Prospero's Books 1991 M
Prospero's Books 1991 M
35MM, COLOUR, DOLBY, 129 MINUTES, THE NETHERLANDS / FRANCE / UK / ITALY / JAPAN, ENGLISH / DIRECTOR/SCRIPT: PETER GREENAWAY / BASED ON ‘THE TEMPEST’ BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE / CINEMATOGRAPHER: SACHA VIERNY / EDITOR: MARINA BODBIJL / PRODUCTION DESIGNERS: BEN VAN OS, JAN ROELFS / MUSIC: MICHAEL NYMAN / COSTUME DESIGN: ELLEN LENS, EMI WADA / PRODUCTION CO: ALLARTS, CINÉA, CAMÉRA ONE, PENTA FILM, ELSEVIER-VENDEX FILM BEHEER, CHANNEL 4 INTERNATIONAL, VPRO TELEVISION, CANAL+, NHK, PIERSON, HELDRING & PIERSON N.V., PALACE PICTURES, STICHTING PRODUKTIEFONDS VOOR NEDERLANDSE FILMS, EURIMAGES / PRINT SOURCE: BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE / RIGHTS: PARK CIRCUS / SCREENING FORMAT: 16MM
‘Prospero’s Books is a film about “You are what you read”. We’re all products of our education, our cultural background, which very largely is perceived through text. Text is so desperately important in this film. All the images come out of Prospero’s inkwell, as though the inkwell were a top hat, with the magician pulling out the scarves, image after image.’ Peter Greenaway, Film Quarterly, 1991—92
Prospero’s Books is an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s last work The Tempest 1623, where a brave new world is situated on the fold of the rise of a new economic order. Prospero (Sir John Gielgud) and his daughter Miranda (Isabelle Pasco) are banished to an island which in turn becomes an expanded library; the library turned into a state where Prospero literally rules his subjects by the books. Gielgud’s narration enacts a cross-identification between Shakespeare, Prospero and Gielgud who at times become indivisibly one person. The film is divided into 24 parts, or more precisely 24 books, with titles such as ‘A Book of Mirrors’, ‘A Book of Mythologies’ and ‘The Book of Universal Cosmography’. Through this structure, Peter Greenaway tries to organise a multiplication of view points (“a chaos of visual realities”) and moves from the theatrical single-centeredness of representation to the cinematic multiplication of motions, senses, images and time.
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