Category: 1982

Fanny and Alexander (1982)

Ingmar Bergman | 4 episodes (57min – 1hr 32min) or 3hr 8min (theatrical cut)

There is a whimsical horror threaded through Fanny and Alexander that only its ten-year-old protagonist has the open-minded curiosity to confront. He gazes in wonder at his toy paper theatre illuminated by nine flickering candles, before wandering around an exquisitely cluttered apartment draped in red, green, and gold fabrics, like a lonely child lost in a world of endless possibilities. He calls out to his family’s maids, but no one replies. The clock chimes three, a set of cherubs rotate on a music box, and a half-nude marble statue in the corner slowly begins to dance. Suddenly, a soft scraping noise emerges beneath the eerie melody, and we catch a glimpse of a scythe being dragged across the carpet. The grim reaper has arrived, but not for young Alexander. Though this magical realist prologue might be the most undiluted manifestation of his vivid imagination, the heavy presence of death underlies all five hours of this Gothic family drama set in 1900s Sweden, marking his childhood with both merciless damnation and divine salvation.

A fantastical prologue setting up Alexander, his imagination, and the huge, magnificent apartment of his grandmother, Helena. Drapes of green and gold hang over cased openings and windows, creating immaculate frames all through the interior space.

In the haunted Christmastime setting of Fanny and Alexander’s opening, an air of Dickensian fantasy settles over the extended Ekdahl family, revelling in the warm festivities of their annual traditions. Religious celebrations and commemorations form the basis of these gatherings, rotating through the generational cycles of life in funerals, weddings, and christenings. Accompanying these occasions are large meals spread across expansive dining tables, though none are so magnificent as the spread on Christmas Eve night which dominates the first act of the film.

Here, Ingmar Bergman delights in splendidly designed sets of vivid crimson hues, weaved all through the patterned wallpaper, velvet curtains, and holiday decorations illuminated by the golden light of chandeliers and oil lamps. With such profuse warmth commanding the mise-en-scène, there are abundant opportunities to embellish it with small flourishes of emerald-green, popping out in festive wreaths, holly, and indoor plants that snugly crowd out the foreground of his shots.

One of Bergman’s finest achievements in production design, dotting his rooms with candles and festive decor, and filling them out with red, green, and gold hues in stunning arrangements. These shots are cluttered but cosy, immersing us into 1900s Sweden.

Matching Bergman’s rich use of colour is his impeccable blocking of a large ensemble, defining the status and identity of each character by their position within immaculately staged shots of family unity around overflowing dining tables and across plush lounges. For all the misgivings and arguments that arise within the theatre-loving Ekdahl family, there is no doubting the intimacy between them as they gather in the vast, splendid apartment of their widowed matriarch, Helena.

Warmth and unity in Bergman’s blocking during the first act over Christmas Eve, bringing the entire extended Ekdahl family together within gorgeously composed frames.
A noticeable shift in the staging following the death of Oskar – reserved distance between each family member, each relegated to their own position and pose.

It is a lengthy setup which Bergman conducts here, insulating us in these family celebrations like a warm, protective barrier from the freezing snow that blankets the village outside. Within its open living areas, we witness their artistic passion emerge in scenes of poetry recitations and musical performances late into the night, each becoming extensions of the plays they perform for the local community. Between the elegantly draped frames connecting each room as well, Bergman stages them like actors within proscenium arches, turning the apartment into its own theatre brimming with enormous personalities. Even greater depths are revealed behind closed doors, bringing a delicate texture to the family’s joys and troubles – Alexander’s uncle, Adolf Gustav, is a cheerful womaniser with a fragile ego, and Carl Ekdahl possesses significant contempt towards his German wife.

Bergman transforms the Ekdahl family home into a theatre of sorts, with the drapes framing its key players in a proscenium arch – remarkable formal mirroring between these scenes and those sets in actual theatres.

It isn’t hard to see where Alexander fits in here with his elaborate tall tales and instinct to escape into fiction when reality grows too harsh. Right from the film’s first frame of the young child peering into his toy paper theatre, there is a robust formal mirroring between the Ekdahls and their art, manifesting with levity in their lively Christmas festivities, and tragedy in the Hamlet-adjacent death of Alexander’s father, Oskar. It is fitting too that he first collapses during a rehearsal of the play, while he is performing the part of Hamlet’s deceased father. “I could play the ghost now really well,” he jokes on his deathbed, leaving his wife to remarry the cruel Bishop Edvard who presides over his funeral – a truly compelling stand-in for Hamlet’s treacherous uncle Claudius if there ever was one.

