Synopsis
Greenaway's short documentary shows 26 bathrooms, each representing a letter of the alphabet.
1985 Directed by Peter Greenaway
Greenaway's short documentary shows 26 bathrooms, each representing a letter of the alphabet.
Absolutely and unquestionably a short documentary about the bathroom, nothing more. The alphabetization is best for a laugh than genuine intellectual response (this is Greenaway after all, the clown prince of structuralism), but holy hell, this is gorgeous even by the Greenaway high standard- and he's shooting toilets, for god's sake!
...and a spot of verse for National Poetry Month:
Consider it an exercise in composition-
That's what I think you really oughta do.
The careful way the camera is positioned...
And Michael Nyman's gorgeous scoring too!
Peter Greenaway is not a good structuralist filmmaker when he isn't being directly humor-based and so the fact this film has so many light moments among the genuine structural existence of it helps it earn many points enjoyment-wise, this also acts - however briefly - outside the familiar realms of structuralism as we know it for each new piece of footage organically winds its way through the alphabet and I feel that Greenaway may have let this run for three hours if that's how long it took to display the footage all the way through to 'z' - but of course he didn't, and it works so well in the shortform displayed especially because the compositions are completely crazy in their held-back audacity.
That's part of the function of the bathroom: it's the one time that you really can be quiet with somebody, you don't have to justify the fact that you've closed the door and don't want to see people.
More windows into people than the windows documentary.
Greenaway’s tasked (for mysterious reasons) with taking us inside 26 bathrooms, and delivers exactly what’s promised. The alphabet structure doesn’t exactly work (“A is for a bathroom. Q is for a quiet smoke. S is for the Samuel Beckett Memorial Bathroom”), though it seems mostly like he’s having a bit of a joke on his own organizational obsessions anyway. What does work is the abundant humanity he finds playing out in these most private of spaces; people’s utopic ideals of how they believe domestic spaces might be most harmoniously used, relishing being relieved of Victorian taboos and tics, whole psyches shaped by childhood bathing habits. Surely among Greenaway’s most warmly humanist films, this usually most clinically distant of filmmakers, delighting in stumbling upon all the strange and surprising ways people choose to exist when no one else is watching.
Another neat and tidy Peter Greenaway short, further showing off his editing timing and witty writing, although more in the vein of Act of God with his pseudo-human-subject pieces, where these works reign in on the density of their vocabulary to instead just give a nice slice-of-life. It's interesting to see what Greenaway does between his features though, and this sudden interest in water definitely has be intrigued.
I like tiny English bathrooms - bobos of 1985 sue me. Maybe I am by nature a servile parson, though.
Greenaway doing his Greenaway thing while sending his house style up. Fun watch for fans of Form.
The absolute excess of unvarnished softwood I think can be a useful lens for a specific milieu - Southern England neutral 1983-2003 or so? Historians of furnishings please @ me.
Described as a documentary but Cosey is clearly acting. Greenaway scholars please @ me.
Nyman soundtrack ofc goated.
A later callback to Greenaways early works, and like those, much more fantastic than it should be or sounds like it could be in synopsis. The world in the microcosm of alphabetical functional architecture scattered about two localities. I would desperately like to find out that there are other Inside Rooms out there, but probably none could be as good as this central/overlooked space.
i have to give it up for the 28 min long documentary with life changing fact about the man who put a toilet in his dining room
If I am continually washing myself, quite apart from the dangerous and insanitary nature of the practice, I shall cease to appreciate it. The thoughtful bather, who has a bath once a fortnight, is the man who knows that a bath ought to be entered warm, and raised to hot after entry, in order to experience the ineffable warmness, wetness, nakedness, milkiness of the steamy relaxation, percolating between his hams, with the winter night outside. It is the horny-handed and the leather-legged who properly enjoys his rare ablutions. — England Have My Bones • T. H. White
A rather charming slice of sort of social history, everyone and their rooms are very much of this period. Nyman's music seems to almost elevate this mundane subject into something more emotional.