Vertical Features Remake

Greenaway

Vertical Features Remake is a love-hate, or more appropriately, celebration-criticism, of structural method, unthinkingly and stupidly dominant in film circles at that time. If you claimed to be a structuralist your credentials were good enough to receive film-financing. Five years before you had to be a good Marxist-Socialist Feminist and then the coffers would be open, five years later, you could get financed if you demonstrated Political Correctness and a love of California.

The subject of Vertical Features Remake is landscape, scrupulously filmed and framed in static 'bits' centring around verticals - nature-created and man-made. And the organisation is deliberately extra-frame, organised around rigid frame number-counts - after all, on the one hand cinema is truth twenty-four frames a second, and on the other, film is a self-consciously manufactured process using the cheapest methods to create the lowest common denomination of illusory movement - Nouvelle Vague crossed with Arte Povere. Cinema is itself. But, as always film-makers cannot agree amongst themselves and the film Vertical Features has to be made three times, one for the master, one for the dame and one for the little boy who lives down the lane. Everyone has his or her needs and everyone should be accommodated. The warring academics were an excuse to explain the methodology, always a structuralist bane, and maybe their explanations set down filmically between the three films, with copious apocryphal diagrams, visual aids, archival exposition and subjectively-viewed manuscript text and drawings, are the highlight of the work - how are film solutions and agendas arrived at, how are they manipulated, what intellectual devices are pulled out to justify schemes and propositions? After all there is no such thing as history, there are only historians. In the end though, it's the landscape 'bits' - trees, posts, poles standing in snow and sunshine along the Brecon Beacons, the Wiltshire Downs, and in the Suffolk marshes - that win out - the bricks of landscape that excite, please, surprise, console and delight us all.