On Sun, 3 Mar 2002, Miles Jackson wrote:
> > The numbering that is a Greenaway leitmotif emphasizes the
> > arbitrariness of the serial character of a narration. When he combines this
> > deconstruction of narration with the deconstruction of the image, you get an
> > unequalled masterpiece like Prospero's Books.
> >
> ...one of the most mind-numbing, tedious movies I've ever seen. But let
> a hundred flowers bloom, eh?
Admittedly, I'm a Greenaway fanatic and love even his obscure stuff. But I've never understood how people can say this movie doesn't have a narrative or that it has a deconstructed one. It's basically Sir John Gielgud reading the text of Shakespeare's _The Tempest_ out loud from beginning to end with each passage filmicly illustrated. There are some cuts (like in any performance) but the order of the original text is preserved. If you're a Shakespeare fan, and I am, this is just another take on the play, and a relatively faithful one at that as these things go these days. (By contrast, I saw a wonderful performance of The Tempest at the Folger Library last year where Caliban was a woman.)
Greenaway's other movies have fragmented narratives or schematics instead of narratives. But not this one, I don't think.
Michael