The Falls is an epic film from the makers of The Draughtsman's Contract, writer-director Peter Green-
away and composer Michael Nyman (who here collaborates with Brian Eno). The text is a formal tour-de-force that draws on the English literary traditions of social satire (Jonathan Swift) and nonsense humor (Lewis Carroll), as well as on French surrealism. But despite its impressive range of cultural and linguistic references, The Falls delivers us into a world of Greenaway's own invention. Nyman's music similarly draws on the traditional but remains quite his own, and an important part of the film. The Falls is set in “post-VUE” England. VUE--Violent Unexplained Event--has claimed some 19 million victims, causing their partial mutation into birds, and stimulating the generation of at least 92 new languages. Greenaway presents a “matter-of-fact” documentary of 92 cases of VUE victims, arbitrarily limiting himself to those whose names begin with the prefix “Fall.”
“Mr. Greenaway is a genuine wit with a grand imagination and a poet's fondness for lists,” writes New York Times critic Vincent Canby. “He is the irrepressible anthropologist of this mad, doomed new world. He is fascinated by the multiplicity of new languages, particularly by one that encourages punning and by another that is ‘lazy and gentle and requires an unusual amount of saliva'.... There are dozens of narratives, including one about a woman who persists in trying to teach her dogs how to fly.... It's not really necessary to interpret The Falls to enjoy it, not if you enjoy Lewis Carroll...Magritte, the BBC, the kind of jokes small children love, linguistics and disaster journalism....”
Peter Greenaway's other films include A Walk Through H and Vertical Features Remake, both of which were shown at PFA in June. The Draughtsman's Contract was featured at the 1983 San Francisco Film Festival and has recently opened theatrically in the Bay Area.