THE EARLY FILMS OF PETER GREENAWAY VOL2 - DVD

History of the Avant-Garde*

THE EARLY FILMS OF PETER GREENAWAY 2
Vertical Features Remake | The Falls

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 The Draughtsman's Contract Greenaway had made a series of highly inventive films which established all the obsessions that run through his later work. In Vertical Features Remake, a playful parody of avant-garde theorising, academics argue about the work of Tulse Luper, Greenaway's best-known fictional character. The Falls is divided into 92 biographies of people who have all been affected by the VUE , the Violent Unknown Event, a phenomenon in some way connected with birds and flying. Michael Nyman provided the score for both films.

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

UK | 1978 1980 | colour | 224 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

'...the most delicious snarl-up of pedantry and poetry in British cinema's history. The Falls is moviedom's answer to Tristram Shandy and you fall over yourself to see it.' --Nigel Andrews, Financial Times

'The Falls is monstrously clever, undeniably inventive, certainly monumental, and terminally cute.' --J Hoberman, The Village Voice