Experimental director and visual artist Peter Greenaway returns to the Film Forum this week with the third installment in his ambitious "Nine Classical Paintings Revisted" series. The film, Rembrandt's J'accuse, focuses on the Dutch master's most valorized work, "The Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch," more commonly known as "The Night Watch (De Nachtwacht)," with an eye toward "deciphering" the multiple characters (thirty-four, according to Greenaway's count), planes, and tableau that populate the canvas. (PHOTO: REMBRANDT'S J'ACCUSE)
Much as in his previous The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) and The Death of Webern (1994), Greenaway exploits the paranoid fantasies of conspiracy theory to aid in a melodramatic tale of corruption, intrigue and murder. His contention–that Rembrandt's ambitious painting is also a detailed indictment of Banning Cocq, van Ruytenburch and their Kloveniers in the murder of rival militiaman Piers Hasselburg–is a fascinating–and some would say incredible–exercise in curatorial forensics. Although Rembrandt suffered professional decline and a rather ignoble bankruptcy at the end of his career, most critics point to the decline in popularity of his distinct Baroque style as the cause. For his part, Greenaway hypothesizes that Rembrandt was ruined by an oligarchical power structure that he uncovered during the painting's royal commission.
In honor of Greenaway's latest venture into conspiracy theory and secret cults, we've compiled a list of some of our favorite films dedicated to uncovering political machinations, villainous plots, and secret rites of unnamable societies:
1. Out 1 (Jacques Rivette, 1971)
At nearly thirteen hours in length, Rivette's masterwork–also known as Noli me tangere–is a brilliant but occassionally insufferable "documentary" focusing on two rival theater ensembles rehearsing the plays of Aeschylus. When communiques of unknown origin begin appearing to thepanhandler Colin (Jean-Pierre Leaud), he must decipher them to discover whether they belong to the mysterious society of the Thirteen. Compared by some critics to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow in terms of its unwieldy largesse, Out 1 remains largely unknown to all but dedicated French cinephiles as public screenings are few and far between.
2. Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)
Kubrick's beautiful but much maligned swan song based on a novella by Viennese author Arthur Schnitzler and inspired by the films of Max Ophuls. After receiving a scandalous confession from his wife, Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) sets about on a late-night prowl of downtown Manhattan but finds himself at an opulent masked orgy on Long Island's wealthy shore. When he is identified as an outsider by the smarmy plutocrats, his life takes a very unexpected and dangerous turn.
3. The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)A kissing cousin to Antonioni's Blowup and De Palma's Blow Out, The Conversation remains an archetype of the 70s political thriller. The film follows surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) who is hired to tap a conversation between an executive and his mistress, the wife of a Washington insider called, rather enigmatically, The Director. Paranoia sets in as Caul discovers the conversation reveals much more than simple infidelity and may endanger the lives of everyone around him.
4. Fantômas (Louis Feuillade, 1913-1914)
Before Lang's Doctor Mabuse or Feuillade's more popular serial Les Vampyres, Europe was terrified by the "master of crime", Fantômas, and his band of underworld cronies. Based on the popular feuilletons by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, the masked villain (played by actor René Navarre) appeared in five installments, cutting a path of destruction throughout Belle Epoque Paris. The serials were so popular that real gangs throughout France began using the moniker when committing crimes, and more than thirty films dedicated to Fantômas were produced in America and Europe by the 1960s.
5. The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915)
Originally titled The Clansmen and based on the novel by Thomas Dixon, Griffith's "paean" to the secret order of the Ku Klux Klan details the struggles of the Confederate South during Reconstruction. "Heroic" scenes of the hooded KKK hunting down "nefarious" former slaves (actors in black-face) remain some of the most disturbing images in all of cinema. While Griffith practically invented both the American film epic and the political thriller with The Birth of a Nation, he also instigated protests, riots and deepening racial tension during the height of Jim Crow legislation and the so-called "lynch laws."
Rembrandt's J'accuse plays at Film Forum through November 3rd. Film Forum is located at 209 W Houston Street in New York.
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