Even outside the scope of family homes, Bergman finds a bright but chilly beauty in the frozen streets of Sweden, even while he lights up his interiors with a blazing warmth.

The narrative that follows is heavily Shakespearean in both structure and characterisation, though there is also a touch of dreamy self-awareness as Bergman considers the multitude of stories woven into the fabric of his art. “We are surrounded by many realities, one on top of the other,” Alexander learns as he takes refuge within a curiosity shop of puppets, and indeed he seems to possess an imagination that can penetrate each of its metaphysical layers. When the voice of God speaks to him from a dark cabinet, he is filled with a great existential terror and total belief in its veracity, right up until he sees its true form – just another puppet, propping up the artifice of Christian piety.

In this consideration of organised religion as a hollow construct, Fanny and Alexander becomes an act of catharsis for Bergman who, in playing to these archetypes of corruption and innocence, reflects large portions of his own childhood. The fond memories of a flawed but welcoming family exist in stark contrast to the oppressive dynamic that pervades the bishop’s bare, colourless home, and caught between the two is the overly active imagination of a boy who struggles to differentiate between fantasy and reality.

The curiosity shop of puppets once again turns theatre and art into a sanctuary for Alexander, and doubles as a metaphor for the many stories that make up the lives and worlds beyond our own.

As such, there is also a distinct fairy tale quality that takes hold of Fanny and Alexander, accompanying the introduction of the wicked stepfather with ghosts and demons directly inspired by those religious tales which the children are raised on. Being deprived of a supportive father figure himself, Bergman carries great empathy for Alexander, understanding his immaturity and naivety as a natural stage in his own creative development.

Perhaps it is this lack of emotional inhibition which grants the young boy the means to deal with his grief, letting him lash out in ways which, while not entirely polite, are honest to his thoughts and feelings. In one evocative scene after he hears his mother’s guttural cry erupt from somewhere in their grandmother’s apartment, he creeps out of bed with his sister Fanny to peer through the crack of a door, where they see her wailing in private over her husband’s cold body. Unlike Alexander’s coping mechanisms that are freely expressed out into the world, the overwhelming feelings of adults must be repressed to those small, remote corners where no one else can see. This is a lesson that the bishop beats into him even harder with a “strong and harsh love,” reframing Alexander’s innocent efforts to understand the world as sinister transgressions that will damn him to hell.

A thin frame caught in the crack of a door, as the children get out of bed to see their deceased father and their wailing mother pacing back and forth.
With a shift in location to the bishop’s house, the splendid drapes and decor of the Ekdahl home is replaced with austere, colourless walls and quiet, unwelcoming dinners. Not a trace of eye contact to be found in these family gatherings.

The move from Helena’s vibrant, festive home of expressionistic décor to the stark white halls of the bishop’s Spartan house lands with a quiet dread, and with it comes a shift in Bergman’s blocking. Gone are the large family gathering of characters arranged in relaxed formations across plush couches and dining halls. These rooms are made of stone and wood, unembellished and projecting the bishop’s cold hostility through every communal space. The housemaid, Justina, effectively becomes a scary old witch in this household as well, using the children’s wild imaginations against them through her unsettling cautionary tales. Harriet Andersson refreshingly proves her range here in playing the total opposite of what she represented in her earliest collaborations with Bergman – tedium and severity, in place of youth and beauty.

Harriet Andersson is superbly cast as Justina the housemaid – she is thin, severe, and unsmiling, representing the inverse of the young, beautiful protagonists she played in Bergman’s earlier films.

The grip that both villains hold over our protagonists is suffocating. The bishop’s demand that Emilie and her children lose all their old possessions as if “newly born” is delivered with a faint chill, forcing them to conform to his pious standard of sparse minimalism, and kicking off a long line of attempts to rewrite their identities. Bergman captures this devastating isolation wreaked upon the young siblings with harsh, angular frames, gazing out the windows of their depressing bedroom, and crumpled on the attic’s grey, dusty floor beneath a fallen crucifix, as if slain by a domineering force of spiritual corruption.

