With all the speculation about The Falls on this mailing list, I have given a little thought to some similarities that exist between Greenaway's work of this period (Act of God, and Vertical Features Remake up to Drowning by Numbers) and the work of other artists, composers, writers and visionaries that seem to share the same aesthetic. I can't say my thoughts are consistent, but I offer these half-baked observations for what they are worth.

Sometimes called 'metafiction' or 'fabulation' and other times lumped with 'structuralist' art, there is a common thread through the creations of following artists which, to my knowledge, hasn't been fully explored in any cross-disiplinary study. (If anyone knows of criticism that embraces all of the below I would love to learn of it.)

In fiction some of the writing of Borges, Barth, Calvino and Lem share similarities with Greenaway. In particular I would cite Lem's two 'novels' Imaginary Magnitude and A Perfect Vacuum the first of which is a collection of prefaces to nonexistent books, the latter a collection of reviews of nonexistent books. Both novels share Greenaway's penchant for reporting seemingly absurd and rather involved fictions. (As a child Lem spent his idle hours in school classrooms creating phony government documents--passports, mining rights, immigration papers--with elaborate fictions about the holders' lives and countries the documents represented. Any readers of this posting curious about Lem's work and this aspect of this character are urged to seek out his recently translated memoir Highcastle. Last year I reviewed this book for The Boston Book Review and the text of this review is currently available at: http://www.bookwire.com/bbr/life.review$913 ) See also especially Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.

In art I think immediately of Saul Steinberg with his fictional maps and documents. There were also two outsider eccentrics, whose names I have been unable to recall. One was a man who created an album of intricately designed fictional postage stamps commemorating events that never took place in countries found on no map. I believe after he died an illustrated book was compiled of his collection. The other was an American who created maps and architectural drawings of a city entirely of his own creation. He worked in the 1930s and 40s and some of his work was reproduced in The New York Times Magazine last year.

I would also include the husband and wife team of Bernd and Hilla Becher, who I cited in an earlier posting. Greenaway has mentioned their huge catalog of watertower photographs, each beautifully shot against a gray cloudy sky. While they document actual architectural structures in what appears to be a very cold and dispassionate style, when viewed in a catalog sequence (either as hung in a gallery or in the pages of a book) some observers start to view these structures as biographically related and almost alive, not unlike animals with a common ancestor. While the impulse to view these man-made structures as having a 'personality' (for lack of a better word) appears to reside within this viewer's mind, I have heard others remark having a similar reaction, and have even witnessed some people looking at a sequence of the Bechers photos laugh at the wit of the juxtaposition of the images .

In music both John Cage and Michael Nyman have embraced near nonsense librettos and composed works built from pieces of previous works. Certainly Patrick Mimran's music for The Stairs is yet another recent follower of this trend.

These were the first examples that came into my mind when I was reflecting on the rather intricate catalog of The Falls. Do other like examples occur to anyone on this list, or know exactly how to properly describe this aesthetic? I am sure some readers will think I am being a little inconsistent and all-embracing, but there is something in common in all these works which is quite distinct from the aesthetic of post-modernism as it is traditionally defined. (Post modernism is often defined as the artistic appropriation of a previously existing work. Certainly Nyman's use of Mozart's Symphonie Concertante in The Falls is post-modernism).

Is The Falls a great film or a great folly? Possibly, and plausibly, both. Certainly a great labyrinth, worthy to stand coiled and intricate beside Borges's stories and Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, two clearly discernible influences upon the movie. Like Wilder's novel, a fabulous fantasia of biographical miniatures linked by a common, violent apocalypse, Greenaway's film gives us a biographical mosaic whose pieces are seen to join only in the grand overview of a Violent Unexplained Event. The harmonies and cross-references in The Falls, like those in Wilder or in Borges, are as vivid and haunting as in a piece of music. It's an abstract film with a strong undertow of letmotiven, a castle-in-the -air built on sensate foundations and with real and shivering winds blowing through it. Just as Borges builds his steepling structures of seeming nothingness with stones quarried from the real world of philosophy, history and religion, Greenaway creates his symphonies of sinister systematization from real-life material: philology, ornithology, institutional bureaucracy. It's a movie realization of Borges mad-methodical cosmos Tlon, where "Metaphysicians do not seek for truth or even verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge metaphysics as a branch of fantastic literature. They know that a system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any such aspect. 'Greenaway's films are monomania made marvelous, systems made symphonic, delight twenty-four frames-per-second.'

And about The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which is alluded to in The Falls, somewhere I recall reading a quotation from Greenaway in which he said he was heavily influenced by both Lawrence Sterne and Thornton Wilder, mentioning he once completely analyzed and dissected a Wilder novel. Hmmm...

Enough for today.

--Alan