REMBRANDT’S J’ACCUSE
Written & Directed by Peter Greenaway
Produced by Femke Wolting & Bruno Felix
Released by ContentFilm
The Netherlands. 86 min. Not Rated
With Martin Freeman, Eva Birthistle, Jodhi May & Emily Holmes
 

Rembrandt’s legendary 1642 masterpiece, The Night Watch, is dissected and examined piece by precious piece in this docu-essay from British director Peter Greenaway. Simple yet undeniably powerful digital effects aid a comprehensive investigation that has divided art historians for centuries. Could Rembrandt have embedded an accusation of murder in this famous commission, one that precipitated his fall from favor from Amsterdam’s privileged class and eventually led to the poverty of his later years? Every detail that provides even the tiniest bit of evidence is enlarged, isolated through the use of digital highlights and shading, intensely scrutinized, and placed back into its original context, only now appearing in an illuminating new perspective. It’s everything that art history 101 was not; an engaging murder mystery presented in an original cinematic form.

Pieces of Greenaway’s 2007 film, Nightwatching, provide the contextual backdrop for the historical period. One part biopic, one part reenactment (starring Martin Freeman as Rembrandt), the footage works far better in this film, adding drama and personality to an already interesting story. It’s quite a unique way to compose a new film, although I fear it will work best here because almost nobody happened to catch Nightwatching.

Details as minute as the coffee pot in the hand of the maiden and the specific size and positioning of a spear are not to be excluded from the investigation. As in most Greenaway films, there are too many visually inventive sequences to name the most significant, but of special mention is the one in which the painting’s multiple light sources dramatically shift positions. Duly noted by the director, who was a technically trained painter before turning to film, Rembrandt was of the first in the 17^th century to pay frequent attention to artificial light sources. Perhaps, Greenaway suggests, this could be the birth of cinema.

However, Greenaway has also publicly heralded the death of cinema. Citing its late adherence to literary material for its basis, he has called it an “extension of a bookshop.” He has also described the invention of the remote control as the exact moment that cinema kicked the bucket, the process of interactivity destroying what was once a fixed medium. In Rembrandt’s J’Accuse, one of an ongoing series of films in which he will revisit historical paintings (another so-called “dead” medium), Greenaway ironically gets as interactive as possible with Rembrandt’s work, establishing a compelling new method of historical analysis for those interested in visual language.

Early in the film, he is careful to distinguish between “the articulate, the knowledgeable, the visually trained, and the visually literate.” Greenaway’s care in the matter only reinforces his reputation as a semiotician disguised as a film director, and his school of thought about images and image-making has been a problem for me in his work, if not in all art. Are the images inherently valuable, or is it their meaning that is most important? In other words, a “visually literate” person may be missing the aesthetic value in a surface while over-interpreting its meaning.

The Night Watch itself has seen its share of over-interpretation, but the controversy over the painting’s meaning and implications is indeed at the center of this film. It’s a compelling story, with the fascinating minutiae of the Dutch Golden Age and its resonant personalities coming to life. Michael Lee
October 21, 2009