Bergman shoots the bishop’s house like a prison with his desolate compositions, trapping Fanny and Alexander in these restrictive frames.
A fallen crucifix and the crumpled body of Alexander, banished to the attic for his disobedience, and slain by a domineering force of spiritual corruption.

His immaculate staging of his actors goes beyond wide shots too though, as he particularly focuses on the thoughtful arrangements of their faces to understand their joys and frustrations on a psychological, intimate level. As Oskar lays on his deathbed with his face turned to the side, Emilie’s profile leans up against his cheek in pensive mourning, simultaneously revealing both the intimacy of their final days of marriage and the tension that is pulling them apart. In contrast, a later shot at the bishop’s house which frames Fanny, Alexander, and Emilie lying on their sides in bed captures them all looking towards the camera, united in their melancholy. With each face slightly obscuring the one behind it, Emilie is set up at the back as the quiet protector of her children, shielding them from the bishop who stands alone and unfocused in the background.

Bergman shoots arrangements of faces that uncovers the subtlest emotions, expressing melancholy longing, maternal protectiveness, and a ghostly terror.

Jan Malmsjö brings a sadistic venom to this role, though he takes care to only reveal his villainy bit by bit. His first handling of Alexander’s lies is stern but relatively fair, keeping us at a distance from the bitter, angry man who lies beneath the cool veneer. It is difficult to get a good reading of him here, but by the time we arrive at his next chastisement of Alexander, his malevolence is exceedingly clear. In response to the bishop’s degradation and punishment, the young boy grows more obstinate in his disobedience, and yet even he can only stand so many beatings before being forced into submission. Watching on, Fanny silently recoils from the bishop’s touch, and Emilie’s contempt for her husband grows. With all paths of escape cut off, they become a broken, trapped family, suffering in an austere hellhole.

Alexander facing the bishop’s wrath, isolated even from his own sister in this shot while the bishop sits back with his family and house staff.

Still, visions of Oskar’s ghost continue to haunt Alexander like reminders of a brighter past, bearing witness to the depression left behind in his wake. These transcendent experiences extend to other family members too, as late in the film Oskar also appears to Helena, his bereaved mother. He speaks little, instead simply becoming the audience to her eloquent soliloquy on the process of accepting her grief, as well as the multiple coexistent truths at the core of Bergman’s dramaturgical metaphor.

“Life, it’s all acting anyway. Some roles are nice, other not so nice. I played a mother. I played Juliet and Margareta. Then suddenly I played a widow or a grandmother. One role follows the other. The thing is not to shrink from them.”

Oskar’s ghost manifesting to both Alexander and Helena, always in his white suit and silently pacing the halls of the family home.

And yet, even as an actress with a deeper understanding of the human condition than her grandson, the pain is no less present.

“My feelings came from deep in my body. Even though I could control them, they shattered reality, if you know what I mean. Reality has remained broken ever since… and oddly enough, it feels more real that way. So, I don’t bother to mend it.”

Bergman’s screenplay flows like poetry through these thoughtful contemplations of life-changing events, bringing this story full circle with the restoration of the family unit. Just as celebrations of Christ’s birth open the film, so too is new life breathed into the Ekdahl clan with the christening of Alexander’s newborn baby sister, reviving the cycles of tradition which connect one generation to the next. Still, even as the conclusion of this epic drama sees the bishop damned to hell in a house fire, four words punctuate its ending with a lingering thread of trauma, keeping his ghost alive in Alexander’s mind.

“You can’t escape me.”

Surreal visions emerging at moments when Alexander is overcome with emotion, transporting him to a new location altogether as he is entranced by a story.

The fantastical imagination of Bergman’s young protagonist is evidently as dangerous as it is enchanting, filtering the world through a lens that distorts every intense emotional experience into a memory that will never fade away. Not only does it manifest as supernatural creatures and visions, but it is also baked right into those dazzling bursts of colour that decorate the fabrics and textures of his family’s home, leaping out like nostalgic recollections of a youth that was only partially lived in the real world. By simply dwelling within this perspective, Fanny and Alexander becomes a deeply sentimental work for Bergman, magnificently distilling his own dreams into expressions of childhood wonder and terror.

