The Falls - Part 1
Peter Greenaway, 1980, 90 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

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

---

Screening as part of The Early Films of Peter Greenaway programme