Moving Pictures, Still Lives: Staging National Tableaux and Text in Prospero's Books

Moving Pictures, Still Lives: Staging National Tableaux and Textin Prospero's Books

Trimm, Ryan S.

Cinema Journal, 46, Number 3, Spring 2007, pp. 26-53 (Article)

Published by University of Texas PressDOI: 10.1353/cj.2007.0032

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Moving Pictures, Still Lives: Staging NationalTableaux and Text in Prospero’s Booksby Ryan Trimm

Abstract: Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books works against the heritage film’sgeneric obsession with setting by foregrounding its soundstage as a textual andperformative space.

Heritage film is peculiarly conscious of time and space. This cinematic cycle, oftenviewed as the primary thrust of the latest long-wave revival of British cinema inthe 1980s and 1990s, centers on using its most prominent features—period cos-tumes and interiors, iconic settings such as manorial houses and postcard country-sides, filmscripts with heavy literary cachet—to precisely situate its story linehistorically, spatially, and socially. As a result, such films inevitably stress a nationalframe: they are based on works, authors, and figures prominent in a national canon(e.g., Howards End, James Ivory, 1992; Shakespeare in Love, John Madden, 1998;Elizabeth, Shekhar Kapur, 1998); they are set against resonant moments in nationalhistory (the late Edwardian Indian summer of A Room with a View, Ivory, 1985;the 1930s’ long slide into the next battle in The Remains of the Day, Ivory, 1993);they revolve around sites rich with national evocation (the Trinity Quad in HughHudson’s Chariots of Fire, 1981,1 or Castle Howard in the miniseries BridesheadRevisited, Michael Lindsay-Hogg and Charles Sturridge, 1981).

Heritage cinema, according to postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, empha-sizes the pedagogic, a singular line of national tradition “based on the pre-givenor constituted historical origin in the past.”2 However, such ostensible heritagefilms as Derek Jarman’s Edward II, 1991; Sally Potter’s Orlando, 1992; and PeterGreenaway’s Prospero’s Books, 1991, problematize time and space through a hostof devices marking gaps, fractures, and chronotopic complexity, thus resisting thetutelage of singularity. Prospero’s Books in particular reworks genre characteristicsin its uprooting of national time and space. Through the film’s presentation of tex-tuality, dramatic space, and performance, Greenaway’s film refuses the unifiednational frame common to classic heritage films in favor of an apparently aleatoryassemblage of images. Through this juxtaposition, Prospero’s Books renders uncer-tain the distinction between actual and virtual shots, scenes, texts, locations, and

26 Cinema Journal 46, No. 3, Spring 2007

© 2007 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

Ryan Trimm teaches film studies and English at the University of Rhode Island. He is cur-rently completing a book on the trope of heritage in postimperial British fiction and film.

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performances, an uncertainty that puts the burden upon viewers to establish thelines of relation among these disparate images.

In contrast, Andrew Higson argues that heritage filmsare typically slow moving and episodic, avoiding the efficient and economic causal de-velopment of the classical film. The concern for character, place, atmosphere and mi-lieu tends to be more pronounced than dramatic, goal-oriented action. Cameraworkgenerally is fluid, artful and pictorialist, editing slow and undramatic. The use of longtakes and deep focus, and long and medium shots rather than close-ups, produces arestrained aesthetic of display. Indeed . . . these heritage films owe as much to the cin-ema of attractions of very early film-making as they do to the classical cinema of nar-rative integration.3

The most prominent attractions in heritage films are design—clothing andfurnished interiors—period and class markers that are the stock-in-trade of cos-tume dramas in general.4 As long takes, deep focus shots, tranquil camera work,and continuity editing situate the story line, the tale inevitably emphasizes setting.This generic obsession makes a fetish or spectacle of place, particularly situationamong manors and manners of the upper and upper-middle classes.5 With thiscompulsive concern with location, heritage film stands as a direct descendant of theBritish film’s lineage of cinematic realism, a family tree stretching from Griersondocumentaries to the New Wave “kitchen sink” film. As Peter Wollen has shown,such realism came to stand as the national style for British film itself (or so the ar-gument runs, it was the United Kingdom who invented the documentary).6 In this

Cinema Journal 46, No. 3, Spring 2007 27

Figure 1. Margaret (Emma Thompson) and Mrs. Wilcox (Vanessa Redgrave)meet in Harrods in James Ivory’s adaptation of E. M. Foster’s Howards End(Sony Pictures Classics, 1992).


lineage of film genres, Higson concurs, “[p]lace becomes a ‘sign of reality’: the im-plication is that it speaks a history, a memory.”7 Realism here trades on specificityof locale, a particularity guaranteeing authenticity and actuality of the production,a precision mapping geographical and social coordinates. The recent cycle ofheritage films, with their strong evocation of place, continues this vein.8 Such con-cern with specificities of place and time inscribe concern with national identitywithin heritage cinema: such films literally work to establish a national chrono-tope. Consequently, the heritage properties of such films—literary source text,country house, landscape—are presented as thoroughly rooted and nationalized.

Gilles Deleuze similarly suggests costume dramas, such as heritage films, infact classically operate as inversions of the typical historical or biographical film.The latter opens with presentation of a particular historical situation, a scenariogiving rise to grand action, a monumental transformation (revolution, war, inven-tion, discovery, legislation, change in social code or attitude) altering the originalsituation. In contrast, the costume drama begins with an action gradually reveal-ing an historically or socially contingent situation. The costume drama then usesclothing and interiors, not as trappings adding verisimilitude to a historical repre-sentation, but as the very means of staging this representation. According toDeleuze, this indexes historical and social contingency: “Here it is a modist ormodellist conception, as though the dressmaker, the designer had taken the placeof the architect and the antiquarian. In the costume film, . . . the ‘habitus’ are in-separable from the outfits [habits], the actions are inseparable from the state ofthe costumes which constitute their form, and the situation which follows fromthis is inseparable from the fabrics and hangings.”9 Heritage films are defined, notby events or dramatic actions, but instead by their ability to situate, to use designas the means to conjure a particular and unified world, one whose macrostructuresand codes are precisely defined by its fashions. However, Deleuze’s account of thecostume film firmly positions it within a realistic regime of cinema, one emphasiz-ing a preexistent reality it accurately reflects.10

Prospero’s Books, though, articulates clearly the constructed nature of its cin-ematic world through overt textuality, a stress on plastic soundstage as setting, anda self-conscious concern with performance and cinematic assemblage. Its refusalof a submissive replication aligns the film with, per Deleuze, the postwar cine-matic dominant of “crystalline description,” a mobile composition that “stands forits object, replaces it, both creates and erases it . . . and constantly gives way toother descriptions which contradict, displace, or modify the preceding ones. It isnow the description which constitutes the sole decomposed and multiplied ob-ject.”11 Such style of cinematic narration constructs, rather than reflects, a setting,a construction continually mutating and transforming lines of relation constitutiveof time and space. By extending the genres of costume and heritage film firmlyinto this realm of crystalline description, Prospero’s Books reworks the role of set-ting in such films. Instead of an established time and space, Greenaway’s film as-sembles a fluid setting, one refusing specificity so much as to specify a nonplace



and nontime: true utopia and uchronia. Through its unraveling of the distinctionbetween actual events and mental images (such as projections, dreams, and mem-ories), Prospero’s Books generates a setting that opens up a space for performance,enactments manifesting only temporary concretizations of the stage.

Textual Space and Framing Power. Higson suggests that articulation of nationalidentity is more or less a generic tic in heritage cinema: the films “insist on the pu-rity and distinctiveness of a traditional Englishness and eschew the particular typeof cross-cultural intertextuality that is such a strong feature of contemporary aes-thetics.”12 At first glance, Greenaway’s film has much in common with the featuresof this pedagogic mission.13 Prospero’s Books, just as with Austen and Forster adap-tations, foregrounds the English stage tradition in its casting of Sir John Gielgud,one of the most celebrated Shakespearean actors of the twentieth century. Further,Greenaway’s film is adapted from a classic literary text to which it is extremelyfaithful, at least in terms of dialogue. It is visually sumptuous, so much so the filminitially seems guilty of the charge Higson levels at the heritage film: the lushnessof narrative settings and period detail short-circuits the progress of the plot. How-ever, Prospero’s Books certainly migrates beyond national cultural boundaries,evincing a pan-European cultural frame of reference dwarfing even the most in-ternationally minded Merchant-Ivory adaptation. Not only does the film allude toworks and figures from nearly every western European nation, but the cast is alsodrawn from England, Scotland, France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland,and Germany; Greenaway’s team has long been a mix of British, Dutch, andFrench crew.

This European emphasis is further reflected in the film’s funding: Ian Christiereveals Prospero’s Books benefited from Eurimages, a pan-European (officially aDutch-Italian-French), non-British funding scheme.14 Further, the film was shotand edited in Great Britain, Holland, and France; the Electronic Paintbox effectswere done in Japan. As a result, a film about a central Brit lit text effectively dis-places the purported Little England focus of the standard heritage film.15

Of course, it is the English text of The Tempest that is foregrounded in thefilm. The pan-European cast delivers few lines. Instead, Gielgud speaks most ofthe film, a recitation almost Brechtian in its verbal stress of text.16 Thus, there isno traditional dramatic arc to speak of, rather a recital of a Shakespearean playproviding rough structure for the visual surfeit on screen. There is essentially nointeraction among characters and consequently little action other than Prosperoshifting between spaces on the soundstage.17 The plot is largely an internal dramainvolving Prospero and the composition of The Tempest, for the film’s action prima-rily revolves around the joy of text. Greenaway’s screenplay highlights this fore-grounding of textuality: having Gielgud as the primary delivery device for TheTempest’s lines is a strategy “made especially significant in a project that deliber-ately emphasises and celebrates the text as text, as the master material on which allthe magic, illusion and deception of the play is based. Words making text, and text



making pages, and pages making books from which knowledge is fabricated in pic-torial form—these are the persistently forefronted characteristics.”18 The textitself is presented as generative spell, one creating whole tapestries of illusionthrough skeins of language. In fact, not only are texts at the center of the film butthey also generate Prospero himself—the introduction to the screenplay empha-sizes the textual constitution of his character: “What was it, in those books, thatmade Prospero not only powerful but also a moralising scold and a petty revenger,a benevolent despot, a jealous father and also a master designer of song anddance? Are we truly the product of what we read?”