A return to family tradition, though with a change in decor – the reds and greens of Christmas Eve are replaced with pastels to represent a christening, signifying a birth and renewal within the Ekdahl clan.

Fanny and Alexander is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.

White Dog (1982)

Samuel Fuller | 1hr 30min

The primal horror at the core of White Dog does not come down to standard psychological questions of whether it is nature or nurture guiding the titular beast towards its most hateful, vicious instincts. There is absolutely no doubt to be had at all that it is a product of the abhorrent environment it was raised in, motivating it to attack Black people on sight. The truly terrifying question that Samuel Fuller poses is whether this conditioning ingrained in the dog’s mind from a young age can ever be overwritten, saving the animal from its own upbringing, and potentially many Black lives from its violent racial prejudice. To achieve such a feat as this would be a professional milestone for African American dog trainer Keys, though on an even broader level he recognises the social significance of the mission too. The exploitation and weaponisation of innocent creatures to do one’s malicious bidding is a perverse act against nature itself, soiling their pure white coats with bloodstains, and so to prove that such virulent racism is fully reversible would mark a victory in Keys’ small crusade for justice.

Blood tainting the pure white coat of the dog, revealing its monstrous persona.

That Fuller deftly imbues this allegory for bigotry and indoctrination with all the tension of a pulpy horror film makes for an extraordinarily creative triumph too, framing the dog as a two-sided creature akin to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He draws this comparison directly in the dialogue, but it is also plainly evident in the suspense he builds around the dog’s behaviour, never quite letting us be sure whether we are about to get the loyal friend who lovingly gazes up at the camera with big, brown eyes, or the salivating beast ready to rip someone apart.

In the hands of a lesser director, White Dog could have very easily been a cheap melodrama falling back on stilted dialogue, and Fuller doesn’t entirely smooth over these flaws written into the screenplay either. Instead, he compensates for them by driving the film even deeper into thriller territory with his subjective camerawork, cutting between tight close-ups of Keys and the dog as a tenuous connection is forged between the two, and gradually closing the gap between black skin and white fur.

Strong iconography in the black skin and white dog, suspensefully closing the distance between both.
Fuller has a sharp sense of unconventional camera angles, peering through Keys’ legs as the dog bounds towards him.
Fuller drives the film even deeper into thriller territory with his subjective camerawork, cutting between tight close-ups of Keys and the dog as a tenuous connection is forged between the two.

At the same time, Fuller is also wisely discerning in those moments where he pulls his camera back from the action altogether, sitting in a wide shot as the dog sniffs at a pile of garbage on a streetside, momentarily ignorant to the African American boy we see playing just around the corner. Later when it launches into a bloody attack inside a church, there is a morbid irony in the camera’s calm movement upwards to a stained-glass window where St Francis of Assissi stands in harmony with a canine companion. With camera placement as bitingly precise and anxiety-inducing as this, Alfred Hitchcock’s influence is overtly present in Fuller’s direction, only magnified by Ennio Morricone’s persistent flutes and strings score uneasily haunting the background.

Hitchcockian suspense in the framing of this wide shot, underscoring the dramatic irony that threatens to erupt into violence.
During one bloody attack, Fuller’s camera pans over to the stained glass window of St Francis of Assissi – with a dog by his side, no less.

At the same time though, Fuller’s style is far from plain imitation. Perhaps White Dog’s most compelling visual choice is also its most distinguished, forcing us to helplessly watch in slow-motion terror as the German Shepherd bounds towards its victims, teeth bared and face pulled into a tight snarl. In each instance, time reaches an agonising crawl, finally building to a nail-biting climax within Keys’ giant cage that harshly wraps around them in the dog’s final test.

Fuller’s slow-motion is a brilliant stylistic choice that lifts the quality of the entire film, forcing us to helplessly watch the dog’s attacks in visceral terror.

If the culmination of this scene doesn’t leave us defeated by the animal’s seemingly untreatable conditioning, then we are at least totally disturbed by the sudden appearance of Wilbur, the man who raised it and who now intends to take it back home. His warm, genial demeanour is at complete odds with our knowledge of his hidden cruelty, which sees him manipulate the course of nature to create killers in his own image. With two granddaughters by his side as well, Fuller hints very strongly at the chilling indoctrination likely going on behind closed doors, only with children in place of animals.

