Murder at the Rijksmuseum
by James Hoff
Rembrandt’s J’Accuse (2009) and Nightwatching (2007), directed by Peter Greenaway
Peter Greenaway has always been a visually-oriented director. Originally trained as a painter, Greenaway meticulously structures the images in his films, revealing a care and attention to the meaning of visual composition that is almost unheard of in popular cinema. Indeed the compositions of many of his frames look more like seventeenth century paintings than twentieth century film stills. This attention to the details of the visual image, often at the expense of any illusion of narrative reality, has, not surprisingly, been met with very mixed reviews. For those used to the strong narrative focus and action-driven aesthetics of directors like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Quentin Tarantino, Greenaway’s work may feel overly intellectual, emotionally cold, or just plain boring. Those more interested in the potential visual and structural experiments that are still possible in film, however, will be much more likely to appreciate Greenaway’s attention to the power of the image. His emphasis on the visual and rejection of the illusion of cinema is more in line with the aesthetics of the avant-garde works of directors like Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, and Luis Bunuel. Like these directors Greenaway is unafraid of calling attention to the artificiality of his own work as art. For Greenaway, film is no more real than a painting or a sculpture and its aesthetic roots lay not in the theatre, but in the visual arts.
In this sense Greenaway’s career has been an ongoing battle against the prevailing decline of visual literacy. And in his latest film, the documentary Rembrandt’s J’accuse, Greenaway makes explicit this belief in the value of thinking in visual terms and in learning how to see and better represent the world through a close attention to the images provided us by the great masters of painting. “Most people,” Greenaway argues, “are visually illiterate. Why should it be otherwise? We have a text based culture. Our educational systems teach us to value text over image, which is one of the reasons why we have such an impoverished cinema.” This intentionally provocative statement is nothing new however since Greenaway has been obsessed with the contrast, the conflict, and the occasional intersections between the visual and the textual, between words and images, since at least Prospero’s Books, released in 1991. Coming just seven minutes into the film, this argument operates like a thesis statement, setting the tone and providing a much needed context for the rest of this remarkable film.
The focus of Greenaway’s documentary is the story behind Rembrandt’s well known and controversial painting Night Watch. Finished in 1642, Night Watch was one of Rembrandt’s last paintings before his disastrous decline as a painter. Although art historians argue there is little evidence that Night Watch had anything to do with Rembrandt’s withering popularity, Greenaway makes a different argument, positing a conspiracy of astonishing complexity. Without giving away too much, Greenaway’s essential argument is that Rembrandt’s highly evocative and visually rich portrait is “a painted piece of theatre,” full of hidden condemnations, ridicules, and most importantly, an indictment and an accusation of murder or, as Greenaway puts it, “assassination disguised as military accident.” According to Greenaway, Rembrandt’s famous painting of the Dutch militia company offers a symbolic depiction of the murder of Captain Piers Hasselberg, the commander, as Greenaway tells us, of the Thirteenth Company of the Amsterdam militia.
Greenaway, perhaps playfully or perhaps in earnest (it’s hard to tell), claims that his argument offers an answer and solution to many of the core mysteries that have surrounded the painting since it was unveiled in 1642. Like so many of Greenaway’s works the film is highly formally structured, based upon a set of thirty-three mysteries, which are explained in sequence. From an explanation of the culture of Dutch militia companies, to a discussion of the curiously phallic and homo-erotic placement of William Van Ruytenberg’s partisan, to the incredibly curious and unconventional golden girl who seems to be running through the center of the crowd, Greenaway examines these mysteries one at a time, building his case like a public prosecutor.
A Scene from Greenaway’s Rembrandt’s J’accusse (2009)
Clearly Rembrandt’s painting is a satirical criticism of the pretentious and arrogant Dutch militias, who by 1642 had largely given up fighting and patrolling and spent the majority of their time drinking, eating, and devising ever new ways of increasing their wealth. The ridiculous dress, the clumsy way they hold their weapons (many of them would never have had opportunity to use such weapons against an enemy) and the diminutive proportions of several of the figures seem to reveal what must have been Rembrandt’s thinly disguised contempt for the Bourgeois militiamen. But Greenaway’s argument takes these insults to a level beyond the plausible.
Playing upon many of these oft-noted visual insults, Greenaway constructs a series of convoluted and complex propositions to prove his point, sounding at times more like a patrician conspiracy theorist than an art critic. But perhaps this is the point. Although these arguments are not always convincing — indeed some of the claims are wildly speculative and there seems to be very little actual historical evidence to support them — historical accuracy is not what this director is after. Greenaway seems to take such pleasure in the story he is spinning and his insights are so dazzling and satisfying that their veracity hardly seems to matter. Greenaway’s real purpose, however, is not to prove his point, but to test how well Rembrandt’s Night Watch is able to evoke and support a story of such complexity and suspense — and indeed, the painting seems more than capable of this. Greenaway’s act of exegetic storytelling bring us full circle back to one of the central aesthetic arguments of his entire oeuvre, which is that the visual is itself a form of communication, and that images, even still images, may also contain meaningful narratives. It is the loss of this sense of visual narrative, Greenaway would argue, that has reduced so much of our current cinema to mere emotional amalgams of dialogue and action, with little, if any concern for the composition of the several thousand still images that make up a film. This, I would add, has also led to a fair share of very bad film criticism, so much of which is obsessed with discussions of narrative and action, often at the expense of any possible discussions of the image.
A Scene from Drowning By Numbers (1988)
Rembrandt’s J’accuse is not the first time that Greenaway has tackled the story of Night Watch. In 2007 Greenaway directed Nightwatching, which in retrospect seems a kind of dramatic preparation for the more documentary Rembrandt’s J’accuse. Indeed, Nightwatching makes almost the exact same argument as J’accuse, except that instead of exploring the thirty-three mysteries, Nightwatching focuses more on the painter himself and the psychological, aesthetic, and political maneuverings involved in the creation of this, his great masterpiece. Shot in the same kind of candle-lit chiaroscuro that was so popular in Rembrandt’s work, Greenaway manages to visually capture both the sense of mystery that the painting elicits, as well as the house-bound claustrophobia of Dutch life in the 17th century. In fact, a good portion of Rembrandt’s J’accuse is borrowed footage from Nightwatching, adding an oddly self-conscious but effective dramatic element into the documentary. Greenaway’s obsession with Rembrandt is no surprise, however, seeing as how so many of Greenaway’s films are filled with similarly structured, intensely symbolic and portentous visual narratives, full of their own sometimes nagging mysteries. Consider, for instance the several odd time-lapsed scientific experiments in A Zed and Two Naughts or the highly elaborate games played throughout Drowning by Numbers.
Scene from A Zed and Two Naughts (1985)
Greenaway is, however, above all else a sensualist, a painter of the world and the human body in light and shadow, and although Rembrandt’s J’accuse is at times visually lush, it is precisely this sensuousness that Greenaway fans will find lacking in the film. This is in part because of the documentary nature of the film, but is also the result of Greenaway’s changing style. Ever since Prospero’s Books, which evoked an enormous amount of digitally composed techniques of text and image overlaid onto the screen, Greenaway has been obsessed with, and has explored in increasingly enervating excess, the possibilities of this technology. In films like Prospero’s Books and The Pillow Book, this technique has the effect of giving greater depth and detail to the shot or sequene in which it is employed, but here its use is increasingly distracting and often feels unnecessary. Indeed, the technological busyness of this film, as if looking at several monitor screens all at once, makes one miss and long for the slower, less frenzied, but still intricate compositions of his earlier work like A Zed and Two Naughts, The Belly of an Architect, or the always delightful Drowning by Numbers.
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