This warning seems odd given the reverence shown by Prospero’s Books to itsintertexts, not only to its germinal Shakespearean text but also to myriad other lit-erary, artistic, historic, cinematic, and architectural texts given homage in thefilm.19 As all are of European origin, the film appears grounded in and worshipfultoward a Western canon of masterworks. Naturally, Shakespeare is given pride ofplace: the complete plays and the manuscript of The Tempest are the only volumessaved from Prospero’s shelves at film’s end. Further, the equation of Prospero andShakespeare (Prospero writes one of Shakespeare’s plays) renders the Bard of Avonan almost divine mage. Martin Butler characterizes this retrograde resonance ofthe film as harking back to an idea of Shakespeare as the presiding genius of West-ern culture, and associates him with notions of authorial power that derive fromthe sacredness of the written word and the ability of print technology to preserve,order and disseminate knowledge. It represents The Tempest as the master-textthrough which an astonishing array of cultural sources can be reconnected, re-deeming the fragmentation of the Western tradition by seeming to touch, at onemoment or another, on every area of the literary, scientific and artistic canon.20

The Tempest in essence becomes a single book containing the other twenty-four volumes from Prospero’s shelves—and, by extension, the other masterpiecesof Western civilization given homage in the film. This cherished status of the canon-ical book does seem to grant further credence to heritage cinema readings of thefilm.21 The very first words of the film (“Knowing I loved my books, he furnishedme/From mine own library with volumes that/I prize above my dukedom,” linestransposed from 1.2.167–9 in The Tempest), in fact, position books and archivesas the source of origin for the story about to unfold.22 This literary link intensifiesat the end of the opening credits, when a single volume is passed down a long lineof Prospero’s tableaux retinue, a textual relay occupying the foreground whileProspero’s parallel procession continues in the background. In the following se-quence, this volume is handed to the red-cloaked Prospero. Such a transmissionhighlights the handing over and down of a privileged text, a text linked to the veryfigure of Prospero. This monumental sense of the book is furthered in sceneswhere Prospero watches Alonso’s party from his tower, an imposing edifice in-scribed “Libris Prospero.”

However, Prospero’s Books finds its source volume not an object worthy ofworship but a framing or creative power, a type of magic capable of making the



new appear. Consequently, the film’s deployment of a loaded literary and artisticWestern canon stands not as a monolith demanding homage but a wild textualityin the process of losing itself through uncontrollable dissemination.23 Greenawaysuggests in the screenplay that “[i]n this film, Prospero is like a [Athanasius]Kircher book-making machine . . . turning books into more books.”24 Similarly, inhis essay “Prospero’s Books and the Visionary Page,” Peter Scwenger highlights thegenerative function of Prospero’s library: “The books . . . create the island andeverything that is on it. They also serve as an ars memoriae, each book represent-ing a topos for the story of Prospero’s past as well as the story he now develops.The themes of that story are those of the books.”25 The magic of the isle, the won-drous sights, and fantastic events are all derived from text. As a result, rather thana stable masterpiece, the book is presented as that which generates virtual worlds.

This intersection of textual and virtual is again underscored in Greenaway’sintroduction to the screenplay: “it is an island of superimposed images, of shiftingmirrors and mirror-images—true mir-ages—where pictures conjured by text canbe as tantalisingly substantial as objects and facts and events, constantly framedand re-framed. This framing and re-framing becomes like the text itself—amotif—reminding the viewer that it is all an illusion constantly fitted into a rec-tangle . . . into a picture frame, a film frame.”26 If the virtual images conjured bythe text are as substantial as the actual, then there is, in fact, no basis upon whichto discriminate between them; the textual has the same reality as does the actualitself.27 Indeed, this blurring of framer and—is it the writing Prospero who con-jures the mirror fantasies or the phantasmatic images that summon the image of a


Figure 2. The transposed lines from The Tempest that textually frame PeterGreenaway’s Prospero’s Books (Miramax, 1991).


creating mage?—echoes Deleuze’s discussion of the indeterminacy of actual andvirtual images in postwar cinema:

the actual image itself has a virtual image which corresponds to it like a double or areflection. In Bergsonian terms, the real object is reflected in a mirror image as in thevirtual object which, from its side and simultaneously, envelops or reflects the real:there is “coalescence” between the two. There is a formation of an image with twosides, actual and virtual. It is as if an image in a mirror, a photo or postcard came tolife, assumed independence and passed into the actual, even if this meant that the ac-tual image returned into the mirror and resumed its place in the postcard or photo,following a double movement of liberation and capture.28

In the screenplay, Greenaway emphasizes just this blurring of virtual and ac-tual: “[t]he division between fact and fiction becomes indistinguishable,” an obscur-ing leading to “elaborate and illusive framings, deliberate confusions between fact,memory and fantasy” (9, 37). Indeed, the virtual world of The Tempest, a play aboutillusion, is itself rendered substantive through the film. In addition, through recur-ring use of insets, script overlays, and windowed screens, the text demonstrates anability to write over itself, to superimpose images, to become its own palimpsest, tobecome its own frame and insert. Prospero’s Books generates spatial complexity ina textual space that is no place but pregnant possibility. Just so, the film presentsProspero’s books as visual inserts—as Amy Lawrence notes, such presentation lit-erally renders texts as “letter boxes.”29 This point is stressed by the white scriptedlettering appearing beneath these volumes, signaling superimposition of text overcharacter and scenes. It is for this reason that Prospero’s Books is structured aroundthese volumes—they are the “organizing principles,” the frames, of Greenaway’sfilm. This enframing technique is further emphasized by devices such as the mirrorsheld by Prospero’s minions to reflect Prospero’s own mental images. Even narra-tion is itself capable of creating a visual frame: Prospero’s recounting of his historyto Miranda “is seen in images that move in a slow-motion that just takes the edgeoff natural action . . . and in pale colours—as though Prospero was conjuring themin the air for Miranda to see as tableaux or paintings . . . indeed there is the sugges-tion that—like the mirror reflections we have already seen—the images are car-ried by mythological characters of Prospero’s imaginings.”30 Tableaux and silveredsurfaces forge a link with the film image; Greenaway suggests this device is“[a]n opportunity to demonstrate the cinema’s illusionism and artifice at the sametime.”31 Through control of the narrative and the mirrors and tableaux it gener-ates, Prospero possesses the power to literally frame an image, a visual equiva-lent of Prospero’s textual power through books. By possessing the isle’s books,by controlling its mirrors, Prospero controls both the narrative and its constituentimages.32

This power is inscribed through depiction of Prospero as author. He tries out-lines, experiments with tone and register, and finally scratches them down on parch-ment. This writing is a recurring motif and structural device of the film: scenes areinterrupted with shots of Prospero in his cell or superimpositions of the words on



screen, images grounding the elaborate masques and tableaux performed by vir-tual and actual inhabitants of the island. This textual focus has an audio componentas well: as shots of Prospero composing are less common than the ambulatory andspectating mage, in essence most lines in the film are essentially voice-offs, linessampled aloud as Prospero drafts The Tempest. As Michel Chion instructs us in hiswork on voice and sound in cinema, voice-offs and voice-overs differ: voice-offsare positioned within the diegesis rather than at another level as in the voice-over33—voice-offs serve to dislocate a character situated within the plot, a detach-ment dependent on “[a] certain neutrality of timbre and accent . . . Precisely sothat each spectator can make it his own, the voice must work toward being a writ-ten text that speaks with the impersonality of the printed page.”34 Voice-offs workto textualize the discourse of the unseen character, an effect amplifying the alreadyheavy textualization of Prospero’s Books. As Deleuze adds, they, in fact, functionto situate unseen spaces off-frame: “it is not sound that invents the out-of-field,but it is sound which dwells in it, and which fills the visual not-seen with a specificpresence . . . sound in all its forms comes to fill the out-of-field of the visual image,and realizes itself all the more in this sense as component of that image.”35 Fur-ther, even when we do see Prospero, the fact that the Prospero who is actuallyspeaking is not the berobed figure gliding across the floor but the old man in an(imagined?) cell trying out lines in the act of composition positions the writing andspeaking Prospero as what Chion has labeled the acousmêtre. This personage isone who speaks without being seen, a speech seeming to arise from “the center ofthe image,” yet which cannot be located.36 Because of this seeming disembodi-ment, the acousmêtre is, not surprisingly, a figure of mastery, of supernatural pow-ers: “Being in the screen and not, wandering the surface of the screen withoutentering it, the acousmêtre brings disequilibrium and tension. He invites the spec-tator to go see, and he can be an invitation to the loss of the self, to desire and fas-cination . . . what are his powers? . . . the ability to be everywhere, to see all, toknow all, and to have complete power. In other words: ubiquity, panopticism, om-niscience, and omnipotence.”37 These powers reveal the acousmêtre as author ofthe images we witness, spectacles springing forth from disembodied text he or shearticulates. Prospero’s power is displayed by this ability to generate texts—visual,audio, and, above all, verbal—texts generating virtual spectacles for our spectatingpleasure. Indeed, worlds generated by text take visual precedence over compos-ing master. Even Prospero’s acoustic mastery is dependent not on our witnessinghis sounding of lines but on the actual generation of text. In fact, Prospero’s voice-off is based on this writing, a composition process that, in good Derridean fashion,is founded on the specter of absence.38 As a result, it is the shots of composition,not verbalization, that situate the magic of this bodiless articulation. In fact, it is thewords themselves, not their scribe, which are truly generative.

