Prospero's Books

This film is one of the very few examples of a cinema as a visual art and that is why it irritates so many people. It's very sad but one doesn't need a screen to follow 99,9 % of the movies made for the last one hundred years of the history of cinematography: you can simply broadcast them on radio. But this one belongs to 0,1 %(as well as Fellini's Otto e Mezzo, or Paradzhanov's Sayat Nova, for example) that you really have to WATCH. So try to perceive "Prospero's Books" not just as an illustrative material to some pieces of literature, but as an art exhibition in motion. Maybe that will make it easier for you, dear Hollywood junk viewer.

I'm attracted to competence, and especially when the vision is unusual and moving. But I love self-referential art, in this case a movie that includes as part (in fact the center) of its message some perspective on what the movie is all about.

This film is one of my most valued experiences, and here, I'll just write about the self-reference. For this, you have to know the context of the play itself. `The Tempest' was written at the end of Shakespeare's career. Earlier, he had composed some of the richest drama that may ever be created. In so doing, the technique -- at least in the great plays -- was to grapple with great forces and ideas and project then into stories. The theatric convention of the days was one of sparse presentation: few props, sets, costumes.

But towards the end of Shakespeare's life, the conventions changed. Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones had introduced the notion of lush, magical special effects, and even popularized productions that consisted of nothing at all but the effects themselves. Shakespeare's prior efforts were deep structures which use the sparse conventions of the theater, without undue obfuscation from those. But here he was asked to produce, even compete, using techniques whose very nature is to distract. So he wrote a play ABOUT visual effects that obfuscate and manipulate, while USING visual effects to the same end.

But there's a deeper irony. Some think Prospero was modeled after John Dee, but this is likely not so, Instead the model was Magus Thomas Harriot who actually did visit the New World and report strange happenings. (In the winter of 1585, he wintered with Algonquian priests probably on, certainly near the land I'm writing from.) Harriot was the age's greatest scientist, but we hardly know him because he never wrote any books as he was under constant examination for heresy. There's lots to his story, all which Shakespeare would have known and partly lived, and the notion of Prospero's Books would have been especially rich at the time of writing.

Cinema is a medium which is all effects, nothing but illusion, and thus is nearly impossible to use as a lens for true visions of the world. So here we have Greenaway's film in which illusion is the point of the immensely clever theatric notion of Prospero's Books. The books are both the illusions and the distorted lens, and turned here into a means to make a film purely about what it means to be a film, and to do so with specific reference to Shakespeare's structure about the similar problem in the effect-laden theater. Moreover, Shakespeare's reference is to Harriot's earlier, similar conundrum between the motions of the great world and the imperfect lens of logic that is required to capture some image of those laws in books.

It's all so well conceived. I'll let others comment on the execution, which seems masterful to me. This film will live very long, and you will be less impoverished by seeing/experiencing it.

This is Peter Greenaway's most humane and enthralling feature, a visual tour-de-force which re-interprets Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' through the books of magic with which Prospero creates his realm. Sir John Gielgud gives a moving, heartfelt farewell performance in the title role, Michael Clarke is a sinuous, demonic Caliban, and Michael Nyman's score is fittingly triumphant. One sequence - the Masque - even turns the film into an opera.

Although the visuals are overloaded to a level of decadence rarely seen on film, it is always with a purpose. One quibble; Prospero's overlaying of his own voice on the characters makes some of the dialogue difficult to follow, especially if you are unfamiliar with the source material. The film demands to be seen on a wide screen.

i miss Gielgud very much already. his voice was so rich, and this film is a smorgasbord of his voice. i find most Shakespeare a bit heavy and sluggish, so strangely perhaps, i find this movie a nice interpretation. and the books, the water, and the nudity are all wonderful. Greenaway is with imagery a bit the way Shakespeare is with words, a bit over-flush, over-ripe; so sometimes he's good and sometimes it just seems like excess. the blue guy was interesting to watch as well. maybe not best to be viewed in one sitting, but more than just a mere film, like being drunk in a flower garden in spring. or perhaps i'm just being poofy.

I love Shakespeare, to read and to see it performed. I also loved Prospero's Books. Granted, I've only watched it twice as yet, and will undoubtedly indulge in a course of dyed-in-the-wool over-intellectualization and cerebral gymnastics during some future viewing, but these first two viewings (with a lovely bottle of Beringer Brothers White Zinfandel) were utterly given over to happily losing all perspective and immersing myself into the fantastical visual orgy spread before me. But then, I also like Heironymus Bosch and Salvador Dali.

Films are to entertain. Film makers cannot be required to entertain each and every member of the viewing public with each film. That said, there is no rule specifying just how a film must entertain us, nor is there a rule limiting any of us to being entertained in a specific form. We can be entertained by purest brain candy, the most convoluted mystery, brilliant wit, even by being frightened witless or moved to tears. In this case, I took my entertainment from the unadulterated, hedonistic beauty - both of sight and sound - offered up in a blaze of brave disregard for bourgeois ideals, and I'm not the least apologetic.

Yes, it did enrich my life, just by the sheer beauty and excess of it.