James Tweedie Calibans books: The Hybrid Text in Peter Greenaways Prosperos Books

Cinema Journal 2000

The essay
This essay discusses Peter Greenaways Prosperos Books as an allegory of the adaptation of canonical literature to cinema, with The Tempests colonial concerns refigured as a confrontation between a masterful original and an unfaithful follower. The essay then situates the films meditation on the literary artefact and neobaroque aesthetics in opposition to the discourses of heritage circulating in Thatcherite Britain. (James Tweedie)

The film
Peter Greenaway Prosperos books (1991)

Prospero: John Gielgud

Caliban: Michael Clark

Ariel (here as a little boy)

Isabelle Pasco: Miranda

1. The Canonical Artifact in a Thatcherite Moment

THE FILM
provides: literal action of the play and meditation on its large allegorical significance by inserting another narrative into the play: the expanded story of Prospoeros books
Later in the essay: The film not only adapts The Tempest to the screen, it also translates the text into a flood of literal, architectonic images that deconstruct categorical distinctions between the book and visual culture.

3 issues concerning contemporary film adaptations - Will the text be overwhelmed by the spectacle on the screen or offscreen? - Will the film present an unreflexive faithful rendition of the original or will it interrogate and unsettle the books canonical status and reconsider its exchange value within the imagined community it addresses? - Can a film incorporate a classic text without inviting comparisons to an idealized original?

Prosperos Books
Is a formally radical interpretation of Shakespeare It incorporates books and paintings into a cinematic space The viewer is put at the crossroads of the arts: - Reader of text - Beholder of art object that is in motion - Spectator at the movies at a film that threatens to become a still object The film unfolds in a space which is instable, changing and heterogeneous Baroque space: undermines the certainties of heritage and the sanctity of canon

The clash between Prosperos books and their adversaries on the island parallels the problematic relationship between the classic text and the film adaptation: this is often a conflict between a masterful original and an (un)faithful follower.

 The Tempest is a central text in postcolonial theory: allegorizes the power relationships played out
in its microcosmic society and manifested in the struggle to destabilize the fetishized books that are the symbol of Prosperos dominance.

The director of the film implicitly critiques the social and cultural status of the book. In a Thatcherite moment, when Britains literary heritage served more than ever as a mooring for a reified national past
Prosperos Books emphasized the kindred nature of aesthetic and social concerns, while it also experiments with a neobaroque idiom capable of supporting such cross-overs

2. Prosperos Library and the Unbound Book

In the play: books serve mostly as mere props but each mention manifests a different conception of the utility and authority of the book. Knowing I lovd my books, he furnishd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom. (1.2.165-68) Prospero elevates those volumes beyond the realm of dukedoms. Wordly ambition and pure knowledge contrasts: Prospero draws on the knowledge and summons a storm and avenges the usurpation of power in his dukedom.

 Caliban makes clear that those books lie at the core of his masters actual and mystified power
Remember First to possess his books; for without them He is but a sot, as I am; nor hath not One spirit to commend: they all do hate him As rootedly as I. Burn but his books. (3.2.91-95)

Post-colonial theory
Homi Bhabha: in colonial context, the battle of the books becomes a struggle over power, origins and ultimately the status of truth
the book transforms literature as a phenomenon of language into a mystified symbol and instrument of colonial power The film: presents an extended meditation on the relationship between the mystical authority of the book and the hybridizing act of reading and writing The director: the film is the process of a mind reviewing its contents, a recapitulation of all the masses of knowledge that a scholar accumulates, some if it quite wasteful, some of it quite bad

The books
24 books 24 frames per second Book of Love, Book of Water Roland Barthes: S/Z: a post-structuralist analysis of Honor de Balzac: Sarrasine - a Book of Love - popular science and mythology

The volumes in Prosperos library serve as an outline of Renaissance knowledge.

The opening credits

a group of figures with an allegorical relationship to water water is the subject of Prosperos first book cameo appearances: Noah, Moses in the bulrushes, Leda and the Swan and Icarus Book of Water liquid, water: the writing emerges from Prosperos inkwell the visuals exhaust the connotative capacity of the word water visible: Ariel urinates, Prospero calls for a storm (in a pool), waves, waterfalls, bathhouse etc. audible: dripping

VIDEO:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Acm62V72k&featur e=related
00:00 -1:00: opening + book of water 5:00 - 6:00 : opening credits

End Plants Miranda reads it vast variety of leaves and flowers (one per page) Nietzsche: Every idea originates through equating the unequal. As certainly as no one leaf is exactly similar to any other so certain is that the idea of leaf has been formed through an arbitrary omission of these individual differences, through a forgetting of the differentiating qualities. literally?, adaptations, also: End Plants (book) exemplifies the failure of language to contain the rich ambiguity of a world beyond ideas

 VIDEO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j72jnYTePU8 00:00 - 00:30 End Plants

Book of Love
similarly to End Plants, the book underscores the limitations of language we can see a naked man and woman which cannot materialize the abstraction promised by the title Paul de Man: abstraction is writeable only through the invocation of an endless regression of further abstractions the naked bodies provide a figure for love because Renaissance convention dictates such figuration or more accurately, because the signifier on the spine announces their presence as Love

 3:45-4:10 (Book of Love) VIDEO:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j72jnYTePU8

Book of Mirrors
mirrored pages: serve both as a reflection of a beholders desires and a prototypical postmodernist fabrication the mirrors dont reflect a realistic vision of a world external to the text or reader but they show a world of lies where the world is seen backwards, upside down

Book of Motion
animated volume that demonstrates all the possibilities for dance in the human body and also how the eye changes shape when looking at great distances

3. The Neobaroque Book

The scenes of reading and writing medium shots and extreme close-ups They reflect 2 different conceptions of cinematic space: the former: it is in the mise-en-scene tradition which emphasizes composition in depth and the long take the latter: more frontal and vertical, most information exists on the surface (in a book held upright like a painting) There is tension between the two spaces: hybridity of arts and the cinema neobaroque (?)

Neobaroque tendency in contemporary European cinema

spectacular baroque environment exploration of libraries and museums Deleuze: baroque and neobaroque can be characterized by an idiom based on: the fold (Leibniz) mass of curves, convolutions and folds that unfurl all the way to infinity