REMBRANDT’S J’ACCUSE (Peter Greenaway, 2008)

The once-UK’s Peter Greenaway has been living in Amsterdam now for a decade. A lovely irony helps launch his pseudo-documentary Rembrandt’s J’accuse, ostensibly a meticulous analysis and deconstruction of Rembrandt van Rijn’s 1642 painting The Company of Captain Frans Banningh Cocq, better known as The Night Watch. Bemoaning how “visually illiterate” we are, Greenaway—who appears as the film’s onscreen/offscreen narrator—says: “Just because you have eyes doesn’t mean that you can see. . . . in our culture very few people spend as much time and patience and intelligence ‘reading’ paintings as they do reading text.” However, the words of his to which we are listening constitute a form of text. Although he shows us screens of differently colored versions of the Mona Lisa as he does so, when he asks, “Is what we see really what we see? Or do we see only what we want to see?” Greenaway must rely on text to have us “see” what he means, to assist us out of our bias in favor of text—although in reality we read, probably, as poorly as we see.
     Greenaway’s thesis about what he insists is the fourth most famous painting in the world (after Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, and Michelangelo Buonarroti’s ceiling of the Sistine Chapel) is that this “painted piece of theater” accuses Capt. Cocq and his lieutenant, Willem van Ruytenburgh, of having conspired in the shooting death of Piers Hasselburg, another officer in their militia company, that has been officially designated an accident. In the course of arguing this startling notion, Greenaway unearths all sorts of clues in the painting, but he lacks either the solemn wit of Chilean-exile-to-France Râúl Ruiz (Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, 1978) or the mischievous wit of U.S.-exile-to-the-world Orson Welles (F for Fake, 1975). It is almost as if Greenaway weren’t in on his own hoax. In any case, the alleged Hasselburg mystery is merely a ruse to compel us to look closely at the painting and see it more brilliantly than we have heretofore. I am doubly at a disadvantage, however: although Rembrandt is my favorite painter, this particular painting is of no special interest to me; the visual “evidence” sleuth Greenaway gleans is all of the most reductive sort. I did like, though, Greenaway’s placement into his theory the downward trajectory of Rembrandt’s fortunes. It suggests the extent to which people’s lives are subject to the masked machinations of the powerful.
     Regrettably, Greenaway’s film is tedious and exhausting, not least of all because of its visual and aural busy-ness and technological overload.