If we are to hold onto any hope and make a judgement based off the dog’s very last actions, then we might have reason to believe that one can indeed be cured of bigotry, paving the way for a far more compassionate and open-minded society. The deeply ingrained hatred which fuelled that prejudice, however, is a different beast altogether. In White Dog’s closing minutes, Fuller finally delivers one last twist of the knife, revealing the ugliness that lies at the sensitive root of the matter. This resentment bred by old prejudices does not necessarily seek racial violence to quench its bloodlust – it just seeks violence.

A melancholy crane shot pulling back in the final seconds, letting the tragedy sink in.

White Dog is currently available to rent or buy on Apple TV, YouTube, and Amazon Video.

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Werner Herzog | 2hr 38min

There is a time and place to blast loud music at large crowds, but clearly Irish opera enthusiast Fitzcarraldo never got the message. It is simply preposterous that anyone could possibly hear Enrico Caruso’s tenor and not be profoundly moved, and so why shouldn’t his voice be wheeled in to interrupt a sophisticated party, or blasted down jungle rivers so the native people might know what they are missing? With his white suit, wild mop of blonde hair, and wide-eyed expression etching a permanent madness across his face, Klaus Kinski looks like some absurd cross between an entrepreneur, scientist, and artist in Fitzcarraldo. Especially with the giant gramophone he lugs around with him, he would look like an outsider in any Western civilisation, let alone in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. There is a huge incongruity between reality and his ambitions of building an opera house in this secluded location, and it only takes a single look at his bizarre appearance to recognise how out-of-touch he is with the unforgiving brutality of the natural world. As Werner Herzog announces in his opening text, the native people call this place “the land where God did not finish creation”. Such lofty dreams of nurturing refined human culture here are not just naïve, but threaten the very foundations of his own conceited, fragile mortality.

One of the most absorbing characters of 80s cinema, carrying us along in his delusions.
“The land where God did not finish creation.” Overgrown canopies and misty shrouds weaving through the branches. Herzog shoots nature’s terror like few others.

Perhaps there is a part of Fitzcarraldo that believes the mythology of the local tribe he enlists in his endeavour, who prophesise a “white god in a divine vessel” bringing holy salvation. In staging him atop mountains, trees, and belltowers looking down upon Peruvian towns and jungles, Herzog certainly at least teases this notion, letting his entitlement burst forth in fits of desperate rage. Taking advantage of the natives’ beliefs is reprehensible enough on its own, but in deluding himself into thinking he could ever contend with and subsequently perfect God’s incomplete creation, he is positively foolish as well, believing that his vision of modern commercialisation is truly transcendent.

But of course, this dream of bringing the opera to the jungle is a long process that requires multiple steps. To get the money he needs to build the theatre, he must first enter the booming Peruvian rubber industry. To get there, he needs land, though with the only unclaimed parcel being cut off from major ports by a long stretch of rapids, he is driven to take alternative, unorthodox methods. Since his acreage is also located over a steep hill a few hundred metres from another, safer river, it stands to reason in his mind that he must haul his large, cumbersome steamship up its precipitous incline, recklessly conquering nature through sheer force of will so that he may exploit it for his own profit.

Herzog’s production design is wonderfully ornate in the first act of film before he disappears into the jungle, framing characters in early twentieth century colonial architecture.
Fitzcarraldo’s megalomania manifesting in high ridges and low angles.

With such an absurd endeavour fully consuming his protagonist’s mind, Herzog sets him up much like a tragic figure of ancient mythology, brought down by his own attempts to transcend humanity. As such, Fitzcarraldo becomes a fable of Herculean ambition, though one that is both distinctly modern in its sharp critique of colonial exploits, and slightly comical in how obviously this opera enthusiast is destined to fail from the start. Within its firm grounding in Greek narrative conventions, Fitzcarraldo also bears strong resemblance to Apocalypse Now and Herzog’s own previous effort, Aguirre, the Wrath of God. There is the additional similarity of each of these productions being plagued with a number of volatile conflicts and disasters that drove the casts and crews mad in the thick of unpredictable jungles, but even beyond this both Herzog and Francis Ford Coppola frame secluded waterways as passages through which humans embark on journeys to discovery and defeat, lightly paralleling the mythical River Styx.