As Douglas Lanier indicates, this “picturing of writing . . . convert[s] theShakespearean text into pure cinematic image, to focus on the image rather thanthe meaning of the handwritten words . . . the text of The Tempest emerges from



the film less an immutable, inevitable artifact than the record of a self-directedimaginative performance that unfolds within time, open to chance and revision.”39

Lanier indicates this gap between text and performance is exemplified at the be-ginning of the film with the word “bosun,” a word we see appear on screen beforeProspero tries out several different intonations. The singleness of the text givesway to numerous different articulations, a multeity working backward to highlightbosun’s own textual split identity: between the address opening the play (it is lit-erally the first word) and the character who would answer in reply. Bosun is bothaddressed and addressee and, as such, both within the text of the play and in thenether regions of stage direction. Similarly, as several critics have noted, the sailors’cry “We split” (1.1.60) signifies the film’s own concern with proliferating and riventextuality.40 That this line in the scene occurs immediately after the credits’ bookpoints to deeper division and dissemination. The camera pulls back from themanuscript where a quill is poised after apparently having just written “We split,We split, We split.” As the camera moves back from the parchment, the edge ofProspero’s face is just visible. A sudden noise necessitates a leftward pan where thered-cloaked Prospero has just entered the library. He slowly traverses the libraryuntil he passes the blue-cloaked Prospero still busy at his writing desk, neitherlooking at the other. Prospero is at once writer and written, a doubling and divi-sion of not only island mage but also of space.41

The library contains Prospero’s cell but that poor cell is itself the source of thecomposition providing the archive with its virtuality. The textual generation ofspace (it is after all the Book of Architecture that provides the island’s locales) cre-ates uncertainty as to which is the actual space and which the virtual. Indeed, thefilm bestows greater presence to the imagined world generated by the text thanto the comparative paucity of the cell (itself most likely a virtuality as well). Thismurkiness between virtual and actuality increases in consideration of the text stand-ing at the center of the film. As Greenaway remarks, Prospero’s Books revolvesaround the irony that its central text, the one responsible for generation of seem-ingly infinite virtual worlds, is itself not there: in using the composition of TheTempest as the central action, the film depicts the creation of “a longhand manu-script that—like all other Shakespearean manuscripts—has never been seen. Thefilm’s ending interferes with chronology and history and plays a game with this lossthat is lamented by every Shakespearean enthusiast” (32). If The Tempest is a playlocating a greater power in words to create magic than special effects, then the in-ability to situate these words disrupts and disturbs the text. A similar problem inlocation is developed in the way Prospero’s Books apprehends movement throughstasis and is itself located in a place of lack, a no place—the sound stage.

No There There; Or, Upstaging Tableaux. By stressing Prospero’s Books as text,as a virtual account of the composition of The Tempest, all of the sites depicted inthe film are in effect contained within the covers of the manuscript Prospero iswriting and hence are all contained within his writing space, his cell. However, the



elaborate desk, richly bound volumes, and sumptuous writing costume hardlymake this study a place of deprivation: “Prospero’s ‘poor cell’ is an irony. With hismagic Prospero can build his own architectural capriccios scaled prophetically toPiranesi’s Romanticism.”42 In fact, Prospero’s ability to add details or place mark-ers from any given locale is extended by a potential ubiquity of the cell itself: “Itcould in fact be anywhere . . . in a palace, seminary, library . . . in a university orhouse in Italy, France, the Low Countries . . . maybe in England or Spain. Anywherein fact in early seventeenth-century Europe . . . anywhere, in fact, in 1611 . . . It isa piece of civilised Europe transported to an island far from the sophisticated cen-tre of things.”43

This quality of being potentially any- and everywhere (provided, of course, itis in the metropole) stands in marked contrast to the putative British dominantof realism, the line running from Grierson documentaries to New Wave “kitchensink” films to heritage cinema, films all emphasizing a particularity of place.44 Incontrast, Prospero’s “poor cell,” as well as every other locale in the film, is only tooclearly located on a soundstage. Certainly, this soundstage serves as stark contrastto the lush landscapes and rich manorial interiors commonly found in the heritagefilm. If, as Michael Walsh suggests, Greenaway is part of an English tradition ofemphasizing “human transformations of the landscape,” Prospero’s Books repre-sents an inversion, a transformation leaving no landscape but a blank, a soundstageat once no place and everywhere in its possible transformations.45

This simultaneous lack and surfeit of location position the film outside theprovinces and inside the metropolis (which is, of course, where one would gener-ally find soundstages). More significantly, the raw potentiality of the soundstagecharacterizes it as an extreme example of what Deleuze has labeled as the any-space-whatever, the setting common to the postwar regime of crystalline description: “Itis now an amorphous set which has eliminated that which happened and acted init . . . The any-space-whatever . . . no longer has co-ordinates, it is a pure poten-tial, it shows only pure Powers and Qualities, independently of the states of thingsor milieux which actualise them (have actualised them or will actualise them, orneither the one nor the other—it hardly matters). It is therefore shadows, whitesand colours which are capable of producing and constituting any-space-whatevers,deconnected or emptied space.”46 Such a space lacks the definite givens that individ-uate and specify particular spaces in a regime of realism. These are spaces unboundby any permanent lines of relation—connections are only temporary contingen-cies. As D. N. Rodowick indicates, this space is defined around potentiality:

An any-space-whatever is a space that is not yet situational. Sometimes it is an emp-tied space, sometimes a space whose parts are not yet linked in a given trajectory ofmovement. Any-space-whatevers are figures of indetermination . . . [they are] less dis-connected than they are indefinite. The idea of any-space-whatevers expresses thequality of deterritorialization and indeterminacy . . . When the spatial and temporalcoordinates of the image are indeterminate, no angle or movement defines the imageas a necessary part of a given action or setting.47



Any-space-whatevers are places now untethered, settings sprung from some localedictating a particular trajectory of narrative or images (e.g., the setting of Monu-ment Valley could only give rise to the images and story lines of a Western). In-stead of a place prescribing such a narrative arc is a space defined by a lack ofdefinition; it is a place still to be developed but developed in ways not immediatelyforeseeable. These chains of events and images escaping prolepsis would createnew lines of linkage and relation—not being anticipated, they have not yet beenyoked together.

This potentiality is one of the characteristics of what Deleuze terms “modernfilm,” postwar cinema articulating seemingly aimless movement through spacesthat fail to freeze the narrative into a recognizable progress of actions. Such filmsare set in a space of possibility allowing its constituent locations to be sutured to-gether by montage to suggest a potentiality lurking in the aleatory, to persist in adisavowal of determination by foregrounding their status as any-space-whatever.As Deleuze suggests, “This is in fact the clearest aspect of the modern voyage. Ithappens in any-space-whatever—marshalling yard, disused warehouse, the undif-ferentiated fabric of the city—in opposition to action which most often unfoldedin the qualified space-time of the old realism.”48 These are all recognizable urbanspaces but spaces not specifying a particular city—they might be found in any me-tropolis. Further, they are all spaces that take on numerous different identities andincarnations, a series of mutations as these spaces are once again molded by newmanagement, new ownership, or just new use. However, even these changes do nottruly seem to affect the any-space-whatever: development does not truly define it,for it is all too obvious this incarnation too will pass. Consequently, these spacesare never clichés, are never places signaling conditioned chains of events and im-ages: anything could happen here—and yet these events would leave the spaceuntransformed, undefined, for anything could still happen in this space.

As Deleuze concludes, these any-space-whatevers are not truly bound totheir surroundings: “what characterizes these spaces is that their nature cannot beexplained in a simply spatial way. They imply non-localizable relations.”49 What-ever events occur in this space create linkages not bound to this locale; becausethese events and lines of relation might have occurred anywhere, they possess aubiquity of possibility. It is here Prospero’s Books’ focus on the unplottable spacesof the cell and the soundstage in general most affects the place-bound stories ofthe heritage film. The events and images depicted in Greenaway’s film are not tiedto a particular locale or national arena: the English story does not require an Eng-lish setting, an effect only amplified by the erasure of the boundary line betweenthe virtual and the actual.

This focus on a nonbound space is developed through the film’s use of cameraand editing work to fracture the harmony of narrative space, to systematically re-fuse a unified setting. There are few establishing shots in the Prospero’s Books, andthese frequently come well into a scene. Furthermore, space is disrupted by a rep-resentation of “dialogue” dependent on clashing cuts from character to character,



as in the initial conversation of Prospero and Caliban, rather than use of two andthree shots to help locate characters in relation to one another. Indeed, such a de-vice serves to highlight the opposition of such characters—Prospero to Caliban,Sebastian and Antonio to Alonso and Gonzalo—for we have great difficulty in sit-uating them with one other: they do not seem to occupy the same space. Thesedevices are somewhat relaxed in the final reconciliation scene; however, this scenedoes not serve to dispel an initial dislocation from an alternation of locations: frombathhouse to Prospero’s “poor cell,” from cornfields to library. Indeed, because itis the “actual” setting of the film, Prospero’s study can intrude upon any other set-ting in the middle of the scene, thus furthering the spatial disorientation.

