The Falls (1980, Peter Greenaway) (Patreon)

79/100

Second viewing, last seen 1995. The rare film that has a legitimate claim to being truly sui generis—of the nearly 9000 other features I've seen, only Alexey Fedorchenko's Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari can even be said to inhabit the same ballpark, and those affinities are pretty superficial. A better analogue, perhaps, is the complete James O. Incandenza filmography, if that constituted the body of Infinite Jest rather than "merely" a nine-page endnote. In fact, it would not surprise me at all to learn that DFW had been directly influenced by The Falls, as he employs many of the same gags, including filling out the roster with a multitude of non-entries: 

Found Drama I.

Found Drama II.

Found Drama III. ...conceptual, conceptually unfilmable. UNRELEASED.

Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space With Mind-Boggling Efficiency. Unfinished due to hospitalization. UNRELEASED.

65. Zachia Fallgillot. This biography has become an ex-directory item on medical advice due to the subject's allergy to public exposure.

80. Ascrib Fallstaff. Pernicious inclusion of fictional character. Criminal charge pending.

Now, did this bizarro mock-doc need to encompass 92 entries running 3+ hours? Probably not. Are some of the bios a little dull? Unquestionably. Still, the sheer torrent of madcap creativity can't help but inspire awe. I mean, the names alone! Crasstranger Fallqueue. Appropinquo Fallcatti. Erhaus Bewler Falluper. (You can never guess whether someone will be male or female—and that's not even accounting for the existence in this universe of male women and female men.) Greenaway shrewdly constructs the film as if it had genuinely been made for an audience that would perforce know all about the Violent Unknown Event and its various effects, thereby allowing him to toss in ludicrous revelations at will and merely hint at some of the more fascinating aspects, e.g. an apparent correlation between victims and their relationship with birds. (Someone should make a companion piece, à la Room 237, about the briefly noted conspiracy theory in which the VUE was engineered by Hitchcock as a Birds-related publicity stunt.) I do wish that we'd been treated to just a little more quasi-narrative material as the film progresses, given its epic length; I have so many questions about FOX, including why there's an F at the beginning of an organization whose full name is the Society for Ornithological Extermination. (Using the 'x' in lieu of the 'e' I get.) At the same time, though, I respect Greenaway's total commitment to his conceit.

Anyway, this remains mostly an exhausting hoot, and maybe the funniest dystopia on record. Even when a bio falls flat, it doesn't much matter, as another will be along in a minute or two and veer in some totally new crazy direction. Love that the dude who recurs as a talking-head linguistics expert, explaining the details of various new tongues, is later revealed to be one of the 92, with a belated explanation for why he's always surrounded by plants: "He could drink salt water without harm, but felt listless and debilitated away from the influence of chlorophyll." Kinda can't believe just how many different random afflictions Greenaway came up with, e.g. the woman who suffers from all of her old wounds opening up, including the holes in her pierced ears and ancient cuts from shaving her underarms. And while much of the footage was clearly shot specifically for this project (apparently supplemented by excerpts from Greenaway's early shorts, which I still haven't seen), there's often a delightful feeling that case histories have been built around existing goofy images, rather than the other way around—I kept thinking of Johnny Depp’s Ed Wood improvising "The story opens on these mysterious explosions. Nobody knows what's causing them, but it's upsetting all the buffalo." Carlos Fallantly's entry, for example, consists of a turkey-pic slideshow for what initially seems like no apparent reason, based on the voiceover; eventually we learn that the VUE transferred Fallantly's romantic feelings from his wife to a turkey on his farm, and that we're seeing the victim's ostensible compensation from the government, which insisted on euthanizing said turkey. "These are the photographs taken as the vet stalked the bird with his camera whilst the vet's assistant stalked the bird with a shotgun. Carlos was not happy with the photographs. He is now awaiting trial at Clichy for shooting the vet." 

[Nyman cue, next bio.]