Listening to Prospero’s Books

Summary

Peter Greenaway’s 1991 Prospero’s Books has received critical attention primarily for its extraordinarily dense rendering of the visual field. The twenty-four books of Prospero – an allusion, Greenaway admits, to cinema’s twenty-four frames per second – provide a powerful structuring device for the film’s exploration of the inter-connected materiality of book and cinematic frame. The result is an extraordinarily complex and imagistic film, and the viewer is at first nearly overwhelmed by the level of visual detail and layering. Claus Schatz-Jacobsen’s discussion of the film provides an example of the critical preoccupation with the visual in the film: ‘It seems as if Greenaway has been inspired by Prospero-Shakespeare’s potent magic to pursue every conceivable visual possibility offered by the state of the art in film and television technology ... Nothing seems finally alien to Greenaway’s painterly urge to emulate by purely visual means the potent verbal magic of his ideal reflection in the mirror of the Tempest, Prospero-Shakespeare.’ While it is of course correct to call attention to the painterly nature of the film, the contention that it is ‘purely visual’ represents a misunderstanding of the full implications of its nature which, far from being exclusively visual, depends upon setting into play tensions and potential rivalries among cinematic image, post-production digital image, dialogue, sound and music. Moreover, it is also a mistake to conceive of The Tempestprimarily as a ‘verbal’ accomplishment, since the play’s emphasis upon spectacle, illusion and, especially, sound, is perhaps more marked than that of any other Shakespearian play.