A Walk Through H

Introduction

Subtitled 'The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist', A Walk Through H records an extraordinary symbolic journey through a mysterious bird-filled country undertaken by an ornithologist at the end of his life.

Press quotes

"Peter Greenaway's unique short feature is one of the best British movies of the decade. It defeats efforts at description. You could call it a cross between a vintage Borges 'fiction' and a Disney True Life Adventure, but that wouldn't get close to it's humour or the compulsiveness of Michael Nyman's score. It's nominally a narrative about an ornithologist following a trail blazed by the legendary Tulse Luper, but it is narrative without characters... See it at all costs" Tony Rayns, TIME OUT 17-23 Nov 1978

"A Walk Through H - Peter Greenaway's 40-minute surrealist film flies free into an empyrean of the imagination all its own... The film is an island of fantasy lapped on all sides by absurdity. Like all the best surrealist art, it combines the pedantically methodical with the devoutly inconsequential... The film takes as its own complete and unquestionable cosmos a world exclusively orientated round maps and birds. The map paintings, by Greenaway himself, are honeycombed with witty detail, the narrator's voice is inspirationally solemn and factual (the humour would have been ruined by a 'funny' voice), and the music soundtrack, often no more than a repetitively plinking piano, is perfectly in key with the changing of the film." Nigel Andrews, SIGHT & SOUND

"In A Walk Through H an aged narrator tells (in voice-over) his own bizarre tale - of a lifetime spent collecting scraps of drawing and writing, scraps collated for him a few minutes before death by a lifelong friend, Tulse Luper, ornithologist extraordinaire and author of a definitive treatise on bird migration. These collated 'maps' guide the narrator after death on his walk through the kingdom of H, and as the camera traces his path across them (in extreme close-up) we are told of their histories and origins: nought, found, and, as often as not, stolen. Birds begin to appear as the unseen narrator tells how he strove to reach his distant goal across ambiguous, sometimes misleading maps. The journey's end proves to be its own beginning and the narrator is again poignantly suspended at the moment of his death, waiting for reincarnation, for the film to be shown again." Chris Auty, TIME OUT