The river is a symbol loaded with history and significance, but Herzog never shoots it cleanly. Debris and sediment are always present, peeking above the surface.

Even more than Coppola’s film though, there is a coarseness to the grain of Herzog’s cinematography in Fitzcarraldo, infusing the already intimidating scenery of thick, overgrown vegetation and brown, sedimented rapids with a hostile crudeness. Though he drifts his camera on boats past densely crowded trees backlit by magic hour sunsets, Herzog does not possess the spiritual reverence of Terrence Malick. Despite the tropical similarities in The Thin Red Line and Fitzcarraldo, there is a harsh distinction between the two, with the latter revelling in the chaotic, uncontrolled presence of overabundant life. Silhouetted congregations of shrubbery are turned into masses of negative space holding back the light of the sun, with branches bending under the strain of dense canopies that can no longer support their own weight. From higher vantage points where Fitzcarraldo stations himself like a god, heavy fog conceals the uncultivated earth like some unsettling, otherworldly shroud, cutting it off from the rest of humanity and obscuring the journeys of the few who are reckless enough to pass through it.

A massive achievement in natural lighting for Herzog, using vibrant, orange sunsets to silhouette his environments.
An unforgiving, inhospitable environment, crowding out Herzog’s shot and oppressing upon his characters in the background.

And in the middle of it all, Fitzcarraldo’s steamship glides innocently down the weedy river, its bow pointing ever-so-slightly upwards as if optimistically anticipating its destination. The noise of its endless, rhythmic chugging set against bird whistles and rushing water even sounds like chanting, mechanically pushing itself forwards despite the odds. The first time Fitzcarraldo and his lover, Molly, board it back at port, their excitement far exceeds its actual visage as an old, rusty vessel, missing floorboards and covered in moss. How this thing will ever make it up a mountain is beyond us, and yet in spite of his folly and overbearing tendencies, Herzog does not treat him with total disdain. In carrying out a virtually identical mission in filming this story, there is a dark irony present, with both men bending nature to their will and submitting to the intoxicating power of their own self-belief.

Depth of field in Herzog’s staging, telling entire stories and relationships through just the visuals.

Still, Herzog does not hold back from menacing surrealism that puts both him and Fitzcarraldo in their places as meagre humans challenging the merciless gods of nature. There is something unnerving about a black umbrella floating down a river in the wilderness, consumed by the water it is designed to keep out, but it is most of all the image of the ship finally ascending the colossal mountain where Herzog manifests the film’s most potent visual metaphor. While the mise-en-scene here is initially crowded out by thick branches and vines imposing upon Fitzcarraldo and the newly recruited Indigenous people, all of this is eventually cleared from view to make way for an enormous construction site, where Herzog employs hundreds of extras blocked all through his frame. In his staging around this set piece, he maintains a keen sense of his environment’s daunting topography, and with it, the manmade wooden beast carving its way through the very materials humans have fashioned it out of. Like the boat perched up a tree in Aguirre, the Wrath of God, there is an absurdity baked deep into this symbolism, whereby the ship becomes a hulking monument to modernity, trying to assert its strained dominion over creation. And of course, Fitzcarraldo stands there amid it all with his gramophone, playing Caruso as if summoning his opera house into existence.

Steam puffing, ropes straining, and the steamship crawls along at a snail’s pace, determined to make it over this muddy hill.

Fitzcarraldo’s challenges and exploitation of nature may be perversions of God’s creation, and yet his downfall is only set in motion at the point that his hubris completely clouds his own compassion. When a local man is killed during a successful test of the mechanical pulley system, it does little to dampen his celebrations, even while pained gasps can be heard in the background. The revenge of the native people he has so callously taken for granted unfolds under the bright, pale face of the full moon, shining down upon them like the white god of their legend, as they let the steamship drift away down the river into rapids.

A sly cutaway to the full moon as nature wreaks its revenge on Fitzcarraldo – perhaps even the white god of legend whose identity he has assumed.

This is not a man who can be kept down for long though. Even with his ambitions shattered, Fitzcarraldo’s dream lives on as Caruso arrives with a full cast and orchestra, summoned by the ship’s captain to deliver the first production in the Peruvian city of Iquitos. Perhaps the piece of Herzog that sympathised with the rubber baron couldn’t bear to see him completely beaten down and tortured. Nature need not be conquered to fulfil such grand aspirations, he posits, and in this way Fitzcarraldo becomes more than simply a cautionary tale. It is just as much a tribute to those who do strive for greatness, tempering their wild desires with a reminder of where exactly the lines between humanity, God, and nature are drawn.

