With the Deuce brothers’ death, the plot builds its ultimate symmetry. However, the arrival of snails that feed off the dead bodies causes a short circuit and stops the twins’ film as they envisaged it. To complete the evolutionary cycle and surrender to their fate – implicitly established from the beginning of the investigation – the twins end up committing suicide and filming their own decay. Alba’s birthplace, l’Escargot, will be the set. ![]() She names him the father in order to complete the symmetry.Įven though the twins finally accept her decision, they remain unsatisfied with the various putrefactions they have shot, and so ask Alba for permission to film the decomposition that will follow her imminent death. After the delivery, she realises that she has had two children, so she quickly finds a legless man, Philip Arc-en-Ciel (Wolf Kahler), with whom to start a family. Then she becomes pregnant and breaks the news of impending fatherhood to both brothers without even wondering which one of them is the real father. Following the advice of her surgeon, Van Meegaran (Gerard Thoolen), Alba decides to have her other leg amputated as well. Along the way, they both start a sexually based relationship with Alba. ![]() The evolution of species captures their attention: they learn about it from BBC documentaries and, on the empirical plane, by shooting different animals decomposing, ranked according to their order of appearance on earth or their evolutionary complexity. While grieving over their women’s sad end, the Deuce twins, Oliver (Eric Deacon) and Oswald (Brian Deacon), begin a scientific investigation of life and death. The rigour of the plot is typical of Greenaway’s artistic creations, but here it reaches an almost mathematical precision.Ī car accident in front of a zoo brings death to the wives of both its two owners and the amputation of one leg to Alba Bewick (Andrea Ferreol), the driver. In terms of form, the visual language is rich in symmetries and symbols which reinforce the evolving construction of the scenario. One of his early features, A Zed and Two Noughts (1986, aka ZOO), clearly encapsulates both these aspects, and reveals as well an unusual rhetorical structure. Firstly, the predominance of image over plot, which comes from his love for painting and his studies of the fine arts and secondly, the consequences of his aesthetic choices, resulting in work that is very difficult to categorise within genre or even compare with the work of his contemporaries. (1) In this statement from a 1990 interview, Peter Greenaway summarises two of the most important aspects of his work. Sometimes I feel I’m a hippopotamus in a giraffe race”. “I think my cinema is better understood in terms of criticism generally applied to the pictorial traditions and the history of art. ![]() Translated by the author with Michèle Becquart and Adrian Martin.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |