Commentary: At 80, Peter Greenaway remains film’s reigning musical maverick
LOS ANGELES — It can be argued that Peter Greenaway is today’s feature filmmaker with the most wide-ranging musical imagination. His best-known films — “The Draughtman’s Contract,” “A Zed & Two Noughts,” “Drowning by Numbers,” “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover” and “Prospero’s Books” — were celebrated in the 1980s and early ’90s for their gripping visual imagination, erudite literate texts and provocative subject matter.
But none of that would have had the same effect were it not for Michael Nyman’s propulsive scores, which draw the viewer into the peculiar, perverse and uniquely obsessive Greenaway universe. It is music applied to make the artificial real, the real bearable, decay delectable, bad behavior distressingly engrossing, sex disturbingly unerotic and landscape an outdoor cabinet of wonders. Greenaway makes it not so much possible to see with your ears, which is the case with conventional film music, but rather impossible to see without your ears.
Those neglected cult classics are now the subject of an American Cinematheque series. A recent weekend of screenings with Greenaway present for his first public appearance in L.A. in over two decades attracted largely young and devout sold-out audiences.
And, as if to prove my point about music being central to Greenaway’s art, the director began the series last month with a
