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Sunday June 3rd @ 7:30 pm at the Spielberg Theatre
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Rembrandt's J'Accuse, by Peter Greenaway Los Angeles Premiere!
Rembrandt's J'Accuse (2008, 35mm, Color, 90 mins.)
Director: Peter Greenaway
Netherlands/Great Britain/Finland/Germany
With: Peter Greenaway, Martin Freeman, Eva Birthistle, Jodhi May, Emily Holmes
Imported 35mm print!
It's CSI: Rijksmuseum in British obsessive Peter Greenaway's fascinating film essay/illustrated lecture, a companion piece to his feature drama Nightwatching (and his multimedia installation "Nightwatching" at the famed Amsterdam museum). Rembrandt's J'Accuse offers a radical forensic analysis of Rembrandt's The Night Watch, arguing, in ways both prosecutorial and playful, that the great painting offers evidence of conspiracy and murder! "The Rijksmuseum is introduced as a crime scene, with the filmmaker digitally inserted, front and center, using a 31-question countdown structure to interrogate The Night Watch's mise-en-scène. Giving nearly as hammy a performance as Charles Laughton's in the title role of the 1939 Brit biopic Rembrandt, Greenaway is also extremely convincing in his analysis of the painting's mysteries... Peering beneath the painted surface and searching in the shadows, tracking that which was cut from the canvas and mapping the network of glances that remain, the filmmaker uncovers a foul, lurid, corrupt, and perversely compelling conspiracy which is to say, he successfully turns The Night Watch into a Peter Greenaway film" (J. Hoberman Village Voice). "Enthralling, cohesive, and witty ... The film brims with juicy conspiracy theories and forensic investigations worth of top-tier TV crime drama" (Richard Kuipers, Variety).
Filmforum will be screening Nightwatching on June 17th!
"[Greenaway] once studied to become a painter himself; apparently, he's harbored dreams of being an amateur sleuth as well." Time Out
"Like Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line, Greenaway's erudite J'accuse is concerned with the construction of a legal fiction." Village Voice
"This immersive tour of the mortal manipulations fueling Europe's 17th-century cultural capital supplies wit and intellect."
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