In Nightwatching (E1), cinema provocateur Peter Greenaway  turns art history into a stylized murder mystery with this provocative look at the creation of one of the most revered paintings in the history of western art: Rembrandt’s “The Nightwatch.” This is not your usual genteel portrait of an artist or biography of a painting and has none of the romantic tone of Girl with a Pearl Earring or visionary obsession of The Agony and the Ecstasy. As played by Martin Freeman, Rembrandt is earthy, arrogant and outspoken, and in his grief over the death of his wife Saskia (Eva Birthistle), he becomes obsessed with turning his commission to paint the group portrait of Amsterdam Musketeer Militia into an indictment of its grasping, corrupt members through carefully placed clues and symbols. Directed in a highly theatrical style on vast stage-like sets, painted in the somber shades of Rembrandt’s nocturnal colors and sculpted in tightly controlled pools and carefully controlled shafts of illumination that can only be described as Rembrandt lighting, the entire film is designed to look like a Rembrandt canvas, right down to the careful composition of the players within the frame.

Peter Greenaway's "Rembrandt's J'Accuse"

The two-disc set comes with Greenaway’s fascinating companion film Rembrandt’s J’Accuse, which is neither a making-of nor a tradition documentary but an essay film that continues his study of the painting and the story behind it with detailed analysis of the canvas and historical commentary of the culture around it. It’s a fascinating piece of art history with a provocative perspective as rife with social politics and power politics as it is aesthetics.
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