This dislocation is furthered by the static camera of Sacha Vierny. The cam-era is stationary for much of the film, and movement within scenes is conductedlargely through montage. In fact, practically the only time the camera does moveis in the long parallel tracking shots following Prospero and his entourage ofmasqueers. However, the distance of the camera from the “action” and its settingin the recreated Alhambra’s forest of columns serves only to highlight the sensethere seems to be no real movement taking place, for Prospero only progressesfrom tableau to tableau and thus never seems to arrive anywhere. An arrival some-where would circumscribe a definite action, a situated movement, removing thesense of the film operating in an any-space-whatever. Indeed, the lateral camerapositioning serves to use the tracking shot as a device that, in Greenaway’s words,“can minimize the camera becoming a subjective eye.”50 A subjective eye wouldsuggest a privileged prospect from which to situate the film’s locales, one freezingthese spaces into a world oriented around this point of view. This disavowal of sub-jective perspective generates not objectivity but a strange detachment, a refusal toarrange these spaces for us.

Increasing this denial of singular point of view is the use of those still and track-ing shots to emphasize the static and dioramic nature of the film. Because thesestationary and seemingly static tracking shots are in deep focus and emphasizelong takes, they serve too as visual rhyme to English landscape painting. Indeed,similar shots were used in Greenaway’s earlier films The Draughtsman’s Contractand Drowning by Numbers to focus on English gardens and landscape. Again, thisparallel picks up Greenaway’s twist on the English visual tradition of “humantransformations of the landscape.” Since André Bazin, these devices have been as-sociated with realism: long takes, deep focus, and a stationary camera present thereality of the world for all to see, for all to examine without fear of the adulterationand falsification that creeps in through the trickery of editing. As Higson suggests,when such techniques are turned on the heritage backgrounds of landscape andcountry houses, the effect is that the camera presents these locales as objects to belooked at rather than as a narrative space: the lingering takes on full focus shotsallow us to absorb the richness of the setting, but the lack of camera movementtends to treat this setting as inviolate, a room we can look into and admire for itsrich furnishings even as it remains cordoned off from entry.51 In Prospero’s Books,



however, such techniques emphasize not a concrete and anchored place, whetherpastoral garden or country manor, but rather the nonplace, the sound stage, a set-ting not bound to any locale nor possessing anything that could not be located else-where. The static camera work allows the lavish and artificial sets themselves tobecome the focal point, sets that use their allusions to art and architectural worksto chart temporary lines of relation.

This mise-en-scène, of course, further disrupts whatever vestigial associationsof realism are conveyed by the cinematography. The very settings of the film, ref-erences running from antiquity to Mannerism, emphasize their artificiality throughthis allusiveness.52 The bathhouse abuts an interior lifted from the Alhambra,Miranda’s bedroom is reached by descending the Arcoli Steps on the Capitoline,and Ferdinand wanders through a Breughel cornfield with pyramids in the back-ground. The costume of the characters apes outfits from paintings by Rembrandt,Vermeer, and Antonello da Messina.53 Thus, in progressing from one architecturalor artistic allusion to the next, the film offers a spin on “moving pictures.” Such vi-sual quotation and illusion emphasize the fact that, despite dislocations in movingfrom scene to scene, all of these settings could only be present on a soundstage.Because one cannot wander from an Antonello study to a Moorish library, thesesettings underscore the artifice of the film, its ability to make virtual relationsbetween places separated in actuality. Expectations of verisimilitude are dashed,bringing not pedagogic icons of heritage but a site of performance, a place of act-ing out. The camera’s refusal to penetrate into the site of narrative action then ap-pears not from respect for velvet ropes restraining us from museum pieces butmore a reluctance to charge onto the proscenium. Indeed, as Walsh has noted morebroadly, this allusive lingering on sets in Greenaway’s films is extended through re-curring use of tableau vivants, an intertextual focus on static models suggesting thefilm’s meditation on art history is a question of animation, a question of negotiat-ing between two basics of the film image:

the stillness it shares with painting and photography and the motion that decisivelydistinguishes it from the earlier visual arts . . . The wider compass of a relationship be-tween stillness and motion also informs Greenaway’s painstakingly assembled still lives. . . his delight in sending clouds of mist drifting through his green landscapes, and hisoccasional freeze frames, as well as providing a clue as to why all the paintings, eitherdirectly presented or acted out, are premodern; cinema itself stands for and subsumesmodernity.54

Such methods violate heritage cinema’s marked gulf between past and present;here, the past provides the models and backdrops for the staging and performanceof the present. Further, the line of division is a permeable one: the paintings arerestaged with models, and even the moving images show a tendency sometimes tobe stilled (confer the final shot of a leaping Ariel congealing into an image out ofMuybridge or Marey).55

A clash then arises between the nonlocale of Prospero’s Books and its mise-en-scène. The soundstage of the film emphasizes potentiality and lack of fixity,



possibilities indicating an absence of the well-defined. In contrast is the film’s de-ployment of Greenaway’s famously overstuffed compositions and “set shots,” shotsconceived as constituting sets whether as tableaux vivants, still lifes, multilayeredallusions, or iterations of a running visual motif; in short, a visual oversaturation.Though still lifes capture the static arrangement of objects, tableaux use live, mov-ing performers. That Prospero’s Books’ tableau vivants are modeled after still-lifepaintings has a stilling effect, effacing the cinematic difference between still lifeand tableaux. Both still lifes and tableau are in tension with the soundstage’s fluidpotentiality, its lack of permanent form to give it definition. As Deleuze notes of suchoppositions, “[a]n empty space owes its importance above all to the absence of apossible content, whilst the still life is defined by the presence and composition ofobjects which are wrapped up in themselves or become their own container.”56

The soundstage speaks to cinematic movement not constrained by set trajec-tory of plot or images, while the still life or tableaux freezes objects depicted incompleted set or totality. This tension seems most acute in the scenes in andaround Prospero’s cell, particularly those in which he strolls through his library.Here, even the sense of movement in the tracking shots halts under the proces-sional weight of Prospero’s retinue, an endless parade of performers almost sug-gesting the former Duke of Milan ambulates around a cyclorama. Because thecamera moves laterally, rarely penetrating closer to Prospero’s parade, the progres-sion is at a remove, a strip of performers gradually moving out of frame. In fact,even the progression along the columns continues this sense of endless display, forthe spaces Prospero traverses are arranged around various tableaux with varyingdegrees of vivant to them. Movement upon the open soundstage finds itself pittedagainst tableaux and still lifes.

These shots are also the source of much of the film’s reflexive textuality, its self-conscious allusions to highlights of art history. Shots of the “poor cell” of Prospero’sstudy owe their mise en scène to Antonello da Messina’s St. Jerome; the crew andpassenger aboard the ship in the opening act find themselves in a scenario muchlike Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa; the drafts of Prospero’s library are quotationsof the winds of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus; a number of Prospero’s retinue seem tohave stepped from John White’s engravings of native Americans. Such a composi-tion style, with precisely ordered and layered shots, stresses arrangement throughtableau.57 Brigette Peuker suggests that, by filming live actors to recreate a stillimage, cinematic tableaux not only create an unstable opposition between move-ment and stasis but also fuse together different genres of images, different strate-gies of visual textuality:

Tableau vivant is a meeting point of several modes of representation, constituting apalimpsest or textual overlay simultaneously evocative of painting, drama, and sculp-ture. As the staging of well-known paintings by human performers who hold a pose,it involves the “embodiment” of the inanimate image. In other words, tableau vivanttranslates painting’s flatness, its two dimensionality, into the three-dimensional. Bythis means, it figures the introduction of the real into the image—the living body



into the painting—and thus attempts to collapse the distance between signifier andsignified.58

To film such a tableau is to have the quick mime the stilled so that the result-ing image might be frozen on celluloid. It might be added that, though such tableauxattempt to add the real into the image, they also have the effect of marking theimage or virtual in the actual, of featuring the human form as sign or text. Just so,the figures in Prospero’s Books’ tableaux never speak and are never shot in close-up; they remain in the background, almost automatons in their set gestures of al-lusion. In addition to this intermixing of the actual and the virtual, Susan Stewartfinds tableau as something that, in its attempt to arrange a set, closes down narra-tive movement, stops time in favor of “a spatial closure which opens up the vocalityof the signs it displays.”59 By suspending narrative time, the tableau emphasizes thesignifying role of the objects depicted. Consequently, tableaux spatialize the nar-rative scene represented, for it plays out not in time but with its signs demarcat-ing space: “we see in the depiction of the tableau the choice of a point of originand the subsequent delineation of significant aspects in relation to that point . . .the language of the tableaus moves continually from center to periphery. What re-mains ambiguous is the closed field of the edges, for language must remain exteriorto this spatial closure.”60

By developing this tension between center and periphery, tableaux replay im-perial textual strategies, techniques pitting metropole against province. Prospero’sBooks’ deployment of colonially themed retinue as performers in tableaux vivantmimes this legacy, an echo underlining the film’s entanglement in the discourse ofempire. As critics such as Mary Louise Pratt and David Spurr discuss, rhetoricalstrategies of organization are dependent on a spectralizing gaze systematicallyconstructing—and containing—the alterity of the colonial other.61 Such strategiesemphasize, among other things, the appropriation, aestheticization, classification,idealization, and eroticization of the colonized subject. Indeed, this very logic op-erates in the seventeenth-century still lifes mimed by Prospero’s Books, still lifesdepicting spoils of exploration and empire: alien fruits and game, strange flora,and the exotic materiality of indigenous bodies. Such use of colonial bodies alsopropels tableau to its subsequent imperial incarnation in the form of ethnographicdisplays. In this regard, Prospero’s Books echoes Robert Stam and Louise Spence’ssurvey of ethnographic film as deploying the camera’s gaze as yet another form ofcolonial mastery,62 meshing well with recent interpretations of The Tempest thatstress colonial themes.

