The Falls

Greenaway

The Falls is the magnum opus of this time. Now recreated in essence with all the new technologies of the 21st century in The Tulse Luper Suitcases - a project of peripatetic, picaresque encyclopaedia. I had always vowed to remake this essay every ten years - a goodly time to update a directory. Indeed The Falls did find its way into a book published in 1993 - twelve years after, and now it's 2003 and time to make a remake.

The original of The Falls was finally finished in 1980 and on 16mm with magnetic tape soundtrack. It is over three hours long and is divided into 92 end-to-end biographies of people who in some way have been apocalyptically associated with the VUE, the Violent Unknown Event, a phenomenon connected with birds - their flying or non-flying characteristics, their voice and song, their individual species habits, their man-manufactured mythology. Every civilisation in geography and history has had ambitions to fly. Here with uncertainties, ambiguities, vested interest informations and dis-informations is a compendium of human tragedies and celebrations, accompanied by the notion of birds. Audubon and Hitchcock are included, and so are all the familiars of the personal mythology of Tulse Luper, polymath, polyglot and sometime tiresome autodidact who had a mocking theory about almost everything.

A history of the world should be a history of every one of its inhabitants, but that, like the Borgesian same-scale-as-the-world map, absurdly mocks human effort, so a section of humanity has to stand in for the mass, and in this case, all those people in the VUE Directory whose surnames appropriately begin with the letters FALL - will have to suffice. The Fall of Man, but more significantly the great Fall of Angels that introduced discord into the world - are, of course, referenced.