Peter Greenaway: BOOK / contents
Andras Balint Kovacz
What is Behind the Picture?
The Concept of Nothing by Antonioni and by Greenaway
A selection from the collections of the Boymans-van Beuningen Meseum,
Rotterdam - section Touch
A film still from "The Draughtsman's Contract"
A film still from "Blow - up"
Little effort has been dedicated by film historians and
film critics to determine by what phenomena, when and how the modern in
cinema cedes its place to what can be called the post-modern. I suspect
that one reason for this is that there is no clear sense of what modern
cinema means in the first place. Is it a period, is it a style, is it
a narrative strategy, or is it simply anything that is new? John Orr argues,
for example, that modern cinema is finished, but it has not been replaced;
there is no such thing as post-modern cinema, or if there is one, it is
in fact a continuation of modern cinema.
By comparing one crucial plot element in Greenaway's The Draughtsman's
Contract and in Antonioni's Blow Up I want to demonstrate what I think
the end of modernist cinema represents. Even if we don’t exactly know
what the post-modern means in cinema, I think that one can point to phenomena
in the late seventies, which substantially differ from what is widely
acknowledged as the character of modern cinema of the sixties and early
seventies, and which can be considered as a starting point of a new paradigm.
I hope that this comparison will provide an evidence that the modernist
paradigm in cinema, at least as far as Greenaway's films are concerned,
has been replaced by something essentially different from it.
My analysis will bear on one aspect of the philosophical ground of the
two films. The most influential philosophical current preceding and contemporary
to modern cinema was existentialism. And, at least until the mid-sixties
there was no doubt about the impact of existentialism on films of the
greatest modernist masters, such as Bergman, Antonioni and Godard. From
Kierkegaard to Sartre, one of the key concepts of existentialist philosophy
is Nothing. This concept plays already an important role in Hegel's dialectical
philosophy, and Nietzsche in his anti-dialectical and anti-metaphysical
philosophy also gives Nothing a distinguished meaning.
András Bálint KOVÁCS
Associate professor and the director of film programme at the Institute
of Art and Communication, ELTE University, Budapest. Selected bibliography:
"Les Mondes d'Andrej Tarkovsky" (together with Akos Szilágyi),
Editions L'Age d'Homme, Lausanne, 1987, Budapest 1997; »Metropolis«, Paris,
Budapest, 1992; "Film and Narration", Budapest, 1997; translation
of Gilles Deleuze: "L'Image-mouvement" and "L'Image-Temps"
into Hungarian.
