[Desktop]
Desktop		 ........ [Peter Greenaway]
Peter Greenaway		 ...... [The Falls]
The Falls		 ...... [What is The Falls?]
What is "The Falls"?



UK 1980, 16mm Colour
185 mins approx
Directed by Peter Greenaway
Production Advisors; Rapper Begol, Tulse Luper, H.E. Carter
Film credits.


  1. A Standard Directory of survivors is compiled in the wake of the Violent Unknown Event (VUE). The Directory lists approximately 19 million persons, many of them victims of physical and verbal mutations, all of them become immortal. THE FALLS is an audio-visual presentation of the available data on a block of names arbitrarily taken from the most recent edition of the Directory: the 92 surnames beginning with the letters 'Fall', from Falla to Fallwaste.
    Confronted by THE FALLS, the average Friend-of-the-Earth of the early 1980s risks being gripped by the desire to understand and interpret. The scholarly format stimulates these desires, as do the recurrent intimations of global catastrophe (both Alfred Hitchcock and Dr Strangelove would recognise them) and individual calamity (the 'ICA' pages of the Directory would doubtless include Icarus, another celebrated 'fall'). But the suggestions of imminent meaning are a tease. Why doubt the film's insistence on its own arbitrariness? Why dispute the proposition that an ideal history of the world would be a history of ALL the subjects who inhabit it? Perhaps the true coherence of THE FALLS lies elsewhere. Perhaps, like Michael Snow's Rameau's Nephew, it is less a directory than an inventory of audio-visual possibilities... (Peter Greenaway, 'The Falls',Plans and Conceits... of doubtful authenticity... BFI.)

  2. In The Falls several semi-factional investigations of bird conspiracy were conducted by examining the poor and unsatisfactory ending to Hitchcock's The Birds. And there were cabalistic interpretations of various bird-listings in films... Special meaning was also looked for in local botanical names, Bird's-Foot, Henbane, Chickweed, Sparrowgrass and so on. And certainly flying creatures from Ganymede and Phaethon to the Wright brothers, Yuri Gagarin, Montgolfier, Amy Johnson, Linbergh and de Saint-Exupery had to be icons. There were many smaller obsessional interests, like a fascination with English-language proverbs, jokes, nursery language, song titles and general wordplay, 'A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush', 'One swallow doesn't make a summer', 'Why did the chicken cross the road', 'Who killed Cock Robin', 'Bye-bye Blackbird', cock-a-hoop, hen-pecked, cock of the roost. A special place was also reserved for the feather-pen-plume held in Marat's dead hand in David's painting, to conjure up the ambiguities of the English quotation 'the pen is mightier than the sword' and develop them with conumdrums of my own to support the supremacy of birds - 'If the pen is a feather, is the feather mightier than the sword?'.

    The Falls was a watershed for me, containing a great many events, ideas, concepts and conceits which I have since expanded and developed. Its structure is ninety-two film biographies strung end to end, and its content is the examination of a Violent Unknown Event that affects some thirteen million people in north-western Europe, metamorphosing them in at least ninety-two different ways. The conclusions are deliberately left wide open, but there is enough evidence to link the event to birds and to the hubristic ambition of flying. But the film is also an ironic examination of all the ways the world could end, and it is not entirely irrelevant that ninety-two is the atomic number of uranium. When the film was made in 1978-80, there was every conviction that the atom could, and possibly would, be delivered by air one unsuspecting day, and that the agressions of the Cold War, the antagonisms of the Space Race and the murderous cost of agressive defence would find a final solution in a disaster from the skies. (Peter Greenaway, Flying over Water, p.92)

  3. 'It's an ambulatory journey to be taken a little at a time, perhaps to be fast-forwarded through if and when the viewer chooses. Certainly, there's no insistence on my behalf that people should feel the obligation to watch it all the way through at a single sitting.' (Peter Greenaway, on the video release of THE FALLS.)

