Today, we watched The Falls (1980), currently available on Kanopy. Since it's over 3 hours long, we decided to make it a Sunday matinee (to allow an intermission if necessary). Good choice, although we watched it straight through anyway.

The Falls is a sort of mockumentary, documenting the effects of a fictitious "Violent Unexplained Event" (VUE) on a selected group of victims (whose surnames all begin with "Fall"). Each of the 92 profiled survivors is featured in a brief vignette.

So essentially, it's a collection of 92 documentary-style short films about fictitious people. One after the other! 92 of them, droning on for over 3 hours! Nevertheless, I found it engaging and quite funny.

The Unexplained Event seemed to have something to do with birds. Victims were obsessed with birds or flight (or sometimes water). They experienced bodily mutations and started speaking mysterious new languages. These strange vignettes intersected each other, until they seemed to weave an almost-plausible alternate history (somewhat reminiscent of Borges).

Before making The Falls, Greenaway had spent years working on conventional instructional films. He'd thoroughly mastered the expected style, and understood quite well how to parody it.

He'd also created numerous short experimental films during that time. I couldn't find many of those online, but he seemed to have already explored similar themes on a smaller scale (and some footage from those early films was cleverly repurposed in The Falls).

Anyway, I enjoyed today's movie, and my husband did too. That said, The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) might be a better first introduction to Greenaway's work.

#TheFalls