The Falls
This week we are showing Peter Greenaway’s The Falls (1980) on Tuesday, December 30th, at 7 PM.
Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’ll start the show at 7:10!
It’s the end of the [year] as we know it! Come celebrate with us as we press play on a long-in-the-waiting From Below choice by the Welsh master of formalist surrealism, Peter Greenaway. This is a rare occasion when we are screening something that neither Stefan or Charlie has actually seen yet—but what can we say? We’ve greatly enjoyed everything else we’ve seen by the director (perhaps you’re familiar with The Cook, The Thief, The Wife, and Her Lover?), it comes highly recommended by friends of the From Below Viv and Sean, and at a whopping three hours and twenty minutes long, it is certainly the longest film we’ve screened (yet). So why not throw caution to the wind and let ‘er rip on this cold interholiday week?
My cheap description of Greenaway’s work, if you haven’t yet become acquainted, is that he has some of the persnickety peculiarity and highly-defined visual style of a Wes Anderson, but way hornier and thornier, with some of the obsessions of a Cronenberg in terms of exploring the limits of human anatomy and capacity. But that keeps Greenaway a bit at surface level; he’s intensely formal in his approach, which bears out in The Falls, his feature-length debut. The film takes the form of a mock-documentary profiling 92 survivors of a mysterious “Violent Unknown Event” who all have a bizarre set of symptoms: ornithiphilia, sudden new language acquisition, and immortality, among others. I love watching Greenaway’s films for their shot construction, as each frame is chock full of overabundant imagery and cryptic messaging, and powerful editing, which weaves an intoxicating, subconscious tapestry across the viewer’s entire brain, with inestimable help by composer Michael Nyman.
I’m excited to experience The Falls, with all of its pandemic and nuclear anxiety and ecstasy, together with you all this Tuesday.
Noughtily,
Charlie, Stefan, Stark