A Painting, A Portrait

Rembrandt’s J’Accuse

Film Forum

The Maid

Elephant Eye Films 

Peter Greenaway, the British director who was educated as a painter, first came to wide attention in 1982 with The Draughtsman’s Contract, a silky comedy about seventeenth-century aristocrats. Greenaway then promptly set out not to build on this success, undertaking one eccentric film project after another. It was almost as if he were determined not to grow cumulatively, as most of the best directors have done. Of the Greenaway works that I have seen, only two of them--quite unlike each other--stand out in memory. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover was a modern comedy that revealed how sex can be achieved in restaurant restrooms. Prospero’s Books, a slanted view of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, put the future in debt to Greenaway by preserving John Gielgud’s exquisite reading of Prospero.

Now Greenaway turns to the Golden Age of Dutch painting. Rembrandt’s J’Accuse is a study of that painter’s most famous work, The Night Watch, and though it certainly is a study, it is also--or primarily--a fascinating film. Greenaway has a thesis, possibly stated previously in the mountain of publications about Rembrandt. The painting, familiar to millions, shows a group of civilian militiamen in Amsterdam rousing to an alarm. Greenaway’s film sets out to prove that the painting is really an exposé of a murder--of one officer by another. Twenty points, all visual, are made to support this thesis.

He embeds his inquiry in an attractive style, decked with dramatized expeditions into Rembrandt’s life, with scrutiny of details in the painting that makes us realize we have never looked carefully enough. In the low center of the screen through most of the picture is Greenaway himself, speaking about what we are seeing. He is always lucid and crisp, never didactic. Meanwhile, the screen keeps fragmenting around him into various shots of Night Watch details, or overriding him as we go back to Rembrandt’s Amsterdam and the creation of this painting.

What is especially taking is that those inserts--can we say “flashbacks”?--are couched in the same light that we have all grown to love in that period. The cinematographer, Reinier van Brummelen, who has often worked with Greenaway, seems to understand what Rembrandt saw in the very idea of light. There are several sources of light in The Night Watch, not the usual single one, a matter that van Brummelen understands in his own work.

The murder thesis is too complicated to summarize, but here are a few of the details. A glove that is held by one man is for the wrong hand: he lacks a left glove, not the right-hand one that is shown. A weapon that another man grasps is held in a sort of penile position, and the shadow of another man’s weapon falls across the first man’s crotch. All the data may or may not support the murder thesis, but at least they adroitly parse the painting. In the event, however, one of the best proofs that Rembrandt was revealing a crime is circumstantial. After 1642, when this painting was made, his financial condition sharply worsened. He continued to paint some of the greatest of all paintings, but patronage fell far off. In 1642, when he was thirty-six, he was a successful artist and teacher; when he died in 1669, he was virtually a pauper. It certainly is arguable that the Amsterdam bourgeoisie punished him for his daring.

Questions remain that Greenaway doesn’t raise. Why did Rembrandt do it? If he knew of a crime or suspected one, why, instead of reporting it, did he spend all that time and talent suggesting it in a painting--a huge one, too? And what did he do about the crime, or what was done to him besides the neglect, after the work was finished? Greenaway saith not. He merely puts forth his implications and inferences in a highly unusual, thoroughly intriguing film.