Greenaway’s film picks up on these readings by structuring many of its tableauxaround the colonial exotic: the Four Winds include Inuit, Africans, and Chinese;the flashes of scenes in Tunis depend on the allure and repulsion in early-modernrepresentations of non-European bodies; numerous scenes use John White’s earlyseventeenth-century engravings of native peoples of Virginia as models. Throughthese models and the freeze-frame capability of the tableau, such exhibits (orscenes) render the bodies of tableaux performers as exemplars or signifiers of a



type, as text. With this thoroughgoing drive to render the known anthropologicalworld of 1611, the tableaux in the film aid and abet Prospero’s Books’ attempt tocatalogue, to freeze within categories and sets. As such, this parade of the exoticproves once more Roland Barthes’s instruction that “inventory is never a neutralidea; to catalogue is not merely to ascertain . . . but also to appropriate.”63

These tableau appropriations of the exotic, of course, further halt the film’snarrative momentum, for such a set piece excerpts a narrative moment and stillsit as a point pregnant with significatory suggestion. Consequently, the tableau teetersbetween depiction of the moment of appropriation or collection (a moment that,like the collection itself, must be one of the fullness and closure of the completedgathering) and the moment of suspended action, of interrupted narrative.64 ForSusan Stewart, the stillness of the tableau then hangs on a quiet moment existingin double time, one dependent on “the relation between arrested life and absolute,‘completed,’ knowledge which is so important to the notion of the collection.”65

It is through this paucity—and surfeit—of time that the tableau is oriented “to-ward silence and spatial boundaries rather than toward expository closure. Whereasspeech unfolds in time, [the tableau] unfolds in space.”66 Narrative would signala transformation or progression of space or situation, one that can only occur in atemporal frame; the interruption of such movement in the tableau frees thesespaces from this developmental arc. As a result, the tableau emphasizes “a still andperfect, and thereby interpretable and unapproachable, universe whose signifiedis not the world but desire.”67 Within the film, even the human form is stripped tobetter deny effective movement, to better stage tableaux.

Keith Gumery argues that nudity functions as a depersonalizing device inGreenaway’s art and films: these texts “denude the actors of all identity by strip-ping them of clothing, then making the characters they are playing strip them-selves as part of the narrative.”68 However, in Prospero’s Books, nudes are enlistedwithin Prospero’s retinue, the very grouping whose presence disrupts and refusesnarrative. Here, as Stewart remarks more broadly, “the ideal of the body existswithin an illusion of stasis, an illusion that the body does not change and that thoseconditions and contingencies which shape the ideal are transcendent and ‘classic’as well.”69 The human form, expressive of mobility and mutability, helps signifya continuity of plastic possibility within a situation or space that is ultimately un-alterable. Film, through this economy of still lifes and tableau bodies, becomes acinema of moving pictures, a cinema not of a chartable movement but of a gener-ative juxtaposition of images and flesh.

Structurally, this denial of progression might be seen in Prospero’s Books’ useof dropping water as the opening and closing moments of the film, framing scenesthat supply the liquid element of many of these tableaux and still lifes. As Deleuzenotes, water accentuates movement in cinema: “water is the most perfect environ-ment in which movement can be extracted from the thing moved, or mobility frommovement itself.”70 If such is the case, then the dropping water during the open-ing and closing credits can only mark a movement that did not move, a return to



a position of potential. The repetition serves to stress continuity: an old man in anoverstuffed soundstage, a space of potentiality in which action does not alter thesetting as locale of possibility. In fact, given the true locus of the film, even thescene of final reconciliations has not impacted Prospero’s Books’ true settings: thescene of composition, Prospero’s cell, and the scene of performance, the soundstage.

Forging the Text. In its appropriation of The Tempest, Prospero’s Books itselfabandons the theatrical stage—not in renunciation of “rough magic”—but forstronger purchase on enchantment through the virtual space of the soundstage. Justso, Lia Hotchkiss suggests that the invocation of the stage in Prospero’s Books servesthe greater end of highlighting a book and image-bound textuality, an eschewal ofreal-time embodiment for the magic powers of print. As a result, Greenaway’s filmpsychically incorporates theater in an act of mourning manifested as aggression.As Hotchkiss argues, “Prospero’s Books reduces theater to its constitutive elementsof book and image (corresponding to theater as literature on the one hand andperformance on the other), claims image for itself (thus further reducting theaterto book), and subsequently reincorporates even that bookish remnant of theater asimage.”71

However, it might be closer to the mark to read the relation with theater asappropriation of performance and enactment, as attempt to render text and imageas live staging. The film’s images, of course, perform tableaux vivant of scenes frompaintings, woodcuts, and photographs, allusions generated through moving bod-ies. The act of writing is enacted not only through the recurring image of Prosperocomposing but also more significantly in the graphic presence of moving script ininserts, superimpositions, and shots of the manuscript. Such emphasis on process,on the animated text, materializes writing and textuality not as an already boundbook but as propagation, as activity churning out not set volumes but vital webs ofwords and images. A defining image of this sensibility might be the paper stormProspero’s library seems subject to, flurries and gusts of printed matter swirlingwords and images in a tempest continuously juxtaposing them in new combina-tions. As these combinations incarnate themselves in images, actual and virtual,text as book and composition coincides with the magic charms of performance.

In fact, all are present in the figure and performance of Prospero: Greenawaysuggests in the screenplay that mage, master dramatist, and master performershould all be identified around this performative power of illusion-making: “it is in-tended that there should be much deliberate cross-identification between Prospero,Shakespeare and Gielgud. At times they are indivisibly one person” (9). Prosperoas master of illusion then becomes the image for the dramatic craft of Shakespeareand the performative art of Gielgud. This congruence brings dramatic elementsof The Tempest’s plot to center stage: Prospero pens the plot for revenge and par-tial transformation of his enemies; he produces elaborate dramas in the form ofMiranda and Ferdinand’s nuptial masque and the sinister scenes staged for Alonsoand company; he constantly plays parts—stern father, suspicious father-in-law,



exacting master, harsh overlord—as with Miranda, Ferdinand, Ariel, and Caliban.The casting of Sir John Gielgud works further turns on this intersection of text andperformance, of stilled tableau and moving picture. Gielgud had already establishedhimself as the foremost Prospero of the twentieth-century stage, so his perform-ance already has a monumental aura to it, an aura preceding the film and servingas justification for Gielgud’s being cast. Indeed, Greenaway’s screenplay suggeststhe film began with Gielgud’s desire to commit his Prospero to film, to make a textof it.72 As a result, casting this theatrical legend in his final Shakespearean perform-ance obviously works in the same vein as mid-century cinematic Shakespeare adap-tations: it is a way of recording and monumentalizing an individual performance.

Yet this textualization of live performance is not of the same order as a filmlike Laurence Olivier’s Henry V,73 which frames itself as a Renaissance production.Olivier’s film stages itself as a facsimile of an original production at the old GlobeTheatre, complete with frequent shots of the groundlings. By stressing the histor-ical authenticity of such a performance, the original text is what is monumental-ized, for it is treated as hallowed source recreated in all its original earthly glory.Image then works to ground and root text, a visual situation that nationalizes theplay, locating its spaces as particularly English. Instead, Greenaway’s rendition ac-cents not theatricality, but its own cinematic nature: screens within screens, thetechnological pyrotechnics of the Electronic Paintbox, and the ever-present sound-stage all self-consciously betray an awareness of the film as a film. Performance,the fleshing out of lines inscribed in black and white, is here expanded beyondenunciation of scripted words.

Perhaps a more significant difference with Olivier’s Shakespearean film, infact, is this articulation of source text. Henry V, with its floating playbill situatingthe camera backstage for the first moments of the play, underscores its source asShakespeare and the English stage, a filial line working to legitimate the film asfully vested in this heritage. However, Prospero’s Books exchanges a source textthat might give rise to a performance profligate in its generation of source texts.Not only is The Tempest a source, but also Gielgud’s theatrical performances asProspero, his role in Providence, and perhaps even his appearance in earlier her-itage films such as Brideshead Revisited and Chariots of Fire.74 Such a link reversesthe source text grounding a particular performance—here it is: the performance(and its link to previous performances) that opens a space for the corporealizationof the text. Similarly, a text that can be performed is materialized in a performancethen rendered as text, a reversal obscured in productions treating the source workto be adapted as sacrosanct. Such adaptations now seem to deploy images tofreeze or still the text, locking it into a space only too bound and specific. Indeed,this tension is given an objective correlative in the very backdrop of Greenaway’sfilm: Prospero’s ever-present retinue of performers who both mime statues andmechanically conduct movements so hieratic as if to suggest stasis.

In fact, the film subjects itself to textualization, for, once Ariel has been “setfree” at film’s end, his leap gradually transforms from three-dimensional cinematic



image to two-dimensional graphic. It is precisely such a move stressing the film’srelation to its own readers, underscoring the fact that, in Douglas Lanier’s words,it is a “cinematic ‘text,’ to be read according to interpretive protocols of close read-ing and with many of the same assumptions about ‘textual’ monumentality . . . Theprice of surviving its historical moment is that the film must itself become a book,one from which the magical agency of Ariel, Prospero’s prime image-maker andperformer, has been ‘set free.’”75 Similarly, Prospero, after performing most of theplay himself, becomes bound to the book. His abjuration of magic powers alsomeans the end of his writing career—and, with it, his performance.

