By Howard A. Rodman.
Director Peter Greenaway mixes Shakespear with HDTV to create 'Propsero's Books'. "If the Cook, the Thief' was about you are what you eat", he says, "then this is about you are what you eat".
Tokyo, the Shibuya District. On a sunny midday in February, the streets are dense with purposeful pedestrians. But if the image is Japanese, the text is English: Signage-massive outsize, in paint, in neon, in pulsating arrays of electric-bulb dot matrix shouts out Coke, Amtrak, Discotheque, Newport Beach Fashion's Island. Just across the avenue at the edge of Yoyogi Park, in what can only be described as a human dot matrix, 49 young Asian men in pompadour hairstyles, arrayed in a 7-by-7 grid, execute rockabilly dance moves in strict unison to the beat of American rock-and-roll songs-perhaps older than the dancers them selves played loud on an enommous radio.
Just behind the dancers, cutting into the Tokyo skyline, is the imposing headquarters of NHK, the Japanese broadcasting giant. And inside the NHK corporate fortress, in the corridors of the west wing, an equally delirious clash of cultures is being played out. Here, against a backdrop of (literally) millions of dollars' worth of high-definition video equipment, Peter Greenaway, the English writer-director of such art-house classics as The Draughtsman's Contract and The Cook, the Thief, Hls Wife and Her Lover, is at work on a film. Looking donnish indeed in casually draped woolen scarf, Greenaway is engaged in conversarion (via an interpreter) with a crew of young Japanese men and women in identical (and very nifty) bright red "Team Hi-Vision" warm-up jackets. Greenaway is here to orchestrate the postproduction of Prospero's Books, his latest and most ambitious work, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Tempest at once fanciful and exact. Shot on film in Holland with a multinational cast headed by Sir John Gielgud, Prosperos Books is being edited on videotape here in Japan in one of the world's most advanced high-tech postproduction suites and later will be transferred back to celluloid for release.
The visual image on the high-dehnition monitors is thrillingly dense: Actors vie for screen space with superimposed calligraphy, Muybridge-like animatics and all manner of body parts. Greenaway's trademark long lateral tracking shots-now a seminaked women skipping rope, now a tableau from Hals or Vermeer, now a very young boy urinating with gleeful (and artificially enhanced?) abandon into a swimming pool where Sir John is bathing-compete for attention with cadenced drops of water, rhythmically pulsing balls of fire and, above all, the lovingly rendered scrape of pen against parchment.
Greenaway has a formal, rigorous, near-algerbraic approach to film naratative-there's a way in which the scripts themselves are almost constructed on a grid," he says-that is almost always belied by a luxe, painterly richness. But here he pulls out all the stops. Layer upon layer upon gorgeous layer of text and image float across rhe screen, like a 1940s MGM montage gone mad, a Slavko Vorkapich fever dream.
It's a process fraught with possibilities as the film's producer Kees Kasander says, "perhaps too many possibilities." On this electronic island of which, one supposes, Greenaway is the Prospero-anything can happen. Adding another metaphor, another layer of meaning, becomes just a matter of tweaking a slider on the Sony HDS7.
While the Team Hi-Vision technicians are taking their lunch break, Greenaway-who speaks rapidly, articulately, in complete, cadenced sentences and wellstructured paragraphs, his speech peppered with words like shan't and albeit-puts forth a version of his history as a filmmaker and how he came to make <i>Prospero's Books</i>.
"Shall I just talk about the barest bones?" he asks. "Well, I suppose I've made about 30 films. The earlier ones were made under very noncommercial circumsramces, of which I suppose The Falls is the ultimate one-the encyclopedia that would bring everything together.
"That initial, sort of very private approach to filmmaking," Greenaway says, "which obviously had extremely restricted audiences, was much more appreciated, I suppose, by the painterly fraternity semioticians, theoreticians of the cinema perhaps more than by the general public. But that's a period I still look back fondly upon and often regret in some cases I can't get back to. "Cause it's extremely open-ended, requires comparatively little collaboration-and I'm not, on the whole, a very good collaborator."
He pauses as if to indicate a new paragraph. "Now, all the tlme that I was making these films, though, I was also engaged in the making of television work. I sincerely believed that if cinema could command a full vocabulary which was made up of 26 letters of the alphahet, there was a way in which television could only handle vowels. I since have come to believe that that's not true and that television has its own alphabet. I made about six or seven programs in television which I tried very hard to turn into what I would call <i>television</i> television. Deliberately against the language of film. And a program called <i>TV Dante</i>, I suppose, was finally the opportunity for me to get my hands on comparatively sophisticated if ultimately low-tech, technology.
