Vertical Features Remake

Vertical Features Remake takes the form of a mockumentary and is made up primarily by four films made by four academics from the raw footage of an incomplete film made by an elusive character called Tulse Luper. The material takes the form of static filmed images of a variety of vertical features, both natural and man-made, such as posts and trees etc. The images are organised into eleven sections of eleven shots, resulting in one hundred and twenty one images of vertical features per film. While each version shows the same number of images, they differ in specific rules for how long a shot is held and have differing minimalistic music accompanying them.

With this film, film-maker Peter Greenaway was poking fun at structuralist film theory, which seemingly was discussed frequently at the time by film academics. The basic idea behind this theory is that films convey meaning in a similar way that languages do. They achieve this by combining edited shots together to communicate ideas. While an individual shot would not express the full idea, a specific combination of images would. Greenaway had some disdain for this theory for some reason and in this film he has academics over-analysing things and coming up with different versions of films, the results of which are absurd but strangely fascinating. The differing editing rules and music used do make a difference to the effect, which is interesting in itself. The imagery is committedly mundane, yet decidedly odd when presented in this manner. Minimalist composers, Michael Nyman and Brian Eno provide the music which does seem somewhat apt for this experimental project. I guess it would all be a bit dry without the wraparound mockumentary about the genesis of the films themselves and their creators. The central character in all this, Tulse Luper, was to become a recurring character in Greenaway's future filmography and would feature extensively in his next, more ambitious and quite epic avant-garde outing, The Falls (1980). Vertical Features Remake is certainly a very left-field bit of cinema that's only going to appeal to more adventurous film-viewers but it's one that has a pleasing lightness of touch in its experiments and consequently makes for a very enjoyably eccentric detour.

This film is awesome! The character of Tulse Luper is one which crops up in many of Greenaway's work (he has just finished a new exhibition at Compton Verney called '92 Suitcases' which expresses psychological and physical episodes in Luper's life. It's great). Greenaway insists that Tulse Luper is not his alter-ego or anything and yet they share loads of things in common.

Greenaway has invested so much of his artistic time on Luper and it is so interesting to watch this film in light of this. Patterns of authorship are fascinating in 'Vertical Features Remake'. See it and others!

This is a complete masterpiece.

I have never seen anything quite like this. Despite this, the majority of people would not enjoy it as it is a tedious look at different scenery. At points, it really drags on, however, for me this extravagance and sheer persistence only enhanced the experience. It is quite hard to believe.

Verticle Features Remake is made up documentary using random archive images of people, and following the story of a man called Tulse Luper, who collected images, and information about vertical features, organised into 11 sections each containing 11 Verticle Features. Creating 121 in total, chosen logically for the project.

Tulse Lupers collection, is then remade 4 times, in film format, following the different opinions on the relevance, and meaning of the original project.

This film is made so brilliantly it's unbelievable. Don't expect to watch a nice light heart comedy. It is funny, but not quite as you normally see it. The music, reinforces the tediousness, and works a spectacularly strange and minimal soundtrack, perfectly suiting the film. If you're a film appreciator like myself, you have to watch this film. REALLY, IT'S THAT GOOD!

An examination by a group of rival academics to remake an incomplete and largely missing film allegedly made by Tulse Luper. The film in question is called Vertical Lists, or Vertical Features, which shows vertical objects like posts, poles, tree trunks etc in a domestic landscape. Each remake uses a differing structure of counting and musical technique to count the 121 (11x11) vertical objects that Tulse Luper allegedly planned for the project.

"Vertical Features Remake" (1978, Peter Greenaway) Haha, oh my god, Peter Greenaway just vaulted into my favorite directors.

"Vertical Features Remake", a 42-minute extra on the DVD for a film I'm watching directly after this called "The Falls", brings to mind such classic faux-sorta-documentaries as Orson Welles' brutally tricky "F for Fake" and Chris Marker's devastatingly funny "Letter to Siberia", but with Greenaway's very distinctive obsession with structure that seems to show up in much of his filmography.

Brilliantly lampooning preachy academics who presume to know more about an artist's work than the artists themselves, "Vertical Features Remake" is nominally about an artist named "Tulse Luper", who was apparently planning on creating a sort of film based upon photographs he pathologically captured of vertical objects (trees, telephone boles, sticks stuck in the ground, etc.), but died before being able to complete it, leaving it unfinished. The film depicts four attempts by presumptuous analytical academics trying their own hands at attempting to reconstruct his vision, and of course, they all completely disagree on what his "vision" *was*, and it becomes a sort of hilarious, almost "Rashomon"-esque breakdown as the four films depicted are drastically different in tone (to the point that the amusingly foreboding piano key poundings that accompany and punctuate each scene are wildly different between each version, with "Vertical" leaving me in hysterics as the pianist is just assaulting the poor thing).

The aspect that pushes the film to the lofty score it's going to receive, though, is ridiculously verbose and proper British narrator Colin Cantlie, whose narration is so hilariously detailed that it becomes unimportant what he's even saying, just the fact that he's saying so damn MUCH of it, and from there, the film gets so amusingly complicated that I just couldn't stop laughing...for instance, we're told that not only do they disagree on what Luper's vision was, no one's even sure if Luper even exists! (Some argue that all the pictures of Luper are actually the editor's father-in-law), or when the third film is criticized by the fourth director as being "too ingenious".

A good DVD special feature is designed to perfectly compliment the main feature, so if "The Falls" is anything like this, it may just have a shot at making my top 300, and considering "Zorn's Lemma"'s placement IN my top 300, I won't rule out this fabulous piece of work either.

{Grade: 9/10 (A-) / #4 (of 18) of 1978}