Greenaway's first feature length film after years of short, conceptual experimentation is a rich tapestry of absurd fabrication dressed up as fact. His prior experiments had developed this mock-documentary format with films like Dear Phone (1977) and A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (1978), in which facts that couldn't possibly have any believable anchorage to reality, were presented to the viewer with the straight-faced, stiff-upper-lipped austerity usually reserved for the news at ten. Here, Greenaway's goal is to create a visual essay based around word games, numbering, bizarre family lineages and a random outburst of 'Violent-Unknown-Events'. With this in mind The Falls (1980) could be seen as not only the director's first stab at feature-length storytelling but also something of an introduction to a number of subsequent Greenaway trademarks, characteristics and idiosyncrasies that would become more apparent in the later, more superficially linear film.
So, we have the preoccupation with numbers and cataloguing, with 92 being our focal point (92 deaths that are chronicled throughout, 92 disparate languages, some fictitious, 92 different types of bird, and 92 known instances of Violent-Unknown-Events, or V.U.E.). Greenaway pieces the whole thing together over the course of the film's epic, multi-faceted narrative, which the director has himself stated can be enjoyed at the viewer's own leisure. This means that we can enter and leave the proceedings whenever we feel compelled, creating a form of cinema as encyclopaedia, with Greenaway creating a shattered mosaic of wavering strands and themes running parallel through the 92 various plots and sub-plots that are documented in the film. Though it clearly won't be for everyone, The Falls will certainly appeal to fans of Greenaway's other short form experimentations, such as the aforementioned Dear Phone and other films like Windows (1975) and Water Wrackets (1976), which create similarly intellectual, arcane and satirical scenarios rife with humour and imagination.
So, we have the preoccupation with numbers and cataloguing, with 92 being our focal point (92 deaths that are chronicled throughout, 92 disparate languages, some fictitious, 92 different types of bird, and 92 known instances of Violent-Unknown-Events, or V.U.E.). Greenaway pieces the whole thing together over the course of the film's epic, multi-faceted narrative, which the director has himself stated can be enjoyed at the viewer's own leisure. This means that we can enter and leave the proceedings whenever we feel compelled, creating a form of cinema as encyclopaedia, with Greenaway creating a shattered mosaic of wavering strands and themes running parallel through the 92 various plots and sub-plots that are documented in the film. Though it clearly won't be for everyone, The Falls will certainly appeal to fans of Greenaway's other short form experimentations, such as the aforementioned Dear Phone and other films like Windows (1975) and Water Wrackets (1976), which create similarly intellectual, arcane and satirical scenarios rife with humour and imagination.