"Peter Greenaway comes on like Oliver Stone transformed into a wry art scholar in Rembrandt’s J’Accuse, his self-described 'investigation' of the Dutch master’s 1642 painting The Night Watch, which he posits as a theatrically calculated 'indictment by image' of a murder within a prominent Amsterdam citizen militia. Greenaway—whose prosecutorial head is present in a modestly-sized video frame in the lower center of the screen, nearly as often as his voice narrates the conspiracy theory—sniffs that most people are 'visually illiterate' in the age of the written text, then attempts to scrape away the centuries by contextualizing Night Watch in its political and social epoch, with some of the same DV sleight-of-effects that stuffed his Tulse Luper Suitcases trilogy but with a lighter touch and a clearer through line. Sequentially dissecting 31 mysteries he spies on the giant canvas he scrutinizes with a coroner’s exactitude, Greenaway credits Rembrandt with tactics ranging from gay innuendo (a captain’s shadowed hand falling just above his lieutenant’s erect, crotch-level blade) to outrage at child prostitution, all in the service of pointing to the militia officer’s officially accidental death as a premeditated coup in the service of Anglo-friendly families’ financial interest in the Crown Jewels of fractious England. ..."
Slant
W - Rembrandt's J'Accuse W - The Night Watch
Peter Greenway, Rembrandt’s J’Accuse
ARTFORUM: Watch and Learn
YouTube: Peter Greenaway's Rembrandt's J'Accuse, "Most People are Visually Illiterate" - Rembrandt's J'Accuse
Rembrandt - The Night Watch (1642)
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