Join Phansi Museum this Thursday (May 9,
2019) May, for a free screening of The
Belly of an Architect, from 17h30.
Stourley Kracklite (Brian Dennehy), the
central figure in Peter Greenaway's The
Belly of an Architect, is at one point seen reflected in the central panel
of a triptych mirror in his Rome apartment, wearing a blood-red robe and flanked
by multiple Xerox copies of classically sculpted abdomens, copies he has made
from photographs of Roman statuary. It's a perfect moment, or at least the kind
of perfect moment Greenaway favours: orderly, symmetrical and obscure, offering
great compositional beauty but no compelling reason why its riddles require a
solution.
At another point in the film, Greenaway
considers the fact that the British one-pound note bears not just a likeness of
Sir Isaac Newton but also of some apple blossoms, which constitute a veiled
reference to gravity. It's an interesting fact but also a self-contained one,
and it's just the kind of information that floats untethered throughout the
film.
Without question, Greenway deserves credit
for naming his hero Stourley Kracklite, calling his villain Caspasian Speckler,
and using his film to celebrate Rome and its architecture with such elegance
and discernment. But The Belly of an
Architect may have as much to do with one man's intestinal maladies as with
art, beauty, obsession, permanence and mortality, subjects to which it also
pays some attention. It's hard to know. And watching the film's visual
obsessiveness - with architectural shapes and symmetry, with cool, stationary
long shots, even with the marble surfaces and deep, velvety tones that give it
visual texture - becomes an ever less-rewarding pursuit as the measure of the
film's solipsism becomes known.
Kracklite, a renowned American architect,
is first seen making love to his wife, Louisa (Chloe Webb), on a train bound
for Rome, where he will live for nine months while staging an exhibition in
honour of the French architect Etienne-Louis Boulee, a man who never travelled.
The trip marks not only the birth of Kracklite's tribute but also the
conception of a Kracklite heir, though this is not discovered until later in
the story. When it is, Kracklite wants to know on which side of the border the
child was conceived; such are his and the film's passion for detail.
While in Rome, Kracklite becomes more and
more obsessed with Boulee, by architecture and by his own innards, which begin
to bother him. He rails against Louisa, suspects her of trying to poison him
(an idea, like many of Kracklite's, generated by proximity to ancient Roman
culture), and develops the belly fixation that induces him to study many
photographs of Louisa's belly, the Emperor Hadrian's and his own. Greenaway
accompanies these developments with dialogue rich in gamesmanship (''Are you a
modern architect?'' ''No more modern than I should be'') and with an
extraordinary succession of studied, perfectly composed images. There is almost
always an archway in the centre of the frame. And in the centre of that archway
is, almost invariably, Kracklite.
Greenaway brings a welcome playfulness to
some of this, as when he uses the film's concerns with ancient art and bodily
deterioration into the figure of a man who surreptitiously chips the noses off
statues (and has quite a collection). However, there's nothing to be done with
the film's essential elusiveness, and in any case, Greenaway seems to prefer it
that way. The Belly of an Architect
does have a humanizing element in the form of Dennehy, who brings a robust
physicality to Kracklite without missing the essentially cerebral nature of the
role; this is one of the best things he has done. His wife, Louisa is Chloe
Webb, who's full of taunting flirtatiousness and speaks in a sleepwalker's
tone.
The
Belly Of An Architect is directed and written by
Peter Greenaway; director of photography, Sacha Vierny; edited by John Wilson;
a stunning musical soundtrack by Wim Mertens; produced by Colin Callender and
Walter Donohue. Running time 108 minutes. This film has no rating.
R20 pp for lectures, screenings are free.
Pre-book a seat in one of Phansi Museum’s
upcoming lectures. Email admin@phansi.com for queries or bookings.
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Phansi Museum is situated at 500 Esther
Roberts Road, Glenwood, Durban. Phone 031 206 2889 or email: admin@phansi.com
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