"There are, obviously, tremendous frustrations about working for television, only one of which-not necessarily the most important-is the question of scale. My frustrations about making very complex pictures on television for <i>Dante</i> and not being able to see them in high quality on a big screen, where there's a mass of information that comes rushing at you, hundreds of events, bang, bang, bang, bang...." He smiles. "All that explosion on the tiny screen was very frustrating".
"So having madeThe Cook, the Thief, which was CinemaScope, wide-screen, taking it to the other extreme if you like big screens, lush cinematography, rich use of all the vocabulary of cinema and also playing, I would like to think, at the cusp of what television was all about, television language, I dreamt somehow of bringing these two together.
"And this, of course, is why we're here in Japan."
Well, as it turns out, not quite Japan.
Though the NHK facility is square in the heart of Tokyo, the edit suite and the electronic Paint hox suite down the hall, connected by an imposing snake of co-ax cables-is not officially part of the country at all. By way of explanation, Greenaway points to the sign in Japanese on the door.
"Well, I think it's something, like, all strangers are forbidden in this room. And that is because we're under a certain interdict which suggests that our program is erotic; if not pornogtaphic. You're probably aware of the Japanese sensitivity about pornography, yes? There is a law which says, Thou shalt not show pubic haiir. Which I take, by the way, to be a pseudonymous way of saying, Thou shan't show genitalia on the screen.
"Shakespeare wasn't particularly known to be highly erotic-or if he was, by inference rather than by direct fact. We, however, have made a treatment of a Shakespeare work whereby there are a considerable number of naked people."
Greenaway continues, moving his hands in small, precise gestures as if wielding a pointer or baton. "The whole of this studio is bonded; that is to say, we are not officially in Japan per se, but rather, in what is considered for these purposes an adjunct of the customs shed at Narita airport. Officially, we are not here because we are pornographic. It is a rather curious situation.
"This means that everybody who works in this room or that is supposed to walk around with a little badge allowing official entry into a bonded area. You see I'm not wearing one," he says. "But that's only because I'm carrying it in my pocket."
Kasander-a handsome, unflappable Dutchman who used to produce the Rotterdam Film Festival-is as excited by the editing process as by the work: "Celluloid is so limited and so conventional nowadays, so badly organized-the large crews, the way it's shot, the cameras, so many problems, so stupid, so back-to-the-Middle Ages that it's time to leave all that behind and do something different."
Greenaway concurs. "The very reasons I became interested in the cinema or television were because of the extraordinary opportunities to play with images, to play with words, to play with their interactions. I started my career as a painter And I still believe painting is, for me, the supreme visual means of communication. Its freedoms, its attitudes, its history, its potential. And if you look at 20th-century painting, it's been 10,000 times more radical than the cinema has." He pauses. "Cinema," he says, is a grossly conservative medium."
He sweeps his arm as if to invoke Kasanders nightmare vision-the world of celluloid and its heavy-metal apparartus. "The cinema is conservative because vast sums of money are necessary to make it. And its conservative because it is a very large collaboration. If you look at the 20th century inventions in painting, from cubism onward, there has been absolutely nothing comparable in cinema. So the cinema, you see, seems to be an opportunity to expand on those things which my rather small painterly talent would never allow me to.
"I desperately think," he says politely, "that cinema needs a savage jab in the arm."
That jab in the arm is being administered, in this case, by a not-so-savage array of Hi-Vision equipment (Hi-Vision being NHK's proprietary name for high definition television, which offers a film-style aspect ratio and several times the resolution of standard TV).
How it works: In the Paintbox room, Eve Ramboz enters images into the computer via a high-definition video camera. The images plundered from a variety of books featuring the work of da Vinci and Muyhridge, among others-are then treated by Ramboz: colorized, resized, rotated, enhanced. As Ramboz works the images, Greenaway looks on and offers suggestions: "A deeper red, a burgundy No, it's the same color as the letter. Maybe something blue, but not the ED blue. Can you make the dots higger? There's still some black in there. Good!"