Again, the casting of the aging Gielgud bestows added resonance, for the epi-logue is also the close of his final major cinematic performance.76 Just as Prosperodispossesses himself of authorship, so too Gielgud figuratively forsakes the tread-ing of the boards, letting his own performance be shut up within the bounds of thisfilm. Consequently, the film renders the performance static and tutorial; it con-cludes with a scene confining movement to the page and performance to a now com-pleted role. However, just as with Prospero, Gielgud’s performance itself splits: heplays the part of the island mage, the conniving father and duke, the imaginativeold man, the composing dramatist. The multiple Prosperos betray the double partsplayed by Gielgud: he is at once Prospero, the character from The Tempest, andProspero-Shakespeare, an authorial character who operates at a level beyond—and yet somehow bound to—the play. As a result, his ultimate (in both senses)performance of Prospero is something one would never see onstage. Rather, it is acurious amalgam of stage performance, text reading, and enactment for a camera(complete with acting towards special effects), styles divided with the competing


Figure 3: Sir John Gielgud in Hugh Hudson’s Chariots of Fire (Twentieth-Century Fox, 1981).


Prosperos. As with the film’s refusal to decisively orient the spaces of cell and is-land to one another, so too does Prospero’s Books abjure concluding whether thecomposing Prospero is the same as the island mage, of whether Prospero is evenon the island at all, or if the author had even been duke, father, and magician. TheProspero who had seemed so “actual” based on our prior experience of The Tem-pest is rendered uncertainly insubstantial, while the Prospero conjured by the filmincreasingly seems to be the substantive one. And yet, the line is never crossed; wenever conclusively discern one to be undeniably real within the realm of the film:both are somewhere between actual and virtual. The final text of Gielgud’s per-formance is thereby continually undone by a juxtaposition of different parts, of dif-ferent roles, never certainly establishing the relations of the different Prosperoswho inhabit the disparate spaces of the soundstage.

Consequently, Prospero’s Books situates a peculiar tension, locating a heritagetext on the no-place of a soundstage, using still lifes and tableaux to transformcinema into moving pictures, and rendering a fluid performance into an unstableand riven text. By so doing, the film depends on the generation of images in whichthe virtual and actual counterfeit one another. As such, Prospero’s Books supportsDeleuze’s claim that, in the bare sequence of the postwar crystalline regime,

the forger becomes the character of the cinema . . . He is simultaneously the man ofpure descriptions and the maker of the crystal-image, the indiscernibility of the realand the imaginary; he passes into the crystal, and makes the direct time-image visible;he provokes undecidable alternatives and inexplicable differences between the trueand the false, and thereby imposes a power of the false as adequate to time, in con-trast to any form of the true which would control time.77

By forging a world of simulacra, a world in which the virtual and the actual haveno discernible difference, a world in which text produces image and performance-image is textualized, a world where stories fail to order space, Prospero abandonsa world of mimesis in which the chain of images would be checked against theircorrespondence to pregiven reality. In so doing, the heritage film no longer rootsa text to a highly specific setting, a bound time and place serving to nationalize thesource narrative. Such heritage films deploy images that seem seamlessly linked,a contiguity serving to constrict and still the world of the source text or account.The trope of inheritance used to denominate the genre marks the bequest asclosed transmission, a smooth handing down of singular legacy from singular lega-tor to singular legatee, a text or icon passed on from past to present. In contrast,Prospero’s Books juxtaposes images so as to offer an unbound textuality, an openand mutable spatiality, and a performance refusing to stay contained within itslines. If unity is not produced through the linking up of such images, then the tran-sition of texts, spaces, and role-playing constructs only a bare seriality. This failureto find a stable whole in the sum of heritage images results in the foregroundingof the gap between (and within) such images. In Deleuze’s words, it spotlights “theinterstice between images, between two images: a spacing which means that eachimage is plucked from the void and falls back into it . . . This is not an operation



of association, but of differentiation.”78 In place of the singular text that usually le-gitimates such adaptations, Prospero’s Books offers a disjunctive library somehowencompassed in The Tempest, a lurching between books only underscoring theirapparently random collection and arrangement, their gaping difference from oneanother. This gap between volumes, between images, does not preclude relationor connection between them but does refuse a naturalization of their link: it is im-possible to think of the film touching the essence or the heart of Shakespeare’splay because the interstices stage it as nothing but exterior, an outside without lim-its. Consequently, there is not a seamless handing down, a transmission that stayswithin a lineage, but a focus on the spaces and holes in such a communication leav-ing it opened and dispersed. Prospero’s Books deracinates heritage film throughspaces, texts, images, and performances disavowing the establishment of a singu-lar national line.

Notes

1. Perhaps because of concerns about the representation of anti-Semitism among Cam-bridge dons, Trinity College did not allow its courtyard to be used for the film. TheCollege Quad was actually played in Chariots by another English landmark, Eton.

2. Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge,1994), 145. Bhabha argues nations function in double time, navigating a tension be-tween the pedagogic and the performative. While the pedagogic stresses continuityand accumulation, the performative is the nation’s present and thus is the “repetitiousand recursive” interpellation of “a growing circle of national subjects” (145). Bhabha’sstress is on the effects of hailing minority and immigrant subjects as part of this circle,an incorporation rearticulating nation and redrawing the national “circle.” Perfor-mance as a process of self-othering stressing discontinuity provides part of the shadingin my later discussion of staging and enactment in Prospero’s Books.

3. Andrew Higson, “The Heritage Film and British Cinema,” in Dissolving Views, ed.Andrew Higson (New York: Cassell, 1996), 233–34. Claire Monk has noted the vast di-versity of films clumped under the general rubric of heritage cinema and questionedthe usefulness of heritage as a distinct genre. See especially Monk, “The British HeritageFilm and Its Critics,” Critical Survey 7, no. 2 (1995): 116–24; and Monk, “The BritishHeritage-Film Debate Revisited,” in British Historical Cinema, ed. Claire Monk andAmy Sargeant (New York: Routledge, 2002), 176–98. Monk certainly raises provoca-tive arguments, particularly in her exploration of heritage being used as a transatlanticmarketing device rather than organic genre. However, any genre is used as an umbrellaterm to incorporate similarly wide-ranging films. As a result, genre characteristics seemless like an inflexible law or scientific taxonomy than a useful fiction for teasing out linesof relation.

4. Cf. Alan Parker’s quip that the genre’s most visible films, those of the Merchant-Ivoryteam, constitute the “Laura Ashley school of filmmaking.” As Raphael Samuel andClaire Monk have pointed out, this focus on costume and interiors, in addition to melo-dramatic plots centered on struggles to express emotion, position heritage cinema inthe catchall of “women’s films.” See Samuel’s Theatres of Memory (New York: Verso,1994), as well as Monk’s “The Heritage Film and Gendered Spectatorship,” Close Up,no. 1 (1996/1997), http://www.shu.ac.uk/services/lc/closeup/monk.htm (accessed June20, 2005); and “The British Heritage Film and Its Critics.”



5. See, for example, Andrew Higson’s English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Dramasince 1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) and Tana Wollen’s “Over OurShoulders: Nostalgic Screen Fictions for the 1980s,” in Enterprise and Heritage, ed.John Corner and Sylvia Harvey (New York: Routledge, 1991), 178–93.

6. Peter Wollen, “The Last New Wave: Modernism in the British Films of the ThatcherEra,” in Fires Were Started, ed. Lester Friedman (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1993), 35–51. Tom O’Regan argues the dominance of Hollywood in the worldmarketplace means any other nation’s cinema must position itself as a national (as op-posed to global/Hollywood) cinema. See O’Regan, “A National Cinema,” in The FilmCultures Reader, ed. Graeme Turner (New York: Routledge, 2002), 141. As such, a na-tional cinema must forge what John Hill has labeled as “national credentials,” distinc-tive marks forging a market niche and distinctive brand identity. Hill, “British Cinemaas National Cinema: Production, Audience and Representation,” in The British CinemaBook, ed. Robert Murphy (London: BFI Publishing, 1997), 244–54. Sarah Street sug-gests sound (especially that of voice and accent) was of particular importance for thiscinematic packaging of British film. See her British National Cinema (New York: Rout-ledge, 1997). It should be noted Prospero’s Books relies heavily on the trope on usingJohn Gielgud’s distinctive voice as a filter for most of the play/film’s lines.

7. Andrew Higson, “Space, Place, Spectacle: Landscape and Townscape in the ‘KitchenSink’ Film,” in Dissolving Views, ed. Andrew Higson (New York: Cassell, 1996), 141.

8. Examples include Castle Howard in Brideshead Revisited, Sudbury Hall in Pride andPrejudice, Peppard Cottage in Howards End, and Mompesson House in Sense andSensibility. See Amy Sargeant’s “Making and Selling Heritage Culture” for a consider-ation of how heritage’s stress on specific heritage properties impacted tourism at suchhouses. In British Cinema, Past and Present, ed. Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson(New York: Routledge, 2000), 301–15.

9. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and BarbaraHabberjam. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 163.

10. Deleuze labels this regime the “movement-image,” a dominant stressing continuitythrough “organic narration”: “It is now a matter of knowing if the object is really inde-pendent, it is not a matter of knowing if these are exteriors or scenery. What counts isthat, whether they are scenery or exteriors, the setting described is presented as inde-pendent of the description which the camera gives of it, and stands for a supposedlypre-existing reality.” Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson andRobert Galeta (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 126. As post-war cinema increasingly stresses abrupt cuts and shifts displacing any sense of anextra-cinematic organic world, this raw succession of images is accordingly labeled“time-image” by Deleuze. Its constructive, nonorganic techniques of assemblage hencedepend on the “crystalline descriptions” described below. D. W. Rodowick’s GillesDeleuze’s Time Machine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997) is a useful guidefor these volumes.

11. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 126.12. Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980, 6.13. See Jonathan Romney’s review “Prospero’s Books” (in Sight and Sound 1, no. 5 [1991]:

45) and James Tweedie’s essay “Caliban’s Books” (in Cinema Journal 40, no. 1 [2000]:104–26) for readings that place Prospero’s Books firmly within the heritage film genre.

14. Ian Christie, “As Others See Us: British Film-Making and Europe in the 90s,” in BritishCinema of the 90s, ed. Robert Murphy (London: BFI Publishing, 2000), 75. This pan-European perspective of the film thus anticipates the Maastricht agreement signedtwo years after the release of Prospero’s Books. The film’s credits describe Prospero’s



Books as an “Anglo-French Co-Production,” though two Dutch companies are alsolisted as providing financial support.

15. Claire Monk questions the rigid link many heritage film critics have made between“quality costume dramas” and questions of Englishness. See her “The British Heritage-Film Debate Revisited.”

16. Greenaway suggests in the screenplay “[t]he legitimacy for this approach is to seeProspero not just as the master manipulator of people and events but as their primeoriginator. On his island of exile, Prospero plans a drama to right the wrongs done tohim. He invents characters to flesh out his imaginary fantasy to steer his enemies intohis power, writes their dialogue, and having written it, he speaks the lines aloud, shap-ing the characters so powerfully through the words that they are conjured before us.”Greenaway, Prospero’s Books (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991), 9. Gielgud,of course, was famous for his elocution and performances “from the neck up,” an act-ing style stressing spoken text. I turn to the question of his performance (rather thanProspero’s enunciation of lines) in the last section of this essay.

17. Martin Butler suggests the device of having Gielgud speak lines as a foregrounded textfocuses attention on the books as characters: the other actors “barely signify, for theiractions are literally scripted in advance. It is, rather, the books that seem volatile, mobileand pregnant with possibility.” Butler, “Prospero in Cyberspace,” in Re-Constructingthe Book: Literary Texts in Transmission, ed. Shirley Chew Maureen Bell, Simon Eliot,Lynette Hunter, and James L. W. West III (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), 186.

18. Greenaway, Prospero’s Books, 9.19. I discuss the film’s use of other intertexts, particularly those relating to paintings, ar-

chitecture, and cinema, later in the essay.20. Butler, “Prospero in Cyberspace,” 188. In a related vein, Paul Washington finds the

film strangely ambivalent around the text of the Shakespearian play most invested inthe colonial enterprise: “Greenaway’s telling of The Tempest is highly equivocal: it si-multaneously uses the technological advantages and capacities of film, as opposed tothose of writing, to develop the postcolonial reading, and yet disregards this reading asthe film culminates—back at the precise moment when the possibility of Shakespeareas an instrument of empire began—with the singularity of the Book. The film unsettlesthe paradigm that shapes it, either as colonial or as postcolonial text.” Washington, “‘ThisLast Tempest’: Shakespeare, Postmodernity, and Prospero’s Books,” in Shakespeare:World Views, ed. Heather Kerr et al. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996),239. Along the same lines, Chantal Zabus and Kevin Dwyer find “Greenaway’s Calibanis resolutely passive and restrained” with Caliban’s rescue of the Shakespearean vol-umes at the end of the film an “ambiguous rescue-operation mak[ing] Caliban a com-plicit player in the very story that oppresses him. In this aquatic mise-en-abyme,Prospero does not truly ‘drown [his] book[s]’ (V.iii.57), for The Tempest always alreadycontains the books that Prospero needed to write The Tempest.” Zabus and Dwyer,“‘I’ll Be Wise Hereafter’: Caliban in Postmodern British Cinema,” in The Contact andthe Culmination, ed. Marc Delrez and Benedicte Ledent (Liege, Belgium: Liege Lan-guage and Literature, 1997), 377. Though Prospero’s Books does make gestures ofhomage to the Shakespearean text, as my argument relates, the film’s techniques re-fuse singularity and unification.

21. James Tweedie’s “Caliban’s Books: The Hybrid Text in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’sBooks” is perhaps the most developed of these readings.

22. All quotations from The Tempest are from William Shakespeare, The Tempest, in TheComplete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (New York: HarperCollins,1992), 1526–58.



23. This use of an emblematic book signifying national identity, a signification whose dis-semination leads to a loss of control over the slip and slide of this national signifier,echoes Homi Bhabha’s account of the English Book in “Signs Taken for Wonders,” inThe Location of Culture, 102–22.

24. This textual proliferation is mirrored in the production of the film itself: Greenawaypublished three separate volumes in conjunction with Prospero’s Books. He suggestselsewhere that the relation between a postmodern palimpsestic text and its “source” isone somewhere between geology and medical transplants: “Between the lines of a textyou can sometimes detect the geological cracks and faults of another and older andmore monumental message. The next text is written to reveal an older correspondencewhose meaning is only decipherable with unobtainable dictionaries. The new text islike a skin-graft after a first degree burn that serves only to emphasise the bloody veinsand wordy arteries.” Greenaway, Papers (Paris: Dis Voir, 1990), 62.

25. Peter Schwenger, “Prospero’s Books and the Visionary Page,” Textual Practice 8, no. 2(1994): 269.

26. Greenaway, Prospero’s Books, 9.27. The film’s constant play of frames—a vertiginous strata of nested screens, a voice en-

folding all other speakers, a text generating images over which it is superimposed—echoes Jacques Derrida’s account of how such borders are inscribed simultaneouslywithin and without the work. See The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington andIan McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

28. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 68.29. Amy Lawrence, The Films of Peter Greenaway (New York: Cambridge University Press,

1997), 162.30. Greenaway, Prospero’s Books, 66.31. Greenaway, Prospero’s Books, 47–49.32. Caliban does have a mirror of his own, just as he has stolen the volume The Ninety-

Two Conceits of the Minotaur from Prospero’s library. However, Caliban’s mirror is it-self framed by those in Prospero’s control, just as Sycorax’s spawn appears himselfconjured from Prospero’s Book of Traveller’s Tales (Greenaway, Prospero’s Books, 93,95). As a result, Caliban is himself part of the imagistic and textual illusion conjured byProspero.

33. Kaja Silverman offers perhaps the best account of the distinction: “The voice-off ex-ceeds the limits of the frame, but not the limits of the diegesis; its ‘owner’ occupies apotentially recoverable space—one, indeed, which is almost always brought within thefield of vision at some point or another. Moreover, although the voice-off seems tochallenge the primacy of vision by introducing the threat of absence, it generally con-tributes to the unity of the classic cinematic text by carving out a space beyond theframe of one shot for the next to recover . . . The voice-over, on the other hand, iscoded as occupying a different order from the main diegesis. That difference oftenseems more quantitative than qualitative, merely a slight temporal and/or spatial dislo-cation.” Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cin-ema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), 48. It can be established thatProspero’s Books uses voice-off rather than voice-over because the main plotline andaction of the film are the composition of The Tempest rather than the plot of that play.Also, the film establishes and continually comes back to the actual setting of the play,Prospero’s cell. Consequently, Prospero’s lines are firmly established in this space that,for the most part, remains off-screen, rather than serving as a present frame, largelyundeveloped, in which the meat of the film provides exposition as to how this situationarose (as in Double Indemnity). Further proof might be found in the vocal and sound



distortions present when Prospero voices another character. The distortions include amechanical distortion or sonic hollowness, Gielgud’s use of a different tone or voice, orsometimes a vocal double with the “actual” character voicing the lines just a beat afterGielgud’s delivery. Such effects are indicative of sonic interference in the meeting be-tween virtual and actual, a clash that must take place at the same level of diegesis.

34. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1999), 54; italics in original.

35. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 235.36. Chion, The Voice in Cinema, 9.37. Ibid., 24. Silverman points out classical Hollywood film almost without exception re-

serves such roles for male characters while figuring characters incarnated within diege-sis (rather than at the level of the voice-over frame) as feminine. Silverman, The AcousticMirror, 54.

38. This voice-off is, of course, occasionally interrupted by shots of Prospero composing.Chion labels this revelation of the body of the one speaking “de-acousmatization,”a materialization “like a deflowering” in which the voice “re-enters the realm ofhuman beings” and “doom[s] the acousmêtre to the fate of ordinary mortals,” 23, 27. InProspero’s Books, the embodiment of the voice then stresses the inevitable death ofthat body (as corporealized in the frail Gielgud), leaving only words and text. This ma-terialization certainly offers a poststructural reading of the final reconciliation scene inthe film, the instant in which all voices are finally returned and identified with their cor-rect characters. This collective embodiment then would serve to point to the mass mor-tality of the players, a coming death leaving only the machinelike textual persistence ofThe Tempest and the other Shakespearean plays saved at film’s end.

39. Douglas Lanier, “Drowning the Book,” in Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, ed.James C. Bulman (New York: Routledge, 1996), 196.

40. James Tweedie similarly invokes Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of the fold in discussingProspero’s Books destruction of The Tempest and its other master sources: “The en-tropic shots of innumerable books unbinding . . . are a visualization of the film’s aes-thetic principles; these shots suggest that the book and the film do not comprise aseries of discrete, flat sheets or shots leading from a beginning to an end, but a mass ofcurves, convolutions and folds that ‘unfurls all the way to infinity.’” Tweedie, “Caliban’sBooks,” 115.

