Intervals
Peter Greenaway, 1969, 7 min

“Intervals consists of footage of Venetian backstreets and alleyways accompanied by various sound sources (including stray snatches of Vivaldi) that lend each interval its own distinct tenor. This short also introduces an abiding Greenaway obsession: the abecedarian sequence (here a disembodied voice can be heard rattling off their ABCs in Italian).” – Budd Wilkins

H Is for House
Peter Greenaway, 1973, 10 min

“Bucolic and beautifully shot, H Is for House carries Greenaway’s preoccupation with alphabetical lists even further. Narrator Colin Cantlie, who provides voiceover work for four subsequent Greenaway films, articulates a series of increasingly improbable items that begin with the letter H, while a mother and her child, played by Greenaway’s own wife and daughter, frolic on the grounds of a country house.” – Budd Wilkins

Windows
Peter Greenaway, 1975, 4 min

“The same residence returns for the thematically darker Windows, wherein sunny landscape shots accompany acerbically solemn statistics concerning 37 cases of defenestration, which are categorized not only by age, gender, and occupation of the deceased, but also by time of day and season of the year.” – Budd Wilkins

Water Wrackets
Peter Greenaway, 1975, 12 min

“Water Wrackets contains some truly luminous images of lakes, bogs, and other waterworks, but the underlying speculative history of tribal rivalries and primitive beliefs delivered in deadpan by Colin Cantlie is quite difficult to follow, leaving the viewer high and dry in a morass of unfamiliar names and locations.” – Budd Wilkins

Dear Phone
Peter Greenaway, 1976, 17 min

“Dear Phone helpfully illustrates its absurdist tales of telephonic mishaps through title cards that display an assortment of scrawls and typefaces, complete with scratch-outs and insertions. And these texts, narrated by Greenaway himself, are intercut with shots of London’s famous red phone boxes.” – Budd Wilkins

A Walk Through H
Peter Greenaway, 1978, 41 min

“In A Walk Through H the camera focuses on a series of 92 maps (all drawn by Greenaway), while Cantlie’s punctilious narrator regales the audience with anecdotes about what he saw on his travels through the abbreviated land of the film’s title, how he obtained certain of his maps, his friendship with Tulse Luper, the soundness of Luper’s travel advice, and other increasingly surreal occurrences. Not for the last time in a Greenaway film, ornithology and all things avian play a considerable role in the lore and symbolism.” – Budd Wilkins

Vertical Features Remake
Peter Greenaway, 1979, 45 min

“Like The Falls, Vertical Features Remake both mirrors and mocks the documentary form. The film purports to represent four attempts, sponsored by the vaguely defined Institute of Restoration and Reclamation, to assemble raw footage taken by Tulse Luper that focuses on the significant vertical features – trees, poles, and more – on display in a variety of landscapes. A handful of imaginary film theorists turn up to opine about the best way to reconstruct the footage, and according to their own pet notions. The results are then shown, each iteration revealing (sometimes slight) differences in shot grouping, editing rhythm, and musical accompaniment. Greenaway’s made-up historical material can be moderately interesting, but if his target is the tedium induced by structuralist films, the joke’s on the viewer, as Vertical Features Remake flirts rather successfully with outright boredom.” – Budd Wilkins

The Falls
Peter Greenaway, 1980, 195 min

“The Falls is an exhaustive, and at times exhausting, elucidation of 92 alphabetically arranged case histories of individuals whose last names begin with the letters F-A-L-L. As a result of exposure to the Violent Unknown Event (or VUE), these people have either contracted bizarre diseases, found themselves fluent in strange languages, or undergone bodily changes mimicking avian morphology. Across the film’s 195 minutes, Greenaway manages to pack in further references to Tulse Luper’s stories and films, gently parodies the BFI as the Bird Facilities Institute, and stunt casts the Quay brothers as twins Ipson and Pulat Fallari. The filmmaker also gets to indulge his twin passions: mythology (the fall of Icarus) and art history (the mysterious egg suspended above the Madonna in Piero della Francesca’s Brera Madonna).” – Budd Wilkins