THE EARLY FILMS OF PETER GREENAWAY VOL1 - DVD

History of the Avant-Garde*

THE EARLY FILMS OF PETER GREENAWAY 1
A Walk Through H | H is for House | Windows | Intervals | Dear Phone | Water Wrackets

He has other reputations as well- as an academic, as a maker of curious artefacts, as a cataloguer of the bizarre and as a librarian of the absurd.

Greenaway might as well have been describing himself in this thumbnail sketch of Canton Remodell, a character in an unmade project. Before his international arthouse hit The Draughtsman's Contract Greenaway had made a series of highly inventive and witty short films. Their content varies widely: the potted history of 37 people who have fallen to their deaths from windows (Windows), a sequence of 92 maps to guide a dead ornithologist on his way into the afterlife (A Walk Through H ), but all the films are immensely playful and take pleasure in outlandish detail, fake erudition and corkscrew narratives. Composer Michael Nyman started his career with Peter Greenaway and contributed a thrilling score to A Walk Through H.

DVD extras include a Galley of Artworks, a Gallery of Archives, filmed introductions to all six films by Peter Greenaway plus hidden features.

UK | 1969 1978 | colour and black & white | 87 minutes | Ratio 1.33:1 | Region 2 DVD

* A series of video releases featuring the best of radical and innovative filmmaking from the first hundred years of cinema

Review

'A Walk Through H is one of the best British movies of the decade... You could call it a cross between vintage Borges 'fiction' and a Disney True Life Adventure.' --Tony Rayns, Time Out