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The Early Films of Peter Greenaway: The Falls

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British director Peter Greenaway considers "The falls" the most emblematic film of his career: it's an inventory of his most beloved obssesions; a synthesis of his previous work as filmmaker and a seed of future projects.

THE FALLS ( 1978 ), his first feature length movie, is a catalogue of 92 invented biographies of people whose names begin with the word " falls " and affected by an unknown illness ( the U.V.E. ) in some way connected with birds and flying. This is, in fact, a seminal work of Greenaway's particular mithology and at its time a game of mirror where he blends bizarre situations, human mutations, archive footage, documentary techniques, humourous self-references ( he introduces in a new way stuff of his previous films ) and conceptual playing inside of a structure whose peculiar characteristic and form - as Greenaway has told- can be reformulated and extended "ad infinitum". But the movie is also a sardonic and creative demostration of scepticism where Greenaway plays to rub out the border between fiction and reality. " The falls " is probably the film that better reflects Greenaway's conception of cinema, so as his voluptuous personality and enciclopedic wisdom: his passion for catalogues and dictionaries; his interest in structuralism theorising and conceptual games; his taste in weird artefacts, bizarre invention and the theatre of absurd; his love for painting and barroque visual invention and his miscellaneous erudition and fine humour.

The score has been composed by Michael Nyman.

"The Falls": an epic film that is a gargantuan send up of the minutiae of extreme scholarship. The 92 biographies of victims of the Unexplained Violent Event [UVE], which may...or may not...have something to do with birds, proceed with icy, statistical, bureaucratic force. The actual characters are absurd and/or implausible. The balancing act of whit and whimsy and statistical cataloguing is masterful. The UVE is never fully explained even though we have 3 1/2 hours of detailed examination [Clearly more work must be done...AAAAHHHHRRRRGGGGHHHH!]. It's much much much ado about nothing... and hysterical. Even the 92 examples here are connected by cross referencing and roundabout links. It's all very complicated. But of course even though archival footage is used and real people and events are sprinkled throughout, it is all made up. So sit back and just enjoy the ride. It's a film about people who learn Klingon or argue over details in "Lord of the Rings". But also about historians who's expertises are about a single year or event and scholars of single artists or even single works of art. It's about a human activity. It's about being a thinking ape. It's wonderful!

Peter Greenway's 'The Falls (1980)', made after a period of unique short films is by no means an amateur work shot by an unsure hand. In fact, many Greenaway enthusiasts consider this his best film from an oeuvre which includes notable features such as 'The Cook, The Thief, The Wife and Her Lover' 'A Zed & Two Noughts' 'Drowning by Numbers' etc. It's trademark Greenaway, a filmic encyclopedia that exhibits all his obsessions with list-making, cataloguing, ornithology, and intelligent witticism. This is as far from mainstream film-making as it gets--so steer clear if you have a short attention span and propensity for dramatic stimulus every five seconds. I'm sorry but, it's strictly art-house stuff.

The basic premise of the narrative is that people are struck by a malevolent occurrence known as the VUE (Violent Unknown Event). So, in a step to further investigate the consequences of the event, the VUE commission has compiled a list of people whose surnames begin with the letters F-A-L-L and all of who've been struck by the VUE (supposedly over 19million people are infected, but the taxonomy has been narrowed down this particular way). Now we have 92 people whose surnames begins with F-A-L-L (Fallbaez, Falllows, Fllbateo, Fallax etc); thus, 92 short biographies detailing their lives and the VUE's effects on them will be presented to us throughout the length of the film (which is a whopping 3+ hours). We learn that most victims are blessed with new languages (of which there are 92), an interest in ornithology, physical deformations, and some with an ability to fly (Bio 81, Ameror Fallstag). As such, the 92 victims' short and sometimes non-existent biographies are narrated in a faux-documentary style by a monotonous narrator, strictly in a bureaucratic way--but that itself is a parody, as the desire to seriously catalogue this absurd disaster results in some moments of 'nerdy' comic humor ('On the night of June 12th of the VUE, Carlos's wife suffered a stroke, and Carlos transferred his affection to a turkey')

From a personal point of view, this maybe the most unique 'first' feature from any renowned film director (David Lynch's 'Eraserhead' comes close), yet the exhausting and at times tedious encyclopediac detailing found in 'The Falls' is unrivaled. The 92 Bio's are all structured in a different way, so in a sense they are 92 separate films--disparate in tone, mood, editing etc. Peter Greenaway himself has stated that it could be '92 different ways to make a film'.

The best way to approach this 'difficult' picture is to first get a whiff of the style via Greenaway's early short films (some of which are referenced in the 'Falls'), such as 'A Walk Through H' or ' or 'Vertical Features Remake'. You'll note that there are some common characters throughout, such as Tulse Luper, Cissie Colpitts, Van Hoyten etc--I'll leave you the trouble of figuring them all out. Nevertheless, as stated earlier, 'The Falls' is considerably atypical even when compared to Greenaway's later, more celebrated works. So come prepared, and expect to be exhausted and awed, bored and excited as you wade through this alphabetically catalogued disaster.