Mathématique
Life is unpredictable. Nothing in life is based on chance. Things happen as they should, you can't do anything about it. You are responsible for your own (un)happiness... And so it goes on.
One thing is certain: it is a confusing mess, both inside and outside. And life consists of trying to get order in that mess, or the illusion of order, or pushing the mess behind masses of anesthesia, work, and/or stiff upper lips. The English are especially strong in that area. But they also take strange paths when it comes to creating order. Take, for example, director Peter Greenaway, maker of films such as Downing by Numbers, the Cook, The Thief His Wife and Her Lover. his obsession with numbers, letters, color themes and other mathematical equations is well known. This way you can of course give everything an air of logic.
And if you would like to see how it all started with Mister Greenaway, cinematically speaking, you can watch 6 short films by the master on April 17 in the cine club of Het Kwade Oog, co-organized by the Other Film in the A.M.V.C. Minderbroedersstr. 22 Antwerp. the first Tilm Windows dates from '74, lasts 'minutes (!) and is about 37 people who died in 1973 due to... a fall out of the window. Not all from the same window, methinks. If that's all... But no, there's already the next film: H is for House (76); This has nothing to do with music, but everything to do with Greenaway's wife and daughter at home on a summer day in the countryside. H is for House takes place on (at least) 3 levels: the glorification of rural life, the director's own version of the children's alphabet, where he does not go further than the letter 'H'. the third level has to do with time and the points of the compass. What happens when things don't go the way we're used to? From date. Then follows Dear Phone (76). Images of red English telephone booths alternate with scrap sheets of a man who is an obsessive telephone user. A man...! Yeah, so what? Water rackets (78), that's what. About the tension between 'seeing' and 'knowing', about images of a lake while the story is told of a fictional army that is shipwrecked and the suggestion that 'seeing' is determined as much by systems of thought as language. It's all in the mind. A Walk Trough (78) is about a collection of maps from the ornithologist (=bird watcher) Tulse Luper, through which the narrator can take a walk through the land of H. Not the road, but the image of the road is central. What people are concerned with! Pure Zen. and then, as the aptheosis, Act of God (80) in which people who have been struck by lightning tell their electrifying (-frying?) story. The lightning! Both a cruel joke of fate and an example of supreme, natural revelation. like Greenaway's (imagined) universe itself. Come & see (ninette m.)
