Rembrandt j'accuse comes two years after Nightwatching, a fictionalized story of the genesis of the painting of the same name, and displays all the pride of the most famous and successful structure of contemporary knowledge narratives: that of the mystery and the enigma. Peter Greenaway's latest performance hypothesizes that Rembrandt wanted to denounce in his painting the existence of a murderous conspiracy and that the vertical fall of the fame and prestige of the Flemish painter, following the creation of the "Night Watch", is most likely due to the j'accuse and the moral condemnation that his contemporaries and clients perceived in the work. Plausible? Maybe yes or maybe no. What really matters is the investigative gaze of the Welsh director who analyses, breaks down and deconstructs the authorial gaze that had created, composed and generated with the materiality of colour and the strength of light a powerful group portrait. By breaking down the constituent details of the painting and enlarging some sections, the director brings out disturbing and illuminating details on the surface and outside the surface. "The Night Watch", much studied and variously interpreted, brings together in the same painting the guild of arquebusiers, "led" by Captain Frans Banning Cocq and his lieutenant van Ruytenburgh, to celebrate its image as a bulwark of the city and show the privileges gained with the war of independence (from Spain) and the foundation of the Republic. If most have interpreted the painting in the light of the consolidated Dutch tradition of portraits of the companies of the civic guard, corporations to which the rich notables of Amsterdam belonged, and someone else has hypothesized that it could represent a scene or perhaps a living tableau of Vondel's historical drama ("Gijsbrecht van Amstel"), Greenaway transforms the painting into an investigation and circumstantial anamnesis.
According to Greenaway, Rembrandt was a free artist, free from any protector and reluctant to identify with high-ranking models. The painter painted "The Night Watch" stubbornly refusing to conform to the image conceived for him by his clients, who considered the finished painting unacceptable. Those highlighted gestures, those singular clothes and that lighting that alternated luminous effects with areas of shadow were considered too theatrical: a group of mediocre comedians of the art had replaced the boastful militiamen in martial poses. Why did Rembrandt challenge Frans Banning Cocq and his officers, refusing to maintain an artistic (and social) behavior appropriate to the system of patronage? Why did he favor the representation of the general action over the faithful depiction of individual characters? Why so much harsh and irreverent criticism? Because (always according to Greenaway) the ambitious Frans Banning Cocq had plotted a monstrous murder to earn the title of captain of the civic militia. At the center of his painting he then places a traitor, whose appearance and action must be considered as a staging under a direction and in the interest of truth. Thus the hand stretched out forward by Captain Banning Cocq, far from giving an order and marking the pace of the march, would be the "left" and nailless hand of the murdered man and the first revealing clue of the culprit, behind which flashes the flame of a shot fired from an arquebus. Greenaway continues to experiment and verify in the field the power of the gaze, making the traces and allusions of the allegories introduced by Rembrandt available to the eyes of the spectators and within "a closed space with a crime". By juxtaposing narrations and posthumous "interrogations" with the protagonists of the historical fact (the alleged murder) and artistic fact (the genesis of the painting), the director observes, interprets and recreates Rembrandt, in search of signs and the production of further meaning.
Greenaway analyzes, breaks down and investigates the "Night Watch", in search of signs and production of further meaning.
(Marzia Gandolfi)
source
www.mymovies.it
The critique
“A year after Nightwatching, the Welsh master returns to Rembrandt's canvas with a "doc" indictment
Thirty mysteries plus one. This in extreme synthesis is the structure promised by the master of provocation Peter Greenaway in the opening of his latest Rembrandt's J'accuse, a film-essay that returns to analyze the famous painting "The Night Watch" just a year after the previous Nightwatching, presented at Venice 64, which built a lively and witty costumed staging on the events surrounding the painting.
An important film, a very daring documentary that smears the canvas of the cinema screen by mixing, juxtaposing, inlaying the most disparate visual (and sound) materials, animating the famous painting by the Flemish painter, cutting out prints, sketches, photographs up to the recontextualization of passages taken from Nightwatching itself within a tight and very sharp ind a film worthy of the best tradition of the crime story. A montage film, one might say, a film that thematizes the modernity (or post-modernity) of paradoxical juxtaposition, of the manipulation of archives, of the rewriting of pre-existing materials, combining the most refined aesthetic reflection with the most efficient entertainment narration, within an audiovisual text of all-too-clear perfection, of spectacular efficiency of inevitable (?) television descent.
Cinema - Greenaway seems to tell us - was born at the beginning of the 17th century, with the refinement of mirror construction techniques and with the introduction of cheaper candles on the market: the reflection and the light. Greenaway plays on the two fronts of historical-biographical reconstruction - the ruin of the painter following his firm and bold denunciation of the powerful of Amsterdam through the subtle plot of his painting - and of the refined aesthetic essay. Rembrandt - detective, witness and judge of the crime at the center of the painting - was then the designated victim of his attack on power, all too evident to the expert eyes of the image readers of four centuries ago; but how many of the modern readers of words would be able to discover today the mysteries hidden in the volumes and forms described by the light emanating from the brush of one of the greatest creators of images of all time?”
(Silvio Grasselli, cinematografo.it)
