Vertical Features Remake
Introduction
Vertical Features Remake is a playful parody of avant-garde theorising in which academics argue about the life and work of Tulse Luper, Greenaway's best known fictional character. In their efforts to reconstruct one of Luper's early projects, the publically-funded Institute of Reclamation and Restoration (IRR) end up with four versions of the film. Score is by Michael Nyman.
Press quotes
"Vertical Features Remake is a sort of sci-fi sequel to A Walk Through H, looking back from an imagined future at some recently ‘discovered' fragments of Luper's oeuvre - an abandoned deconstruction film (or landscape essay) provisionally entitled Vertical Features. Remaking the film provides an excuse for four adventures in formal film construction which simultaneously mock formalism, academic discourse and institutions like the bfi. Vertical Features Remake is a partly autobiographical absurdist fantasy that could have been conceived by Lewis Carroll. It presents the world of the IRR, the powerful Institute of Reclamation and Restoration, which has just discovered some sketchy surviving records of a ‘film project undertaken by Tulse Luper when he was working officially, but it seems reluctantly, on a State landscape Programme.' That programme was code-named Session, and its ominous aim was ‘the creation of a dynamic landscape'. Vertical Features was a document made in protest by Tulse Luper, and Vertical Features Remake consists of the IRR's four attempts to reconstruct that film.
"In fact the film is an attack on the whole British film-culture, with the IRR on one side and pedantic academia on the other. Both sides are seen as unconscious partners in a sinister threatening Session 3, laying waste the cinematic landscape. This never becomes a crude allegory or a simple protest, though; the short films-within-the-film are remarkable on their own terms and the musical collaboration with Michael Nyman makes for a harsh lyricism". Chris Auty, TIME OUT Dec 1978
"A key film in the Greenaway canon and possibly the most enjoyable film he has ever made. It tells of the efforts of the fictional Institute of Reclamation and Restoration to reconstruct an experimental short, Vertical Features, made by one Tulse Luper (clearly a Greenaway alter ego). Amid much hilarious academic spluttering, the group ends up assembling it in four slightly different ways. Each version offers a flow of awesomely beautiful landscapes in which the vertical is emphasised, set to Michael Nyman's oddly poignant, jangling score." LOS ANGELES TIMES
"In their continuing attempt to elucidate the life and work of the environmentalist and arch-cataloguer Tulse Luper, the publically-funded IRR, the Institute of Reclamation and Restoration, reconstruct one of his early film projects.
"Carefully explaining and documenting their method and approach, the IRR, in their endeavour to satisfy critics, academics and film enthusiasts, end up not with one reconstructed film, but with four.
"The fascination with academic methodicality which pervades Greenaway's work, sometimes in comic battle with its opposite - nature, spontaneity, instinct - sometimes standing alone, reaches fetishistic dimensions in Vertical Features Remake.
"Each of these reshapings - Vertical Features Remake 1, VFR 2, VFR 3 - is shown within Greenaway's larger film, and sandwiched between them are burlesque snippets (very funny) from the imaginary academic controversies that greeted each version." Nigel Andrews, SIGHT AND SOUND