The Paintbox images are then ported down the hall to the edit suite, where layer after layer of superimposition is tested, tailored, adjusted, combined. At every turn, Greenaway seems preternaturally certain about what he wants to see-as if the film already existed inside his head, the task now being but to coax out those images from the bank of switches and devices. He speaks to his equipe: "I want to have 15 frames fade in, hold it for five seconds, 15 frames fade out. I want the fade-in to begin the very moment that the face disappears."
The engineers reroll tape, stare at the frenetically rewinding image on the monitors, pull sliders, twirl knobs. Now Greenaway views the results of his instructions. "It's too long. Can we make it four seconds?" he asks editor Marina Bodhijl. He views the new cut. "Now let us try three seconds." They make the edit, play back the tape. "Good," says Greenaway, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. "Now. Can we reconstruct 'The Anatomy of Birth' according to this new ratio? Would it be at all possible?
Prospero's Books is, in essence, a set of perpetual translations.
The first is Greenaway's "interpretation" of The Tempest, in which one line of Prospero's-"knowing I loved my books, he [Gonzalo] furnished me from mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom"-is made to serve as the metaphor for the whole enterprise. Greenaway then assumes that this library contained some 24 books and proceeds, one by one, to invent them. The 24 hooks like the 12 drawings in The Draughtsman's Contract, the sequential digits in Drowning by Numbers or the color scheme in The Cook, the Thief-provide Greenaway with his grid, his armature.
"I'm often thought of, by those critics who hate what I do, as being incredibly anal-retentive," says Grecnaway. "But I would refute that. I think that I can quite honestly say that I'm open to a serendipity.
"Besides," he adds, "this is the fist time I've actually used, as it were, somebody else's screenplay".
The second translation is the technological one, that of film-to-tape to-film: Shot on 35mm film (by the venerable Sacha Vierny, who contributed his talents to such modern classics as Belle de Jour and Last Year at Marienbad, as well as several previous Greenaways), Prosperos Books was then transferred to 1125-line high-definition wide-screen video Superimpositions, special effects and opticals were added in the video domain and then transferred back to film to be married with the original celluloid. (In conventional film-to-tape editing, the tape version is too low-fidelity to be transferred back to film-the end product of those devices is, rather, a computer-generated Edit Decision List, whose numbers can be used to conform the celluloid to the videotape edit.)
And third, underlying all, is the translation whereby Prospero becomes Shakespeare and Gielgud becomes Prospero with Creenaway perhaps hovering above all.
Greenaway explains: the Tempest [has been] a fantasticaly popular play for the past 10 years or so." He speaks briefiy of Paul Mazursky's Tempest, of Derek Jarman's Tempest and of Forbidden Planet, that wonderful '50s science-fiction chestnut in which Walter Pigeon plays Dr Morbius, the Prospero of Altair-lV, with Robby the Robot as his Ariel.
"For me," Greenaway continues' "The Tempest is extremely self-referential, and I always tend to feel the most sympathy for those works of art which do have that sort of self-knowledge, that say, basically, 'I am an artifice.' I very much like the idea that when somebody sits in the cinema and watches a film of mine, it's not a slice of life, it's not a window on the world. It's a constant concern of mine to bring the audience back to this realization.
"The Tempest is somehow an ideal medium to play this game. To start, there's a way in which Prospero himself is a portrait of Shakespeare. Although first person isn't used all the time he's not saying, 'I,I,I'- there are inferences, certainly toward the end of the play and cerrainly in the epilogue, which say, 'I am an artificer, I have spent most of my life making tricks for you; if you like them well and good but if you don't no matter, I'm now taking my leave.' Taking leave of you, the theater, the world of illusion. And supposedly it is Shakespeare's last full play.
"Obviously, what clinched it was the opportunity we were offered to have the last grand classic English Shakespearian actor, Sir John Gielgud, to play what presumably is the last perfomance of his life-he's 86. So we can have an identity cross-referencing Shakespeare, Prospero and Gielgud. And I've tried very hard to do that, so that Gielgud is Shakespeare, so much so that, as the film progresses, we actually see Gielgud/Prospero as Shakespeare writing The Tempest. Self-referential, and it brings us back to text again. Because we see the text written.