  4. 'An interest in possibilities of a filmic encyclopedia to rival the Whole Earth Catalogues of the early seventies and a delight in the manufacture of lists for their own sake were the ideas initially responsible for various projects that coalesced into THE FALLS. If an ambitious filmic encyclopedia of the World threatened to make the World redundant, and if the items in the list were essentially unclassifiable, then so much the better'. (Peter Greenaway, "The New Social Function of Cinema", BFI, 1981)

  5. 'Assembled over a five-year period from a combination of self-generated and found film footages, THE FALLS.... [stands] at a pivotal point in the Peter Greenaway filmography, posed between his earlier idiosyncratic short works and the unique pleasures of his post-"Draughtsman's Contract" oeuvre... Shot as a fake documentary assembled from a dazzling inventive array of fictive elements, it takes the form of a directory detailing the selected case histories of those affected by the Violent Unknown Event (or VUE), a mysterious apocalyptic occurrence that has left a substantial section of the British public speaking bizarre invented languages, dreaming of water and identifying themselves with the bird population.

    The film's personal mythologies (strange names, fictional languages, and invented figures like the ubiquitous archivist Tulse Luper proliferate) further develop the representational concerns of his previous short works... while also poking pointed and endlessly inventive fun at the work of Greenaway's then colleagues in the Central Office of Information: "Here were people collating absurd statistics about the number of sheepdogs in South Wales or Japanese restaurants in Ipswich, so I thought I could put the classic BBC techniques, the paraphernalia of apparently 'real' information, to entirely fictional ends"'.(Trevor Johnstone, sleeve notes to the video release of THE FALLS)

  6. 'THE FALLS is a three hour Greenaway grab-bag incorporating newsreel footage, old photographs and animated collages, to make up a pseudo-documentary, a quasi case study featuring... 92 victims of a strange and unexplained phenomenon called [the] VUE... Of 129 million victims, a random selection... yields 92 last names beginning with the letters FALL.' (Laura Denham, "The Films of Peter Greenaway", Minerva Press, 1993)

  7. 'Since a filmic consideration of each of the nineteen million VUE victims, like a full-scale map of the world, would mock human effort, it was thought appropriate to narrow the field, if not the intention, and find a representative but random cross-section of victims whose experiences could help elucidate the [VUE]. Selection by alphabet is random enough, for what other system could put Heaven, Hell, Hitler, Houdini and Hampstead in one category? Not unaware of the significance of the four letters, it was decided that all those victims in the Directory whose surnames begin with the letters FALL were to be chosen. There happened to be just ninety-two... Like their owners, the ninety-two filmed biographies are varied and differ from one another in pace, content, style, mood and intention.' (Peter Greenaway, "The New Social Function of Cinema", BFI, 1981)

  8. '[his] films, in particular THE FALLS, find their place within a rather different domain of the modernist enterprise than that "legitimised" by current avant-garde practice, (this in spite of Greenaway's enthusiasm for chance and pre-ordained structure). That domain is bordered on the one hand by the grand English tradition of nonsense, honoured by the Surrealists as the tradition of "objective humour" that goes back to Lewis Carroll... On the other, rather more respectably, it finds its equivalents in the literary practices of Borges and Calvino.' (Simon Field, "The New Social Function of Cinema", BFI, 1981.)

  9. What matters, as in all absurdist art, is that logical methods work overtime to cope with the wildly bizzare... Greenaway creates his symphonies of sinister systematization from real-life material: philology, ornithology, institutional bureaucracy... THE FALLS is the flexiform shape of cinema to come, and Greenaway a prophet-polymorph for the new millennium. Keep watching the screens!' (Harlan Kennedy, "Film Comment", 1982)

  10. 'THE FALLS is a book published in 1993 by Editions Dis Voir. Its ISBN number is 9-782906-571326. We sell it for UK pounds 12.95.' (Assistant, Waterstone's bookshop, Manchester, UK. 1995.)

  11. 'The film closes with a credit sequence structured by the chorus of the VUE anthem ... and whose images are the film's VUE witnesses projected onto yet another screen. There is no mistaking you have been watching a film - maybe you have only been watching a film of a film'. (Peter Greenaway, "The New Social Function of Cinema", BFI, 1981)

    Joint Winner of the BFI Special Award

Released on video by
Connoisseur Video / CR157 .