PROSPERO’S BOOKS. Greenaway’s Digital Experiment Decrypted

The Danish collaborator of Greenaway, Kess Kassander, who financed the Rotterdam Film Festival and served as the executive producer of Prospero’s Books, was fascinated by how the film was made. In an interview with Howard Rodman, Greenaway stated, The reason I got interested in cinema is its unique potential for playing with images, playing with words, and their interactions. I started my career as a painter, and I still believe that painting is the primary visual means of communication. Twentieth-century painting was ten times more radical than cinema. Cinema is conservative, claims Greenaway. If you look at the twentieth-century trends in painting, starting with cubism, there is nothing comparable in cinema.

It is no coincidence that Greenaway chose Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Prospero’s Books are essentially a collection of continuous translations. The first is an interpretation of Shakespeare’s original. Knowing that I love my books, he (Gonzalo) provided me from my own library with volumes that I valued above my dukedom. This line, spoken by Prospero, could serve as a metaphor for the whole. Greenaway assumes that this library contains twenty-four books and sets out to invent them. Some of the most important are: the Book of Mirrors and the Book of Water. The twenty-four books form the backbone of the structure, creating something like a grid of intersecting lines on which the narrative is based. Greenaway has a formal, rigorous, almost algebraic approach to film narrative. The painterly richness of the image seemingly contradicts this, but it functions more like a collage or pastiche. The film images, styled after works by Hals or Vermeer, with a female entourage reminiscent of a Bacchante procession, photographed through Greenaway’s characteristic long lateral camera movements, the image of a small boy symbolizing the creative soul, overlap with musically textured shots of rhythmically dripping water droplets and pulsating balls of fire within the frame.

The space of several frames is simultaneously contained within itself. Human figures merge in the cinematic space with superimposed calligraphy, interpenetrating with the image of a pen writing on parchment. The film image here is polyphonic, expanded not only spatially, multi-layered through the additional depth created, but also on the screen plane thanks to the frames contained within. Simultaneously, the illusory nature of this image is emphasized by several shots in which a wider view reveals that we were watching only a screen, in front of which Prospero or Miranda sits, and onto which a curtain also falls. Objects, including the books, change their colors. All thanks to HDTV technology, which Greenaway in Prospero’s Books gives an almost magical status, possessing the extraordinary power of art. It is a technique rich in numerous possibilities. It is very apt to compare that on this electronic island, where Greenaway can be assumed to be Prospero, anything can happen, as the master’s apologists wrote. Using HDTV, we have the opportunity to add a new metaphor, another layer of meaning.

Prospero’s Books are not just a translation as interpretation, but also a translation film – tape – film. Filmed traditionally on 35 mm tape, they are transferred to widescreen high-definition video, with 1125 lines. Using High Definition technology, we achieve a hundred percent image improvement, as we have twice as many lines on the television screen. It’s like a newspaper photo, more dots mean better image quality. Greenaway thus uses both conventional film techniques and HD television resources. The post-production of Prospero’s Books took place in Japan, in one of the most modern studios in high vision. Only later were the books transferred back to celluloid tape and sent to normal distribution. In the Japanese studio, in the room where the drawing device – the paintbox – was located, Eve Ramboz, collaborating with Greenaway, input images into the computer, also working with painting reproductions and original prints. She processed the images by coloring, reversing and rotating, changing sizes, emphasizing individual elements. All of this was done in close collaboration with the director. The paintbox images were fed into the computer, where they were analyzed, layered, then fine-tuned, combined, and edited. Post-production costs amounted to $4 million.

Copying was done at Imagica, one of the best Japanese film laboratories. During the making of Prospero’s Books, Greenaway was involved in television work. Previously, he prepared seven programs in which he attempted to realize what he himself called “television television” in contrast to the classic film language. He discovered that television has its own alphabet and does not, as he metaphorically put it, only use vowels. The program called Dante decisively made Greenaway start looking for more perfect techniques than ordinary television. Until now, very complex images could not be viewed in good quality on a large screen. Striving for another extreme, Greenaway made the widescreen film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. However, the director dreamed of combining both poles. And so Prospero’s Books were created.

Thanks to great technical possibilities, the British creator creates fantastic books, just as Prospero invents his fantastic island Utopia. The translations and transformations prevalent in the film at another level concern the relationships between author and character (Shakespeare – Prospero), actor and character (Gielgud – Prospero), director and character (Greenaway – Prospero). The Tempest is a very good example of self-referential art; the film is self-referential in repeatedly emphasizing that The Tempest is a text. Greenaway imagines art as Prospero’s own creation, which is why we see this magical playwright’s pen calligraphing the next lines of text. His unearthly powerful voice conjures the characters, and Prospero invents dialogues for other people. The creators recorded Gielgud’s voice simultaneously with each actor’s voice. Characters begin to speak in their own voices only when something like catharsis and forgiveness occurs in the film’s symbolic layer. By a strange twist of fate, Gielgud’s last great role was linked with Shakespeare’s last full play. The Tempest is a drama about blossoming and dying, beginning and ending; the film can be interpreted in relation to both the end of the century and the end of the millennium. Prospero’s last ironic gesture – the burning of books – expresses Greenaway’s tragic reference to the former culture, of which he is an apologist, and to its creative techniques.

This image is superimposed with the image of Ariel running through fire and water towards the viewer, an image with cathartic and regenerating power. The whole world gradually disappears, the curtain falls between us and the world, a system of mirrors and multiple reflections. The apocalypse has the dimension of a spectacle. At the end, we hear the sound of water, just like at the beginning. We live in an age where a pair of shoes is worth Shakespeare (Alain Finkielkraut), suggests Greenaway. The post-industrial world is reflected in the film space, ambiguous and multi-layered, heterogeneous, with elements of pastiche. A completely different “pastiche space” was created, among other things, thanks to the use of HDTV technology. The logic of pastiche is a peculiar mixture of elements, for example, architectural styles of different eras overlapping each other, it is a scenography that emphasizes its artificiality, where analysis combines with synthesis. The past exists through celebration, spectacle. We are societies exposed to viewing, like an exhibition. The vitality of these societies is preserved only by constant communication. There is no longer an inner life of the soul, there is only the reality of communication, the outer life. Beyond this life, a single individual does not exist. Reproduction, that is, repeatability, is pushed to the limits of absurdity. Culture must be a simulation and reproduction to exist; it cannot absorb something new; it remains in a vicious circle of its own creators from the past and present. The world of Prospero’s Books follows the same logic, perfectly demonstrating it.

I want my HDTV, Coppola demanded during a session of the National Association of Broadcasters. Coppola, who pioneered the use of electronic techniques while filming Apocalypse Now in the Philippine jungle, used video technology in the production of Dracula. He created a collage of visual images with sketches and illustrations from books. The fascination with HDTV technology can be seen in Derek Jarman’s film The Garden. Wim Wenders, in the film Until the End of the World, also uses this technique in the dream sequence, employing as a filmic device the noise that occurs when HD tape is played faster on a digital player. This new technology fascinates many creators. Raymond Bellour even compared what has happened in the field of cinema and imagery to a “revolution of poetic language.” Just as the boundary between rhythmic prose and free-verse poetry has blurred, so the field of cinema and “new images” interpenetrate each other. Film has always embraced new technology, electronic images, especially their multiple realities, dreamlike qualities, and layered overlays. Today, anyone can observe modern television techniques at the London Museum of Moving Images. However, cinema taught us how to look at the world; now we want to learn how to view cinema through other media, as one of the critics of Cahiers du Cinema previously noted.

Written by Małgorzata Kulisiewicz