I Would Like to See It: The Belly of an Architect (Patreon)

That Peter Greenaway’s obsession with impermanence led him eventually to a film about legacy is perhaps inevitable, the proverbial unstoppable force and its paired immovable object colliding as an expression of simple probability over time. As American architect Stourley Kracklite (Brian Dennehy) frets over an exhibition of the work of obscure architect Étienne-Louis Boullée which his Roman colleagues have contracted him to plan, he ponders his own legacy as well as Boullée’s and that of the Roman emperor Augustus, the three figures eventually becoming symbolically entwined in Kracklite’s mind as his marriage and body begin to fail him. His wife strays. His stomach aches. He, like Boullée in the eyes of his Italian colleagues, becomes increasingly seen as a minor talent whose buildings will never see construction, and as he gestates the stomach cancer that will drive him to take his own life, so does his wife gestate their only child, though her poor health near the end of her pregnancy suggests that fetus and tumor might exact the same price from their hosts.

You die, leaving nothing, or you die, leaving something. In the ruins of ancient Rome Greenaway sketches both propositions as simultaneously romantic and banal. What is the nameless man who sojourns through ruins knocking noses, penises, and fingers off of statues if not a living reminder of the essential vapidity of concern for posterity? Once you’re dead they’re going to strip the rings from your fingers, knock the gold out of your teeth, and dump you in a ditch. Who cares if you leave something behind? Life, The Belly of an Architect postulates, is simply an elaborate machine for gestating death. Some people understand this and work within it for purposes large or small, selfless or venal, and some fight it with every breath, refusing to understand that no action exists which does not eventually tip more life into death’s waiting mouth. Still, the pursuit of impossible ends can be awe-inspiring. The wreckage of ancient Rome can still stir the heart and quicken the breath.

To call any of Greenaway’s films “visually accomplished” is to declare water wet or sheep wooly, but The Belly of an Architect demands the term. There is an air not of completion or of perfection to its meticulous framing, but of understanding, of a kind of mastery which accepts its own fragile place in a visual world in an unending state of decline. How can you capture images of decay without comprehending film’s propensity to fade and distort over time? How can you contemplate a man’s inability to face his own insignificance in the shadow of death if you have your own sights set on cultural immortality? Greenaway’s film is an accomplishment, and like the temple domes and aqueducts of ancient Rome, one day it will lie in ruins, and then eventually it will be dust, or a memory of dust. When in Rome, the old saying goes, do as the Romans do. We all know the historical tidbit of the man who stood behind the conquering general in his chariot at every triumph, a human skull in hand, whispering in the great man’s ear: memento mori. Remember death.