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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My fourth report from the screening rooms of SIFF is now up on GreenCine.

There are various world premieres and the dozens of guests arriving for screenings and audience Q&As, but the highlight event will surely be the screenings of Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky at Benaroya Hall, with Sergei Prokofiev’s score performed live by the Seattle Symphony and Chorale with mezzo-soprano Kathryn Weld.

The film is undeniably a classic, and just as undeniably a bald piece of nationalist propaganda that celebrates the salt-of-the-earth heroism of Russian citizens who rise up to defeat the invading German Teutonic Knights (backed by the blessing of the Catholic Church), not just to defend their homeland but to bring glory to their national honor. It’s largely pageant until the famous battle on the ice, which is a thrilling work of cinema and illustrates just what a magnificent action painter Eiseinstein was. The epic scenes of the Teutonic Knights on horseback (looking like some unholy combination of Viking invader, aristocrat soldier and Klu Klux Klan grandmaster) overwhelmed by the onrushing armies of Russian peasant foot soldiers is as evocative a portrait of action cinema as you’ll see.

The other exciting development for the last weekend will be the three days of screenings at The Cinerama, the crown jewel of Seattle cinemas. Not that it’s necessarily showing the big screen spectaculars that should have been reserved for this venue, but it should be a kick to see the Hong Kong collaboration Triangle and the French war movie Female Agents thrown across the Cinerama’s huge screen.

Read the full piece here.

A final note: I wrote this before embarking on a day of interviews followed by screenings at the Cinerama. And I can attest that it was indeed a kick to see the full widescreen Triangle, a highly entertaining tangle of a movie, and the “Dirty Dozen”-inspired Female Agents, which delivers neither more nor less than an otherwise conventional war thriller done up with style, romanticized sacrifice and stoic heroism in the face of brutal torture, was indeed a kick. And also note that, appearances aside, the nasty Nazi tortures, which include near-drowning of prisoners, inflicted upon their French and British prisoners is nothing like the patriotic interrogation methods that the U.S. humanely applies to the prisoners held in out bases (which include the near drowning of prisoners). To even suggest otherwise would be downright unpatriotic, for as we know, the right to speak out against the injustices of our government is a principle to defended to the death, but never actually acted upon.