A Zed & Two Noughts (Peter Greenaway, 1985) (Patreon)

I watched this for a project that asked writers to revisit films that were formative for our burgeoning cinephilia, the idea of course being that we have changed, our tastes have evolved, and a film from this period of our lives is certain to hold some personal weight. When I was in high school, A Zed & Two Noughts was one of two films that radically refocused my ideas about what cinema could do, not just as a story-delivery-system but as a formal endeavor. (The other film was Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, so you can perhaps figure out why I'm so warped.)

 I don't remember exactly when I last saw Zed, but it was a long time ago, at least twenty years. Coming back to it, there were a lot of things that surprised me, not just about Greenaway's film but my reaction to it all those years ago. For one thing, I don't recall being bothered by all the carnage, slaughter, and decay. Just for grins I watched the end credits closely, and indeed there is no disclaimer about "no animals being harmed." Granted, I don't think they started doing that until the nineties, but I did find myself wondering (a) whether some of the animal corpses were fake; (b) if not, how exactly Greenaway procured them; (c) if some or even all of the death on display could be plausibly excused, if not for art than maybe science. Anyhow, I'm not sure this film could even be screened anymore.

I go into much more detail in the essay I wrote, but the other thing that struck me is how formative this film is for Greenaway. Zed was only his second narrative film (third, if you count The Falls, which you could reasonably do or not). And you can still see the filmmaker struggling to create a story that yokes together all of his visual ideas. At times, he and Sacha Vierny give us stock-still, symmetrical compositions that just linger there, while characters stolidly declaim large swaths of text. Greenaway the writer and Greenaway the painter are both quite present in Zed, but they often seem to be working at cross purposes. He mostly solves this dilemma with The Belly of an Architect, which is a less adventurous film, certainly, but a more fully realized one.

And about that writing. Zed sometimes seems like a grab-bag of themes and motifs (decay, fate, symmetry / asymmetry, evolution, perverse desire, and so on) that drift and bob around each other, as they might in an epic poem. They don't really coalesce, though, and the sheer preponderance of concepts and literary / art historical allusions is both astonishing and a bit frustrating. It's as though Greenaway is still uncertain whether he'll get the chance to make another film, so he's loading this particular camel's back to the breaking point. And while Greenaway's ostentatious erudition seems wry and self-parodying in later films like Drowning by Numbers and even The Cook, the Thief..., here it seems like he's nervously showing off, relentlessly insisting that he is a serious artist and thinker. 

Don't get me wrong: I still like this film quite a lot, and I admire it even more. But one of the traits that would eventually result in Greenaway's fanbase abandoning him -- the pummelling maximalism that made The Tulse Luper Suitcases so hermetic -- is already very much in evidence here.