A Zed and Two Noughts, 1986

"A Zed and Two Noughts" is of course--at least ostensibly since this is Greenaway movie--A Zee and Two Zeros (or Ohs). Which might spell Zoo. Or one Alpha & two null Betas. A precocious Post-Modern film (1985), made when the notion was, in retrospect, about to peak in various avant-gardes. I don't think many movies can be said to be in this "style" if the P-M complex can be unjustly reduced to that superficiality. Yet it does share many of the PoMo world's tendencies such as a drift toward pastiche, collaging different styles and intents, lots of deadpan irony that undermines merely Modern motions of rational good sense and narrative structure inherited from the Enlightenment. Post-Modernists question(ed) high rationalism as a delusion, not comprehension: it cannot in fact see past the distortion and manipulation which underlay and characterize life now. Add the director's trademark obsession with death, more specifically rotting flesh, and one is flush with the outlines of his inquiry. Yet it is no mere set of flourishes; he genuinely engages the nature of his medium even as he plays with its surface attraction. All the business about strobe lights catching the stop motion deterioration of dead flesh before cameras of course simulates the flickering of the motion picture image. What is this odd thing of film that preserves what is in its own "real" world if it is in fact rotting merrily away in the bodies of those who enacted it for the cameras -- returning to the ooze. (And Greenaway makes sure that in one of the closing shots that we see the ZOO sign from the backside -- where it spells, of course, OOZ[e].) ¿How much of a MIRROR to reality can a MOVIE be? For those not wanting to work so hard on his hidden themes, there is a great deal of visual fun that is simply entertaining in its decidedly odd way. Guy Maddin was obviously highly influenced by it in his "Saddest Music in the World"--also visually interesting, but a less deep meditation on any ideas. 8.08

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