Psycho. #17

Reflections on a changing canon.

Which canonical auteurs are unfashionable in the present moment?

My first instinct, which I have to go with, is to say: Peter Greenaway. Now, Greenaway was honoured with a retrospective at the BFI in 2022 and again by IDFA last year, so it may be that I’m talking out of my arse, but I think it’s the case that I don’t hear Greenaway mentioned as a great elder of British cinema, at least not as he used to be when I first got into cinema, about 10-15 years after his heyday. Back then, I watched Drowning By Numbers (1988) with university friends, feeling something akin to excitable bafflement, because Greenaway was so uncool, seemed so blissfully engaged with the pictorial qualities of his films, and hadn’t really bothered with psychological verisimilitude or a screenplay. I felt like I was watching a weird, tinny opera. Around this time, The Pillow Book came out — perhaps Greenaway’s last film to meet with any sort of popular audience, although it was greeted rather coldly by critics. And no wonder: although it oozes sensuality and is gorgeous to look at, the film came out at a time when the pert ironies and sometimes smart-aleckry of American indie cinema were starting to signify the death of a certain strain of ‘poetic’ movie-making. Did Greenaway lose his touch? Certainly; but it’s also true that his type of cinema — full-blooded, pretentious, lush, baroque — was on the way out by the late 1990s, seen off by Tarantino. That would have the effect of rubbing out the reputation of some of his earlier movies: when do you ever hear people raving about The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover anymore?