The Baby of Mâcon 1993 R18+
The Baby of Mâcon 1993 R18+
35MM, COLOUR, DOLBY, 122 MINUTES, UK / FRANCE / GERMANY / BELGIUM / THE NETHERLANDS, ENGLISH / DIRECTOR/SCRIPT: PETER GREENAWAY / CINEMATOGRAPHER: SACHA VIERNY / EDITOR: CHRIS WYATT / PRODUCTION DESIGNERS: BEN VAN OS, JAN ROELFS / COSTUME DESIGN: ELLEN LENS, DIEN VAN STRAALEN / PRODUCTION CO: BLACK FOREST FILMS, CHANNEL FOUR FILMS, CIBY 2000 / PRINT SOURCE: NEWVISION FILM DISTRIBUTORS / RIGHTS: PARK CIRCUS
‘For me, this film is not a criticism of Catholicism in particular. It talks about power, all ideologies that pretend to guide the thought and the imagination of the social body and what happens when one defies them. The Church finds itself deprived of the opportunity to exercise [power] in its own domain, that is, the domain of miracles, and it reacts forcefully, taking vengeance in an atrocious manner.’ Peter Greenaway, Postif, January 1994
The Baby of Mâcon is an elaborate and challenging exploration of contemporary voyeurism, the madness of religious faith and the spectacle of violence. In the famine-plagued medieval town of Mâcon, where women have long been infertile and believe it a punishment from God, a child is born to an old woman during a play being performed for nobleman Cosimo de Medici (Jonathan Lacey). The play itself concerns the miraculous birth of a child in a city hungry for salvation, and from the onset Peter Greenaway orchestrates an uneasy similarity between the actors’ lives outside the play and scenes performed within. Greenaway’s structures the film tableaux as a complex three-act play wherein the awareness between the play’s aristocratic spectators and the film’s self-conscious viewers are constantly interrelated. When the real mother’s virginal daughter (Julia Ormand) claims the baby as her own and the product of an Immaculate Conception, her social standing is elevated with claims she has mothered the Messiah. The naïve young woman begins to exploit the situation, exchanging gifts and money for blessings. However the enemies she has made in the process lead the young woman and child to become an object of excessive and gruesome retribution by the local bishop and a town on the brink of mass hysteria.
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