The opera arrives in the Amazon without circumventing nature – a bizarre yet satisfying sight to behold.

Fitzcarraldo is currently streaming on SBS On Demand.

The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982)

Peter Greenaway | 1hr 48min

There is a murder mystery lingering beneath the Baroque façade of this late 17th century English country manor, though the question is less about who committed the killing, and more how one Mr Neville fits into it all. He is a young artist, commissioned by Mrs Herbert to sketch twelve landscapes of her estate for her absent husband, and in his creative pursuits he demands perfectionism. Each day he repeats in voiceovers the time and place of where he will conduct his work, and clears everyone from the gardens to guarantee clinical consistency. Still, small imperfections begin to slip in here and there. A ladder leading up to a window. A shirt slashed across its front. Gradually each one of these artistic renderings become more like incomplete pieces in a confounding puzzle, disturbing Mr Neville’s measured sensibilities within a plot he can’t possibly grasp.

There is a definite parallel between the painterly ideals of our stubborn protagonist and Peter Greenaway, whose artistic precision emerges in predominantly static tableaux, framing perfectly manicured gardens and meticulously arranged interiors with a similarly painterly attention to detail. Kubrickian seems like a fitting descriptor here, not just in representing the cold distance with which these characters are regarded, but also in our understanding of the film as a descendant of Barry Lyndon’s stylistic lineage.

These interiors are Sternbergian in the obstruction of actors through period decor, but the precision and coldness feels entirely Kubrickian.

Greenaway’s depiction of historical British aristocrats surrounded by extravagant period décor especially works to build up the theatrical artifice of their high society, as we observe in the film’s opening where they gather within candle-lit rooms and in symmetrical arrangements around elaborate displays of fruit to gossip among themselves. His artistic perspective is even more evident in his use of Mr Neville’s drafting board as a frame through which his camera observes the Herbert estate, crafting his own picturesque images much like the draughtsman himself.

A constant framing of these beautifully manicured gardens through Mr Neville’s drafting board, revealing Greenaway’s own painterly sensibilities.

But for all his mathematical precision, Greenaway is evidently more prepared to wrestle with the inconsistencies of his subject matter than Mr Neville. It isn’t just the strange clues being left around the garden, but often just beyond the view of other characters there lurks a naked man, always painted to resemble either a sculpture or otherwise blend in with his surroundings. Trying to decipher the logic behind this figure’s bizarre actions would be a waste of time, as this would be to submit to the flawed idealism that Mr Neville attempts to impose order upon his surroundings. The living sculpture is rather a human manifestation of chaos, discreet in its appearance, unpredictable in its movements, and impertinently disrespectful to everyone caught up in this high aristocratic culture.

The nude man making subtle appearances outside dinners and gatherings. His mere appearance is a disturbance in this mannered culture.

As beautiful as Mr Neville’s sketches are, they do not capture the truth of this mysterious man’s identity or his environment. One would also never realise from his drawings that the residents of this majestic mansion trade snarky barbs that undercut its image of civility, nor that it is housing a sordid affair between Mrs Herbert and the draughtsman himself. In graphic match cuts between his black-and-white drawings and the real landscapes, we see the beautiful colour drained from this setting, though it is clear that Greenaway is also working against Mr Neville’s inflexible artistic methodology. Michael Nyman’s jaunty Baroque score of harpsichords, saxophones, and bass guitars feels particularly in line with his brazen aesthetic, mixing traditional and contemporary instruments as part of a vaguely anachronistic chamber ensemble, which also fits superbly within the film’s mischievous irreverence. It is primarily through this playful aesthetic that the hollow power plays and puzzles of The Draughtsman’s Contract begin to reveal themselves, so that by the end of Greenaway’s obscure murder mystery we may even delight in its final bitter twist of the knife.

Greenaway cares fare more about aesthetic than plot, as it is through that which we begin to understand the dynamics of this quaint but nefarious aristocratic culture.

The Draughtsman’s Contract is not currently available to stream in Australia.