Greenaway’s Witty, Wearying ‘Falls’

Peter Greenaway’s dazzling, confounding 1980 three-hour-plus “The Falls” (at the Nuart Sunday and Monday) takes its title from 92 people whose last names begins with “Falls.” The names, we are told in an opening crawl, are among 19 million listed in a directory published every three years by the Violent Unknown Event (VUE) investigating committee. What follows are a flow of beautiful English urban and rural images, interrupted from time to time with fragmented vignettes, diagrams, drawings, written texts (the last a Greenaway passion).

Meanwhile, voice-over narrators tell us absurdist, nonsense tales--each introduced by Michael Nyman’s jaunty theme music--of all 92 people concerning the effects of the mysterious VUE, which in turn prompts much speculation on the part of Greenaway as to what, if any, birds had to play in the catastrophe that has left so many transformed by bizarre mutations, suggesting ultimately the notion of man turned into bird only to fall rather than soar; curiously, all the “Falls” people look perfectly ordinary.

Clearly, Greenaway means to leave it up to us as to what to make of his wearying yet endlessly witty and inventive work--and we do come away with the feeling that if somehow humanity did survive a nuclear catastrophe we would avoid confronting the meaning of its horrors by immersing ourselves in an endless, passionately obscene cataloguing of its effects on survivors. As in other early Greenway works (much of which will be shown at the Nuart Tuesday and Wednesday), “The Falls” suggests that we get so caught up in constructing entire universes out of data that we lose touch with the natural world.

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