 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 | 🎙️ EPISODE 427: 03.22.22 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝟏𝟎-𝐕𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐦𝐞 RANKING GREENAWAY 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 If you thought Greenaway was going to get less weird as a filmmaker with age, that perhaps Nightwatching — a true to form "biopic," by most's definition — well, you were wrong! His first entry of the 2010s is among the weirdest films in his whole catalog, and almost certainly the horniest. Framed as a companion piece that 2007 film movie about Rembrandt movie, the subject here is Hendrick Goltzius, a fellow Dutch painter and artist whose fertile period predates the much more famous Rembrandt by a few decades. But whereas that film dissected a specific painting and was inspired by real events and real people, Goltzius and the Pelican Company is nothing of the sort. It's really nothing beyond that man (Goltzius), whom you probably weren't familiar with before, and a whole bunch of dicks, tits, vaginas and butts... soooo many dicks, tits, vaginas and butts. |
The 70-year-old Greenaway did not NEED to frame a film about sexual taboos and their representation in the Bible around a lesser known 16th century Dutch artist. That is A CHOICE, my man. Stylistically its a departure from the brief return to the more formal, restrained filmmaking we see in Nightwatching as well. Green screens and overlays and even Tulse-era CGI are all employed rather liberally. The setting is one giant warehouse, quite literally a stage, and the movie is essentially a series of plays both real and imagined until they blur into one. It's spiritually far more connected to The Baby of Mâcon than anything else, utilizing an incredibly similar narrative device and traversing the same thematic pathways.
There's a lot to be offended by here: some characters don blackface and, of course, the raw straight-up porno x Christianity mashups. Peter Greenaway is and always has been a provocateur. With that comes hits and misses, and the risks are equal with both. When he's on, it works completely and is often pretty damn hilarious. F. Murray Abraham's character is introduced here by having him take a shit in public whilst peeling an apple — the crowd cheers when he's finished — and that isn't even close to the wildest scatalogical scenario Greenaway's put on film!
Ultimately, the sheer audaciousness of Goltzius, now over a dozen features and countless shorts into a long and storied career, is admirable, despite its many flaws. I probably shouldn't have been, but I was somewhat caught off guard. A truly unexpected experience in the wake of Nightwatching, which — while the far better film — isn't a fraction as salacious.
CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 427A - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 427C ⫸
⫷ EPISODE 427A - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 427C ⫸
Goltzius and the Pelican Company is a 2012 historical film by writer-director Peter Greenaway. The film is based on the life of Hendrik Goltzius, a late 16th-century Dutch printer and engraver of erotic prints. He seduces the Margrave of Alsace into paying for a printing press to make and publish illustrated books. Goltzius promises him an extraordinary book of pictures of the Old Testament Biblical stories. Erotic tales of the temptation of Adam and Eve, Lot and his daughters, David and Bathsheba, Joseph and Potiphar's wife, Samson and Delilah, and John the Baptist and Salome. To tempt the Margrave further, Goltzius and his printing company will offer to perform dramatizations of these erotic stories for his court. It was released on September 30, 2012.
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