Prospero's Books

Peter Greenaway is one of the great filmmakers, with an original and personal vision. This movie is a marvelous mixture of Shakespeare, visual poetry, music, art ... a feast for the imagination.

Having said that, I must add that I watched it with my wife whose succinct comment was "pretentious". Well, yes, it is a little pretentious, and there are spots that move along too slowly, so you can't just "let it happen" as you do with most movies. This one requires you to pay attention.

It includes what must be the longest single pan to the side ever filmed. I'm not sure how long it was, but it went on forever. I guess it must have gone more than 360 degrees, circled back to the original spot, where new sets had replaced the old. I'm not sure. But it is dazzling. Actually, you can take virtually any frame from this movie and make it into a poster.

Films have been around for about a century, and there isn't much around that doesn't recycle old material. Peter Greenaway is an exception. Like him or not, he's a dyed-in-the-wool original.

John Gielgud plays ex-Duke Prospero in Peter Greenaway's version of Shakespeare's The Tempest, stuck on an island with sprite, Ariel, monster servant Caliban and his beloved daughter Miranda, who falls in love with Prospero's enemy's son Ferdinand.

By and large, you either love or hate Greenaway who, as on this occasion, devotes his time to the film's visuals, somewhat at the expense of the emotions that the tale should bring. If you accept this though it is a rare treat. Greenaway's design for every second of this unique film experience is full of dance, colour, striking architecture, cinematic tricks and wonderfully choreographed movement (and an awful lot of nudity) topped off by Michael Nyman's music. It has oft been said that Greenway's films are like watching a moving renaissance painting and this is particularly the case here. Startling production to look at, if possibly a bit hard work at times.

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.

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.

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.