Film
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‘THERE’S A MURDER HERE AND A CONSPIRACY’ Hitlist THE BEST FILM & DVD RELEASES*
✽✽ Dogtooth Demented Greek familial drama. See review, opposite. Cameo, Edinburgh and selected release from Fri 23 Apr. ✽✽ No Greater Love Beautiful documentary about life inside a Notting Hill nunnery. Best of all Richard Curtis is nowhere to be seen. See review, page 48 and profile, index. GFT, Glasgow from Mon 26–Thu 29 Apr & Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Fri 23–Thu 29 Apr. ✽✽ Dirty Oil There’s black gold in them there Canadian hills. Worrying documentary about an ongoing environmental tragedy. See review, page 47. Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Fri 16–Sun 18 Apr. ✽✽ Nightwatching See feature, left and review, page 46. Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Mon 19–Thu 22 Apr. ✽✽ City of Life and Death Powerful neo-realist drama about the appalling 1937 Nanking massacre. See review, page 48. GFT, Glasgow from Fri 16–Thu 22 Apr. ✽✽ I Am Love Exquisitely executed Italian generational drama. Selected release, out now. ✽✽ Samson and Delilah Profound Australian rites-of- passage drama. Filmhouse, Edinburgh until Thu 22 Apr. ✽✽ Cemetary Junction Likeable 1970s set comedy. General release from Wed 14 Apr. ✽✽ Psycho New digital reissue of 1960 Hitchcock horror. GFT, Glasgow from Fri 16–Thu 22 Apr. ✽✽ Kick-Ass Teen comedy meets comic book hero. General release, out now. ✽✽ Takeshis’ Weird ass 2005 Takeshi Kitano film finally gets a UK release on DVD. See interview, page 57. Out now (Artificial Eye).
Dutch cap
Artist, filmmaker and cultural provocateur Peter Greenaway tells Paul Dale how he came to make a film about the murderous mysteries behind a masterpiece
T o me, and these things are subjective, Peter Greenaway is the great genius to have emerged in the last thirty years of British cinema. Historically profound, unapologetically intellectual, elegantly plotted, wittily scripted and full of mystery – Greenaway’s films exemplify all the things that the English do best – eccentricity, political and cultural satire, jigsaw puzzles, class deference and urgent sexual congress. Having long ago ended a perceived creative purple patch which took him from 1982’s perverse manor house mystery The Draughtsman’s Contract through to his vicious 1989 satire of Thatcher’s nouveau riche The Cook, The Thief, The Wife and Her Lover, Greenaway has spent the last twenty years in exile working on film and arts projects while being critically and commercially ignored.
I believe his newest film Nightwatching, a detective- mystery-of-sorts set around the creation of Rembrandt’s most famous painting The Night Watch, is his finest film of the new century, and having been made in 2007, and only now getting a release here (despite doing healthy business in most of northern Europe, Japan and America), I would go as far as to say it is one of the best films to have come out in the last decade. From his Amsterdam home, the 68 year- old Greenaway told me how he came to make such an unusual film about Holland’s first art superstar. ‘If I ask people to name me three famous Dutch people they normally come up with Van Gogh,
44 THE LIST 15–29 Apr 2010
Rembrandt and Anne Frank – so two painters and one political dissident, all of whom were treated very badly here. So painting is high on the agenda, from Bosch and Brueghel to Van Gogh and Mondrian. So they celebrate this politically. The year 1606 is Rembrandt’s birthday, so in 2006 there was a big celebration, and the Rijksmuseum invited me to do something with The Night Watch which was painted in 1642. ‘So what happened was I had to work at night along with my collaborators, I couldn’t go to the gallery in the day because that would interfere with the visitors and I looked at that painting night after night for about ten weeks and the more you look at it the more you think – what’s that all about? And why’s that like that and why does that shadow go that way and why are there 13 pikes and what on earth are those two women doing amongst these 34 men and is it really a woman or is it a dwarf? The painting is an indictment. There’s a murder here and a conspiracy.
‘When Rembrandt was as a young man, he was this combination of Bill Gates and Mick Jagger. Everyone wanted to go down the pub with him, and he was also incredibly rich, but the mystery is that he lost it all and he died in a shack in the corner of a muddy field. How did he have so much money? How was he so popular? And how did he end up with nothing?’
Nightwatching, Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Mon 19–Thu 22 Apr. See review, page 46.