"Well, a cynic, of course, might say, This is all highly fashionable, it's very postmodemist, part of that phenomenon. And, of course, I would not deny it. Gielgud is not Action Man, but he does have the most magnificent voice and an extraordinary ability to use it. And since there is a way that Prospero is both Gielgud and Shakespeare, we have got Prospero himself to invent the dialogue for all the other characters. And as you see Gielgud/Shakespeare/Prospero writing the dialogue, so you see Prospero. as played by Gielgud, trying the dialogue out. Ultimately, Gielgud's voice is everybody. But, since this is a Jacobean play, there is a feeling that this originally might have been a classic revenge drama-something like [17th,century playwright John] Ford's 'Tis a Pity She's a Whore, on which I based, in fact, The Cook, the Thief But unlike that film, this is a broken-backed revenge tragedy-because it doesn't end in revenge. It goes to a certain point, then suddenly doglegs in a different direction.
"And I've used that crucial point which suggests that forgiveness brings alive that which revenge can only keep dead. So all the characters, who havee been previously voiced by Gielgud, at that moment of forgivenes suddenly speak for themselves."
But if Prospero (and perhaps Gielgud) has renounced his artifice, its not at all clear that Greenaway is about to renounce his. Though the cross-cultural, cross-technological project was not without its difficulties, a basic sense of goodwill exists among these comrades in electronic arms.
Greenaway and Kasander love jousting against celluloid and found NHK a stunning benefactor (the postproduction time and services furnished to Prosperos Books would be worth, on the open market, perhaps $4 million). Says Kasander, "It works for us, it works for NHK. 'Cause we do the research for them. We did perhaps 80 percent research and 20 percent the real work. In exchange, we can do everything for free." Kasander says that he and Creenaway pushed the limits of what Hi-Vision could acomplish. "We asked so many things from them, we sent back the first [tape-to-film] transfers, we refused almost everything because it was not good enough. But now it's good. It's one step fotward."
The transfers were done at Imagica, the leading Japanese film lab. Although the Prospero material presented formidable obstacles due, in part, to Greenaway and Viemy's insistence on high-contrast chiaroscuro film-style shots, with no concession to the lowered contrast range of video-lmagica managed, by assiduous tweaking, to produce video and video-to-tape images without grain and with full, rich blacks.
NHK seems content, as well, to let Greenaway and, on a slightly earlier project, Wim Wenders-have their days on the Hi-Vision playing fields. Wenders, says Hi-Vision technichal director Hideichi Tamegaya, became fascinated by the grain artifacts on the screen when HDTV is fast-forward or rewinded at high speed on digital recorders. "I tell him. This is not an actual effect, this is noise.' But he thought it was very good."Wenders ended up using the hi-def noise attifacts extensively in his film Until the End of the World for dream sequences. "We developed," says Tamegaya, "a special system aS a means of dealing with strange images."
Greenaway sighs about some of the constraints of this post production. "I'm a guest in the country, and I'm grateful for whats been offered, but I'm used to very sophisticated Western video houses, where you move very fast-not least of all because it's incredibly expensive. It took 3 and a half weeks to do 8 and a half minutes of film. And the actual degree of complexity I don't think is that astonishing. It's a combination of unfamiliarity with the approach, the inexpertise of the technicians-which is not their fault, they just haven't had the experience. I suppose the third factor which must be taken into account is that the machinery is well-nigh prototype.
Retrospectively, I wish we'd been more ambitious. But this whole exercise-like every film you make opens so many doors. Now we're looking out the window to the next ocean. And thats very exciting."
Greenaway smiles. "You know that [Jacques] Derrida quotation which says, The picture always has the last word? A great little epigram. And here I am taking this renowned text and tuning it into images. Now, I don't want this to be an English intellectual playing with the tools, as I did in TV Dante. But even if we have created something unsatisfactory I shan't cry copious tears over it, because I can see now the potential." Once more, Greenaway describes the precise sequence of dissolves and superimpositions he'd like for a particular sequence. Now, as the red jacketed engineers find the right section of tape, Greenaway-assured of perhaps 10 minutes during which he will not be called upon to make a decision retreats to the corner where, seemingly oblivious to the multilingual play of voices in the edit suite, he types out a scene for yet another film on his laptop computer.
"Theres a project," he says later, "I'd like very much to do, called Prospero's Creatures' about what happened before the beginning. Sort of a prelude to The Tempest. And I've also written a play called Miranda, about what happens afterwards on the ship on the way home. It's about what happens to innocence and how it has to be destroyed."
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Glyn Szasz zaphod@mpx.com.au