Short of the Week: Peter Greenaway’s statistical analysis of death, ‘Windows’
Throughout the history of cinema, many prominent filmmakers have often drawn inspiration from other art forms such as paintings, sculptures and, more recently, even video games. One such director is Peter Greenaway, whose films have often reflected the unique sensibilities present in Renaissance and Baroque art. Known for seminal works such as The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Greenaway’s vision of cinema always stands out.
During his early years, the Welsh filmmaker was convinced that he was going to become a painter. However, Greenaway was eventually mesmerised by the infinite potential of the cinematic medium, having watched the films of pioneers such as Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard. The French New Wave played a significant role in influencing his decision to pursue cinema since he was completely enamoured by Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad.
For this edition of Short of the Week, we have decided to highlight Greenaway’s striking 1975 film Windows. Only about three minutes long, Greenaway contemplates the bizarre statistics of deaths related to people falling out of windows. It’s interesting to compare Windows to Greenaway’s later works, especially because the ageing auteur is still active, and his latest project – Walking to Paris – has attracted the attention of fans.
During a conversation with Screen Slate, Greenaway said: “It’s rather strange. You pass the biblical threescore years and ten, and they begin to think that retrospectives are part of the game. I’m sure there are people who think I’m dead, I’m so goddamn old now. But as you can tell from my actually talking to you, I’m still alive. And still making films and still hoping to continue because the excitement of making movies is extraordinarily powerful.”
The director added: “I’m not so sure cinema is quite the same thing as it was for our grandfathers. Cinema was invented as a public art, and we all went down the high street and we sat together in a crowd. But I bet you, as a professional critic, and me, as a professional filmmaker, we spend more of our time alone, either in our bedrooms, our offices or workplaces, actually looking at single screens on our own. Maybe every now and again, we use cinema as an event, but it’s not a common practice so much anymore.”
Windows might be too breezy compared to his well-known opuses, but it remains a fascinating cinematic chronicle featuring a drily humourous account of our tragicomic relationship with death. Greenaway questions our civilisation’s obsession with statistics, demonstrating that they rarely capture the morbid spectrum of something so fundamental to the human condition as suicide.
Watch the film below.
