# Prospero's Books (1991)

### reviewed by
Frank Maloney

    version which had disk corruption.  -Moderator]

                                  PROSPERO'S BOOKS
                           A film review by Frank Maloney
                            Copyright 1991 Frank Maloney

PROSPERO'S BOOKS is a film by Peter Greenaway. The film stars John Gielgud. The music is by Michael Nyman.

I have been postponing writing about PROSPERO'S BOOKS because, beyond shouting I loved it and admitting that I nearly dozed off in one place, I am somewhat at loss to know what I can say. It is a complex film that certainly pushes the limits the definition of what a motion picture is. It also pushes the limits of what the viewer can take in. I refer to the complex imagery, the multi-voiced dialogue, the play-within-a-play structure, and the ambiguity of purpose and message. In the meantime, allow me to present a few tentative, first impressions.

I doubt that many of you reading this do not know that PROSPERO'S BOOKS is a version, a vision, of Shakespeare's final play, "The Tempest." You probably also have read a synopsis of the story or are already familiar with it, so I won't rework those tailings. "The Tempest" is easy to read as Shakespeare's farewell to the stage and as such it may well represent a coherent commentary on play-making and the play-maker. The playwright is the magician who creates and destroys entire worlds, who has the power to name and marshal characters and forces not accessible to you and me, mere mortals, the audience.

Although I don't imagine that Greenaway is bidding farewell to movie-making, his way of presenting "The Tempest" is a commentary on his own art, a visual essay on film-making, perhaps. Certainly, it would not be too startling to find a correlation between the magician and the director. One of my favorite moments in PROSPERO'S BOOKS comes when Prospero leads his trains of spirits past a tableau of Prospero himself writing the dialogue the ambulatory Prospero is speaking. In the movie, it is the act of writing the play "The Tempest" that is the magic that moves the action (as, indeed, it is in our quotidian life)--not a startlingly original idea on Greenaway's part, but a masterly, succinct image of the idea. It is an image that is suggestive, too, of the question of how much the creator exists outside his (or her) creation, how much the creator is self-creating. Of course, the maddening thing about what one might think of as visual criticism or visual philosophy is that the image seldoms poses more than the question. Imagery is inherently ambiguous. For many viewers, the ambiguities of PROSPERO'S BOOKS will be a barrier to the film's accessibility.

This film is first and foremost a visual art form. There is some irony, perhaps, in the way Greenaway subordinates the famous dialogue to its visual equivalents; it is almost as if a contemporary director proposed returning to the silent film. Of course, films are primarily visual experiences (whereas drama, and especially poetical drama such as Shakespeare's, are essentially verbal experiences), particularly as films are usually made these days; great dialogue is rare and such films are subject to criticism of being "talky."

It occurs to me that the most useful comparisons amongst recent films are to be made with contemporary Shakespearean films, HENRY V by Kenneth Branagh and HAMLET by Zeffirelli. Such films typically struggle to find ways not to be merely filmed plays. The directors use realistic or even historic sets, move scenes to outdoors locations, extend action sequences, make use of appropriate special effects, and so forth. But woe betide the incautious director who dares rearrange scenes, edit speeches, or take other liberties with the "Master's received text."

Compared with Greenaway, Branagh and Zeffirelli produced utterly conventional film versions of the plays. It is, it seems to me, wholly unfair to say that Greenaway has produced not so much as a film version of "The Tempest," but a visualization of the play's major theme. And that has got some people upset.

I confessed in the beginning to an attack of the drowsies while watching PROSPERO'S BOOKS. This came during the wedding sequence which more like watching "The Tempest" as one would expect to see, and had little to do with the playfulness, the richly detailed, painterly surfaces, cinematic fantasies that I associate with Greenaway. Of course, I had put in a hard day's work at work, but the fact is that during the parts of the film that were more challenging, more daring, I stayed right in there, alert and happy.

And speaking of staying right in there, the man who performed that amazing version of Caliban never failed to delight and surprise me with his ceaseless movements -- stretching, pointing, forever straining against the invisible chains with which Prospero enslaved him. The three actors who played Ariel presented a charming concept of that airy spirit.

Watching the calligraphy in action was beautiful and fascinating, more choreography than calligraphy at moments. The costumes of the courtiers, those amazing hats, collars, and shoes, were whimsical, hilarious, and satirical, existing in ludicrous contrast to the wisps and scraps that clothed the spirits, speaking volumes about artificiality and civilization. (These clothes put me in mind of BARON MUNCHAUSEN, for what that's worth; exaggerated styles for exaggerated imaginations, styles that say more than the wearer knows.)

I loved the nudity, the lack both of coyness and titillation, the variety of bodies, the way before the movie was over I had stopped seeing them as naked and started them merely as nude.

I wasn't too thrilled by the silly queen act of the two servants who team up with Caliban to take over the island, but I can live with it, I think.

I was pleased and impressed by the interludes in which we were told about Prospero's 24 books, the animation, the use of HDTV in the inserts, and especially by the identity of the 24th book. I was also shocked by the fate of those books, as any literate person has to be; our reactions, as much as the movie's (and the play's) actions vis-a-vis the books speaks volumes about the power of books over us. The power, rarity, and beauty of the written word is one of the essential ideas in "The Tempest"--an idea also acted by the close-ups of the calligraphy. Greenaway's version of the books is remarkably like the television version of another famous fictive book, THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, books that can't stay still, that squirm and babble with powers all their own.

I haven't any idea whether to recommend PROSPERO'S BOOKS to you; some of you will share my love of this movie, others will be subject to various negative reactions, including irritation and frustration. I intend to see it again and I won't be particularly concerned about whether I have to pay full price or not.

    --
    Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
    .

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