Greenaway: The Shorts (DVD)

Contains the films: Intervals (1969, 6 mins), Windows (1974, 4 mins), Dear Phone (1976, 17 mins), H Is for House (1976, 9 mins), A Walk Through H (1978, 41 mins), and Water Wrackets (1978, 11 mins)

“He has other reputations as well—as an academic, as a maker of curious artifacts, as a cataloguer of the bizarre and as a librarian of the absurd.” Peter Greenaway might well have been describing himself in this thumbnail sketch of Canton Remodell, a character in an unmade project. Before his international arthouse hits like The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and Prospero’s Books, Greenaway made a series of highly inventive films that established all the obsessions that run through his later work. The content of the six playful shorts featured varies widely—from the condensed, wry history of 37 people who have fallen to their deaths from windows (Windows), to a sequence of 92 maps to guide a dead ornithologist on his way into the afterlife (A Walk Through H) set to a thrilling score by award-winning composer Michael Nyman (The Piano). All of these quirkily delightful works take great pleasure in outlandish detail, fake erudition and corkscrew narratives.

Also available as part of the box set GREENAWAY: THE EARLY FILMS