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Critique Of "The Art Of National Identity" By John Orr

Critique of “The Art of National Identity” by John Orr;
With an alternative view of the films of Peter Greenaway

The essay entitled “The Art of National Identity: Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman” by John Orr makes a number of excellent points regarding the opus of each of the two filmmakers. By focusing his analysis on the relation of their works to the art and concept of national identity, however, Orr misses the opportunity to discuss aspects which are more fundamental to each of their aesthetics. I find this limitation to be particularly frustrating in his analysis of Greenaway, so I will limit my response to an analysis of that director’s films and offer a method of viewing them which, I believe, accords more closely with the auteur’s actual intent and execution.
The most perceptive point Orr makes in his comparison of the two directors comes with his analysis of the ways in which “both absorb theatre into film…[and] also extend film form by other means.” In the context of film narrative, Orr describes Jarman’s “systematic use of anachronism and palimpsest” in contrast with Greenaway, “who uses them more sparingly and sticks, by and large, to the rigours of narrative continuum” . In my view, this analysis of Greenaway’s practice is wide of the mark, but I shall wait until later in this essay to make my argument.
In focusing on “the different ways in which they use time and space” , however, Orr hits upon a central opposition between the methodologies used by each director. Analyzing the ways in each uses the frame-within-the-frame, Orr finds Jarman “is largely fascinated by the temporal frame-within-a-frame of film narrative, the leap of epochs acting as a disruptive shock not only to the viewer’s sensibilities but to his/her sense of linear history.” By contrast, Greenaway, he finds, “is more obsessed by the spatial frame-within-the-frame, the viewfinder, the painting, the photograph, even the photocopy…[which becomes] an even more self-conscious...