The Belly of an Architect · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man stands at an office photocopier in Rome, pressing his own torso to the glass. Around him are the images he cannot stop making: postcards of stone bellies, reproductions of Boullée's domes, photographs of statuary swelling under marble drapery. Stourley Kracklite builds nothing in this film. He copies. The Xerox is the only machine he operates with conviction, and what it gives back are degraded duplicates of bodies and buildings, defaced, recombined, laid side by side. Start there, with the copier, and the whole architecture of Greenaway's film opens.

The world Kracklite moves through is an ordered one. Sacha Vierny — the cinematographer who shot Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima mon amour for Resnais — frames Rome head-on and centered: the Pantheon, the Vittoriano, Piazza Navona held in rigorous symmetry, with the human figure dwarfed inside the geometry. It is a closed system of permanence in stone. And it is rotting. The commission Kracklite came to mount is quietly taken from him by the Speckler family who underwrite it; his marriage decays; the abdominal pain he reads as poison is cancer eating him from inside. Deleuze, writing about Visconti, names exactly this configuration — a hyalosign he calls crystal-decomposition: an aristocratic, perfectly ordered world that is dying from within, beautiful and embalmed at the same moment. The crystal-image is one where present and reflection can no longer be told apart, mirror facing mirror; in its decomposing form, the whole gorgeous structure is found to be already corrupt. Greenaway never made it into Deleuze's books — Belly came out two years after The Time-Image — but no film fits the concept more cleanly. The travertine glows golden while the body laid out among the masterworks goes bad. That is the picture's organizing irony, and the concept gives it a name.

Why lean on Deleuze rather than just calling this a tragedy of jealousy? Because the film keeps refusing to behave like one. Kracklite never acts to change his situation. He watches. He watches his wife Louisa's belly swell with the wanted child, watches Caspasian relieve him of both wife and exhibition, watches his own gut on the photocopier glass. This is what Deleuze calls the seer — a character to whom no adequate action is available, who can only look and endure. The sensory-motor circuit that drives ordinary cinema, where a man perceives a problem and acts to resolve it, has gone slack. Dennehy's performance is built precisely on this: the bulk and gruffness of a Hollywood heavy, all that latent capacity for action, with nowhere to put it. He clutches his stomach and declaims. The flatness of the delivery, the frontal arrangement of bodies inside the frame, the gut held and held — Deleuze would call this a cinema of the body, where posture itself becomes the unit of meaning. The clutched belly is a gest: an attitude that exposes a whole relation between a perishable American body and the eternal European stone it has come to worship.

Underneath the ordered surface runs something more primitive. The belly is the film's true engine, and the belly is appetite, drive, decay, birth — a savage originary world erupting beneath the neoclassical one. Kracklite's compulsion has the shape Deleuze gives the impulse-image: a downward slope, a line of slope toward exhaustion and death, scavenged out in fetish part-objects. The photocopied bellies, the postcards, the obsessive reproductions of his own torso are relics charged with a force he can't master. He is symptom-reading the world — convinced, because he has read that Livia poisoned Augustus, that Louisa is poisoning him — when the symptom is simply his own organ failing.

And because Greenaway is a cataloguer by temperament, the film offers itself to be read rather than watched through. The editing is paratactic: discrete framed units set side by side like exhibits in a gallery, the exhibition Kracklite mounts becoming a mise-en-abyme of the film's own method. Rome here is a stratigraphic image — an emptied monumental landscape spoken over by absent presences, Boullée dead two centuries, Augustus and Livia dead two millennia. The image loses its everyday self-evidence and becomes a lectosign, something to decipher. The repeated rhyme — curved dome, rounded statue, swelling belly — trains the eye to read body as architecture and architecture as body, until the belly itself becomes the film's symbol, the single object that condenses every relation it cares about: building and flesh, permanence and rot, the diseased belly against the pregnant one.

The lineage is unusually legible. Through Vierny, Belly inherits the architectural tracking and frontal neoclassical framing of Marienbad — itself one of Deleuze's exemplary crystal films — and turns that crystal toward decomposition. From Greenaway's own Draughtsman's Contract it takes the numerate man undone inside a grand estate; from A Zed & Two Noughts the clinical fascination with the body's corruption; from Pasolini's Salò and Storaro's Conformist the neoclassical interior staged as a closed system of power that dwarfs and degrades the figure inside it. What Greenaway adds is the copier — creation reduced to facsimile — and it points forward to his own coming digital layering in Prospero's Books, the cinema of the catalogue and the database that he, more than anyone, made into a form.

The film closes on a stark rhyme: Kracklite falls to his death from the Vittoriano as his child is born. Life and decay in a single cut. It is the crystal at its most legible — the ordered world finishing its decomposition exactly as a new body enters it. Watch it again and watch the bellies. Greenaway has taught the architecture to think.