The Falls - Part 2
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

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

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Screening as part of The Early Films of Peter Greenaway programme