41. The presence of this scene right after the textual relay presents literary tradition orheritage as not a singular and stable transmission but a process of self-othering, a tex-tual proliferation of subjectivity.

42. Greenaway, Prospero’s Books, 42.43. This endless possibility of setting (provided it is in Europe) stems again from the power

of Prospero to make his own setting: “Prospero, homesick exile, has tried to recreateon his island many characteristics of a far distant Italy. In the buildings of his palaces,the stocking of his libraries, and in the fashioning of the indigenous spirits into classi-cal allegories he has quoted extant buildings, paintings and books. Most of these arehistorical or contemporary to his life, but being a magician he can also slip time andborrow and quote the future” (Greenaway, Prospero’s Books, 12). Rosalind Galt dis-cusses a perhaps related device in her treatment of Lars von Trier’s Zentropa (also from1991) and its use of back projection for a destabilizing presentation of landscape. Byusing background images presenting landscape in impossible spatial relations to the ac-tors in the foreground and back projections with distressed stock, a divide is createdbetween the background setting and the foregrounded human figures, a contrast thatserves to untether the characters from the specific situation of neorealism. See her“Back Projection: Visualizing Past and Present in Zentropa,” Cinema Journal 45, no. 1



(2005): 3–21; and The New European Cinema (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 2006).

44. For discussion of the realism and its specificities of situation in British cinema, seeAndrew Higson’s “Space, Place, Spectacle” and Terry Lovell’s “Landscape and Storiesin 1960s British Realism,” in Dissolving Views, ed. Andrew Higson (New York: Cassell,1996), 157–77.

45. Michael Walsh, “Allegories of Thatcherism: The Films of Peter Greenaway,” in FiresWere Started, ed. Lester Friedman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993),257. Confer David Pascoe’s comment that Greenaway’s early art and film career was col-ored by an interest in the English Land Art movement, an interest perhaps best seenin the experimental short A Walk Through H. This movement would deploy “maps,words and photographs, to present places, routes, things seen, thoughts evoked and ac-tions performed, and sculptures assembled from natural elements such as soil, twigs,driftwood or stones, which can be physically presented in the gallery space.” Pascoe,Peter Greenaway (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 58. Although the Land Art’s idealwas to recreate in the gallery an actual space, Greenaway uses this technique, even inwhat I call his “soundstage trilogy,” to create a self-conscious “reality effect” for a fic-tionalized space.

This use of a foregrounded soundstage as setting makes Prospero’s Books the mid-dle film in a Greenaway trilogy including The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Loverand The Baby of Mâcon. As is discussed below with Prospero’s Books, all three filmsforeground issues of performance. Further, all three films invoke national peripheriesand exteriors: the eponymous cook in The Cook is French, as is the reputed setting ofBaby; Prospero’s Books follows the canonically English Tempest in locating itself on adeserted isle in the Mediterranean. As a result, the (lack of) setting in Greenaway’sfilms and this center/margin tension recall the Thatcherite North/South battles, as wellas the imperial metropolis/province dichotomy. In all three cases, the unapologeticsoundstage locates the films in a symbolic London; however, as this essay tracks inProspero’s Books, margins do haunt this center.

46. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, 120; emphasis in original. It should benoted Deleuze regards the any-space-whatever as the spatialization of the any-instant-whatever that serves as the atomic substrate of film. However, in the organic regime ofclassical cinema, these spaces and moments are “selected so as to create an impressionof continuity” (5). It is only in the crystalline regime of postwar cinema that devicesstressing discontinuity create juxtapositions completely opening lines of relation. JamesTweedie, in fact, offers a brief but useful consideration of the hybridization of wordand image as “apotheosis” of the any-space-whatever in his “Caliban’s Books,” 113.However, as this essay endeavors to unpack, it is around the nonsite of the soundstagethat Greenaway’s film most thoroughly deracinates the national setting of canonicalheritage films. Indeed, it is only by situating the any-space-whatever against the na-tional specificities of genre setting that the full extent of such deterritorializations ofthe image become fully apparent.

47. Rodowick’s Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, 64.48. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, 208.49. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 129.50. Greenaway, Prospero’s Books, 13.51. Andrew Higson, “Re-Presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Her-

itage Film,” in Fires Were Started, ed. Lester Friedman (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1993), 117.

52. My source for this list of artistic sources for Prospero’s Books is Greenaway’s screen-play, which is certainly not coy in identifying artistic intertexts.



53. The exaggerated form of some of these costumes, particularly the sometimes absurdlylarge ruffs, suggest the film satirizes the archeological exactness of some heritage films’wardrobe.

54. Walsh, “Allegories of Thatcherism,” 258–9.55. For an illuminating discussion of how Marey, Muybridge, and the early development

of cinema negotiates transformations in the experience of temporality, see Mary AnnDoane’s The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 2002).

56. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 16.57. John Orr characterizes this enframement as a cinematic tic of Greenaway: “Greenaway

in contrast is more obsessed by the spatial frame-within-the-frame, the viewfinder, thepainting, the photograph, even the photocopy.” Orr, “The Art of National Identity:Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman,” in British Cinema, Past and Present, ed. JustineAshby and Andrew Higson (New York: Routledge, 2000), 332.

58. Brigette Peuker, “Filmic Tableau Vivant: Vermeer, Intermediality, and the Real,” inRites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies (Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 2003), 295.

59. Susan Stewart, On Longing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 48.60. Ibid., 50.61. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation

(New York: Routledge, 1992); and David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire (Durham, NC:Duke University Press, 1993).

62. It should be noted here that in their discussion of the founding films of British documen-tary, Kathryn and Philip Dodd discuss the treatment of the poor in John Grierson’s Eng-lish films of the 1930s as depending on a spatialization that positions the viewer as anoutsider looking upon an alien community. Dodd and Dodd, “Engendering the Nation,”in Dissolving Views, ed. Andrew Higson (New York: Cassell, 1996), 39–50. Indeed, bydenying this underclass any point of view shots and by focusing on the laboring malebody, this distantiation and eroticization of the subjects in the community under sur-vey parallel the mastering gaze of the ethnographic camera as described by RobertStam and Louise Spence. See “Colonialism, Racism, and Representation,” in Film The-ory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1999), 235–50. As a result, Greenaway’s use of shots associated with the docu-mentary echoes the ethnographic gaze deployed both home and abroad during thisgenre’s birth. Prospero’s Books further aligns itself with the documentary tradition (whichAndrew Higson sees as England’s greatest contribution to film) through the unidenti-fied voice-over describing each of the twenty-four books that structure the film.

63. Roland Barthes, quoted in Donald Horne, The Great Museum: The Re-Presentation ofHistory (London: Pluto Press, 1984), 210.

64. Cf. Stephen Heath’s comments on the “intolerable” tableau space of early cinema forfilm viewers used to classic continuity. In Heath, Questions of Cinema (New York: Ox-ford University Press, 1981), 39–40.

65. Stewart, On Longing, 57.66. Ibid., 66.67. Ibid., 115.68. Keith Gumery, “A Real Lack of Costumes: Some Thoughts on the Unclothed Figure

in the Films of Peter Greenaway,” The Velvet Light Trap, no. 49 (2002): 69.69. Stewart, On Longing, 116.70. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, 77.71. Lia M. Hotchkiss, “The Incorporation of Word as Image in Peter Greenaway’s

Prospero’s Books,” in The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory, edited by



Lisa S. Starks and Courtney Lehmann (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UniversityPress, 2002), 95.

72. Greenaway, Prospero’s Books, 9.73. The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fifth with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in

France (short title Henry V, Laurence Olivier, 1946).74. Of course, there are the numerous visual arts (painting, architecture, photography, cin-

ema, etc.) source texts cited by Greenaway himself. The most striking cinematic refer-ence is to Alan Resnais’s Providence, a film that in many ways rivals The Tempest inimportance as source text for Greenaway’s adaptation. Providence also tells the tale ofan aging artist figure who pens his final book by trying out the speeches for his char-acters. The authoritarian nature of this artist is, like Greenaway’s film, figured by thedevice of having him literally speak for others. Quite strikingly, Resnais’s film also usesan aged Gielgud to play this role.

It might also be added that the rampant allusiveness of Prospero’s Books has the ef-fect of illuminating the source texts of The Tempest. These texts include The Four Voy-ages of Amerigo Vespucci, Arthur Barlowe’s The First Voyage Made to the Coastes ofAmerica, Montaigne’s essay On Cannibals, and Peter Martyr’s The Decades of theNewe Worlde. The effect is to downgrade the Shakespearean work from transcendentmasterpiece to textual epiphenomena. Douglas Lanier suggests that this demotion ofthe Shakespearean text is broadcast in the scene where the infant Ariel micturates ona number of Prospero’s books. Lanier, “Drowning the Book,” 200.

75. Lanier, “Drowning the Book,” 202–3. Confer also Leon Steinmetz’s assertion that TheTempest is itself a play about illusion. Steinmetz and Peter Greenaway, The World ofPeter Greenaway (Boston: Journey Editions, 1995). Amy Lawrence similarly notes thatthe very mark of this illusionistic tendency, the masques in the play, are depicted in theplay through great use of intertextuality. As a result, Prospero’s Books then uses themasques to underscore the manner in which Prospero himself is “a text in a world oftexts,” and thus only as material as these sources of which he is composed. Lawrence,The Films of Peter Greenaway, 163.

76. Gielgud, of course, continued to appear in films up until his death in 2000 but neveragain took a lead role in a full-length feature. Almost all his subsequent performanceswere cameo appearances or voice-overs.

77. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 132.78. Ibid., 179.



Documents

Moving Pictures, Still Lives: Staging National Tableaux and Text in Prospero's Books