Peter Greenaway’s Documentary ‘Rembrandt’s J’Accuse’ Poses Hidden Conspiracy

by Sam Juliano

     “This building is the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Holland, the home of the prime collection of Dutch painting.  The Rijksmuseum is currently the scene of a shooting.  The relevant authorities should investigate.”

     So intones British director Peter Greenaway in an inimitible voice that warns it’s listeners that a cover-up has been sustained for almost four-hundred years, and that one of Western culture’s most iconic figures may well have been the prime perpetrator of the deception.  Greenaway boldly announced that The Night Watch, which he states is the fourth most famous painting of all-time (behind three Italian works – DaVinci’s Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and  Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel) is basically an expose for a murder.  The painting, which features civilian militiamen responding to an alarm, is a prime example of what Greenaway considers to be a kind of painted theatre, and in later contentions the director suggests that the ramifications of the questions raised in regards to the real intention of the work, brought about Rembrandt’s fall from grace. 

    The documentary, Rembrandt’s J’Accuse, is basically an expansion to the director’s 2007 fictional feature, Nightwatching, which was a far more general consideration of the artist and his most famous work, but while it was part of a larger celebration of Rembrandt’s 400th birthday, it stopped short of launching the inquiry that lies at the center of this new film.

     Greenaway persuasively argues 20 exhaustively presented “points” (actually 30 ‘mysteries’) that Rembrandt “has scrupulously painted an indictment of guilt in paint,” and he suggests that the painter lost commissions and spiraled down into poverty as a result of the painting exposing people to the public.  Greenaway’s running narration is lucid and engaging throughout and free of the didacticism that might alienate all but the most ardent fans of art history.  Wisely accentuating the mystery and intrigue inherent in the masterpiece, which like the aforementioned Mona Lisa, has perplexed and fascinated viewers for centuries, Greenaway makes not only a plausible case, but manages to engage viewers in his point-by-point contentions.  He convinces us that maybe we never looked hard enough as he alternates from showing details from the painting to Amsterdam locales to the historical construction of the painting in re-enactments, and his gifted cinematographer Reinier van Brummelon (with whom he worked with previously on Nightwatching) seems to know how to use light in this film, much as Rembrandt did in his own paintings.  The eye-filling screen captures of Renaissance art have rarely been examined on film with such visual magnificence or such probing close-ups. It is clear from the outset however, that The Night Watch is a dark tapestry that seems almost purposely intent on hiding something, and Greenaway pounds home to point repeatedly either directly or by innuendo.  The music by Marco Robino and Giovanni Sollinia is melancholy and ominous, perfectly attuned to grandiloquence of the visuals.

     Among the claims of deception is a right-handed glove that is actually displayed on the wrong left hand, and a weapon shadow can be seen on a soldier’s crotch area.  Other lurid suggestions are posed, yet without a proper mediator, like a distinguished art historian, Greenaway allows his theories to stand on their merit or be seen as excessive overeach.  One could easily pose that Rembrandt’s subsequent admonishment and desersion by the Amsterdam bourgeiosie was more coincidental than circumstantial, but most of the clues do seem to support the idea that is some valid substance to the charges.

    Greenaway asks all the pertinent questions and lays out his facts flawlessly, but almost predictably does not raise the questions that might serve to lessen the persuasiveness of his argument.  First and foremost is the dearth of an answer as to ‘why Rembrandt might have concealed a crime?’  Why wouldn’t he have reported the crime to the authorities rather than devote a huge block of time in his artistic prime to cast a visual condemnation that was never clear and mired in cryptic clues.  But the director doesn’t even attempt to pose questions than can’t possibly yield satisfactory answers.

 .

 

      Greenaway’s toneless cynicism finds voice early in the film when he dismisses most people as “visually illiterate” and he blames a text-based culture for what has turned a once thriving movie scene into a current “impoverished cinema.”  He goes on to assert that “just because we have eyes, does not mean we can see.”  Elitism aside, Greenaway’s contentions are consistent with the laziness that often informed by on-lookers at art exhibitions and galleries throughout the world, the obvious result of impatience and an inability to appreciate the true beauty of the form.

       The director’s attempts to implicate an assassinated Dutch politician named Pim Fortuyn and filmmaker Theo Van Gogh into the centuries-old controversy has little bite or relevence, even as he has his camera show the body on a street.  But this narrative diversion doesn’t cloud the issue at hand, which is the undeniable essence of the work itself, a kind of Da Vinci Code for contemporaries who may be intimidated with the comparitive antiquity of the enterprise.  If not anything else, Rembrandt J’Accuse is a captivating and often ravishing foray into the unsolved mysteries of art history and a coincidental disection of one of the greatest paintings known to man.  For art lovers it’s nirvana, for the rest it has the power of hypnosis.  It’s 2009’s best documentary feature.

Rating:  * * * * 1/2

Note:  I saw ‘Rembrandt’s J’Accuse’ on it’s final night at the Film Forum, Tuesday November 3rd at 10:00 P.M.  I believe it may be available on the Region 2 DVD of ‘Nightwatching.’

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Freudenheim is marshalling his arguments to stop the art sale through legal…