Critique of "the Art of National Identity" by John Orr

Critique of “The Art of National Identity” by John Orr;

With an alternative view of the films of Peter Greenaway

The essay entitled “The Art of National Identity: Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman” by John Orr makes a number of excellent points regarding the opus of each of the two filmmakers. By focusing his analysis on the relation of their works to the art and concept of national identity, however, Orr misses the opportunity to discuss aspects which are more fundamental to each of their aesthetics. I find this limitation to be particularly frustrating in his analysis of Greenaway, so I will limit my response to an analysis of that director’s films and offer a method of viewing them which, I believe, accords more closely with the auteur’s actual intent and execution.

The most perceptive point Orr makes in his comparison of the two directors comes with his analysis of the ways in which “both absorb theatre into film…[and] also extend film form by other means.” In the context of film narrative, Orr describes Jarman’s “systematic use of anachronism and palimpsest” in contrast with Greenaway, “who uses them more sparingly and sticks, by and large, to the rigours of narrative continuum” . In my view, this analysis of Greenaway’s practice is wide of the mark, but I shall wait until later in this essay to make my argument.

In focusing on “the different ways in which they use time and space” , however, Orr hits upon a central opposition between the methodologies used by each director. Analyzing the ways in each uses the frame-within-the-frame, Orr finds Jarman “is largely fascinated by the temporal frame-within-a-frame of film narrative, the leap of epochs acting as a disruptive shock not only to the viewer’s sensibilities but to his/her sense of linear history.” By contrast, Greenaway, he finds, “is more obsessed by the spatial frame-within-the-frame, the viewfinder, the painting, the photograph, even the photocopy…[which becomes] an even more self-conscious and cerebral meditation.”

Fortunately for a student of contemporary British film, Greenaway has spoken and written extensively about his ideas and aims, and the frustrations he has encountered, not only in dealing with the dominance of the American model of filmmaking and film aesthetics in the marketplace, but with the limitations of the available technology. Unfortunately, after his percipient remarks about Greenaway’s spatial preoccupations, Orr veers into an ill-considered analysis of what he sees as kitsch and camp elements in Greenaway’s mise-en-scenes, which he describes as being obsessed with “collecting” objects to fill the screen; he completely misses the point behind the director’s use of such objects as metaphorical conceits. Thus an analysis which began so promisingly takes a nose-dive in the very next section, and never fully recovers from the mishap.

Greenaway’s film aesthetic is closely allied with that Wagner’s idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, which the composer envisaged as a synthesis of all art forms in one: the opera. “There’s a searching, a groping, for new words here – not just by me, but by all of us, I think, as a community – for notions of “mega-cinema,” the complete artwork, which of course has potentially been on the scene for perhaps thirty or forty years, but which still hasn’t reached any useful synthesis. Wagner’s notion as opera being a complete artwork has long been a hovering image of what might, possibly, be possible. ”

In a fundamental sense, Greenaway’s films are operatic in design and intent: an assertion the director himself has made on many occasions. In later years, Greenaway has turned increasingly to the actual staging of operas: both his own collaborations and those of other composer/librettists. These have met with varying degrees of success, as assessed by critics and by Greenaway himself. But it is opera that comes the closest to offering Greenaway the opportunity he seeks to incorporate all the elements he seeks to unite in his films in text, sound, visuals, with the further opportunity to break the third and fourth walls of proscenium and apron in live performance.

Although Greenaway has been outspokenly critical of all of twentieth century century cinema - he has even gone so far as to declare the medium dead - he does find hope for the future: “…I’m not downhearted about this, because just around the corner, after a hundred years of this prologue to cinema which we’ve had, is the possibility of at last being able to make pure cinema, with all the new technologies. Virtual reality, the IMAX screen, the whole digital revolution