A Zed & Two Noughts
Greenaway
The Draughtsman's Contract was critically successful. Some distributors in France even made a lot of money out of its francophile cartesian hauteur, its icy cool manners and the puzzling intellectual challenges. To follow a successful and so-called first-feature film (so-called because the film had been prepared in a sense on the back of over ten years of experimental film-making) was not so easy. And when it finally arrived, after some anguish at ever finding the money to make it, the film, A Zed & Two Noughts, was itself not so easy either. Some said it was three films in one. First, an essay on twinship and the idea of meeting oneself, second, a dissertation on the world as an ark and, thirdly, a celebration of Vermeer, master of light.
It was photographed by the French master Sascha Vierny, with music again by Michael Nyman, with a cast of live animals in cages courtesy of Rotterdam Zoo, and a cast of dead animals filmed quietly rotting in lengthy time-lapse studies in a field somewhere in Dorset. Much research into the lives of gynaecologists and twinship-genetics was avidly pursued. Revered naturalist David Attenbourgh, blue comedian Jim Davidson, and majestic actor Joss Ackland (who subsequently declared it was the worst film he had ever seen, leave alone acted in) gave their authority to its making; and David Cronenberg remade a version of it a little later as Dead Ringers, after sitting me down for a long quizzing session in a Toronto hamburger bar. He successfully played the trick of making the two twins one person courtesy of Jeremy Irons, whilst we tried the much more difficult game of making two actors (admittedly brothers) not only twins, but separated Siamese twins, and not only separated Siamese twins, but separated Siamese twins who wanted to be united.
The surgeon responsible for the attempted unification was van Megeren, infamous faker of Vermeers, whose light we borrowed, a light that nearly always comes from the left, a metre and a half above the ground. Vermeer used a primitive camera in the 1670s, and Godard suggested Vermeer might have been the first cinematographer because he created a world based on split seconds of time modelled entirely with light - a definition of cinema. To celebrate Vermeer, a directory of a painter's vocabulary of light was essential, and in making one, it seemed correct also to make a comparable directory of light to celebrate Sascha Vierny.
We made a list. We hoped to make an example of every one of its items - lighting by God at dawn, sunrise, noon, dusk, twilight, moon-light and star-light, fire and phosphorescence, and by man, fireworks, flambeaux, matches, candles, oil-lamps, cathode-tube, neon-tube, car head-lamps, numerous torches and many many more. The final challenge was light by rainbow. And there is such a shot, a rainbow indeed illuminates the doorway of an elephant house.
Vermeer as master lightsmith, but also Vermeer as husband, father of eleven children, Protestant who married a Catholic in religion-divided Netherlands, domestic paragon and mysterious admirer of women, giving them a dignity and an honour rare among his contemporaries, has continued to fascinate. You never see the legs of a Vermeer woman, and so it was with us, save our heroine never had any legs, because they were amputated to make her better fit the film-frame.
A Zed & Two Noughts, striving hard, even in its title, to play games of symbolism, multiple meaning and non-narrative structure, was not recorded in orthodox circles as a comprehensible box office success, though it now, after 20 years, has a considerable fan club stretching from Siberia to Mexico City, most of whose members know the film considerably better than I. Because of both its huge ambition and its infelicities, it is the one film I would dearly, if ever given the chance, wish to remake; a parent often reserves his greatest affection for the most troubled and troubling offspring.