (1988).
With his
distinctive style and recognisable signatures formalist and auteur
theories are appropriate tools in studying Jarman’s work. In his book Derek Jarman (2005) Rowland Wymer writes “He was unashamedly auteurist in his conception of cinema. All
his films carried the credit ‘A Derek Jarman Film’ or ‘Derek Jarman’s
Film’ and he eventually came to believe that a highly personal form of
cinematic expression was the only kind which mattered”.
The formal
signatures that I have highlighted in the brief summaries of Peter
Greenaway and Derek Jarman above are evident in their individual film
adaptations of the classic text The Tempest by William Shakespeare. In
Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books he uses his distinctive techniques of
multi-layering picture in picture, with on screen text and graphics as
in the scenes where Prospero is writing in his books, as depicted below,
a still from Prospero’s Books (Peter Greenaway), as well as other
signatures such as projections, shot composition and long tracking
shots.
Prospero’s Books (Peter Greenaway 1991)
In his film The
Tempest (1979) Derek Jarman uses candlelight, firelight, reflected
light, colour filters and shadows to dress the set (the light forming an
important part of the set design) and to create the mood for each
scene. In the scene where the virginal yet spirited
Miranda whom is stranded on an island with her banished father Ferdinand
the Right Duke of Milan is wondering through the house at night, the
warm glow of the candlelight illuminates her against the bleak
background of the old ruined house / castle.
The Tempest (Derek Jarman 1979)
There have been a
great many adaptations of Shakespeare plays, both in theatre and
cinema, which usually result in productions that are either; period set
pieces that are apparently historically accurate and what purists would
describe as ‘done properly’ such as Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944),
faithful productions of the text that are updated in setting such as
Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996) and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet
(1996) or contemporary adaptations of the plays where the plot is
retained but the language, settings and characters are updated and
altered such as West Side Story (film adaptation directed by Jerome
Robbins and Robert Wise, 1961) which is based on Romeo and Juliet, Kiss
Me Kate (film adaptation directed by George Sidney, 1953) based on The
Taming of the Shrew and which uses the story-within-a-story technique
often used by Shakespeare himself, and A Thousand Acres (directed by
Jocelyn Moorhouse, 1997) based on King Lear.
In both
Greenaway and Jarman’s adaptations the directors remained faithful to
the language and respectful of the story but with some artistic license
with historical accuracy of some costumes, props and scenes, for example
in Jarman’s The Tempest Broadway star Elizabeth Welch sings the classic
jazz song Stormy Weather, which was written in 1933 by Harold Arlen and
Ted Koehler. Each director used a wealth of their
‘signature’ formal techniques in their adaptation of the text and
produced two very different looking films, each displaying the
distinctive style associated with its director.
Prospero's Books
The Tempest
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