For any psychopaths out there who find Greenaway’s films from the 80s to today to be a little too mainstream, rejoice that his early films are now available on DVD.
Vertical Features Remake is a Three Stooges-esque poke in the eye at art and cultural criticism, at documentary filmmaking and at the scientist/librarian in all of us that need to investigate everything from every angle. It is darkly satirical and it is also, deep down under there somewhere, very beautiful.
The bulk of the film, really, is just a collection of shots of vertical things in natural settings. Trees, telephone poles, tire treads in snow leading up toward the horizon. They are remixed over and over (to a Michael Nyman score) partly as wallpaper, but also for rather anal arguments of a psuedo-scientific/aesthetic nature. If this all sounds like mumbo-jumbo in an early Cronenberg of Pynchon-esque way, that isn’t by accident.
I find it hard to give even a thumbnail synopsis of Vertical Features Remake so here’s something I clipped from Greenaway’s website:
The subject of Vertical Features Remake is landscape, scrupulously filmed and framed in static ‘bits’ centring around verticals – nature-created and man-made. . . The warring academics were an excuse to explain the methodology, always a structuralist bane, and maybe their explanations set down filmically between the three films, with copious apocryphal diagrams, visual aids, archival exposition and subjectively-viewed manuscript text and drawings, are the highlight of the work – how are film solutions and agendas arrived at, how are they manipulated, what intellectual devices are pulled out to justify schemes and propositions?
This is all comes at you in a Dr. Who-like 16mm BBC aesthetic that I find positively adorable and reminiscent of the Yes album Fragile. I wish I could explain more, but you just have to see it.
