A Zed & Two Noughts · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the rot. A shrimp, a fish, a crocodile, a swan, a dog, a zebra — each one set under lamps and filmed for hours, then compressed into seconds, so that we watch a body slacken into its own slime while Michael Nyman's score gallops alongside, strangely elated. The Deuce brothers built the rigs to catch this. At the very end, snails crawl across the equipment and short it out: the living world quietly eating the machine that came to record its death. That last image is the whole film folded into one frame, and it is the door I'd walk you through.

Greenaway built his cinema out of cataloguing — years editing for the Central Office of Information, then alphabetised case-study shorts like The Falls. ZOO scales that habit to a feature. There is barely a plot; there is a system that generates incident. Two zoologist twins lose their wives when a swan hits a windscreen, and their grief hardens into a project: film everything decaying, in order.

The time-lapse reels are where Deleuze becomes useful rather than decorative. Greenaway has always pointed back to Eadweard Muybridge, the Victorian who froze a galloping horse into a strip of equidistant snapshots. Deleuze, following Bergson, called those frames any-instant-whatevers — cinema's deep secret. Older art chose the privileged instant, the posed climax, the javelin-thrower caught at the perfect angle. Cinema instead samples motion mechanically, at any ordinary moment, and reconstitutes movement from the ordinary ones. The decomposition rigs are that principle laid bare: serial scientific observation, no decisive instant anywhere, just the interval ticking. But something tips over. We are watching the one process the eye can never actually witness in real time. Decay isn't being measured by movement here; decay is time, given directly to the eye. That makes these reels chronosigns — images of time itself rather than of action — and it's why they feel less like documentation than like staring into the thing under everything.

Which tells you what kind of people the brothers have become. After the crash there is nothing to do. You cannot act on a dead wife. So Oswald and Oliver stop being agents and become watchers — what Deleuze names voyants, seers caught in pure optical situations, able only to look and listen where once they could intervene. Andréa Ferréol's Alba, the driver, loses one leg and then the other, her body subtracted limb by limb, and the men mostly observe. The film's whole sensory-motor engine — perceive, then act to change the situation — has seized up. That seizure is precisely Deleuze's hinge between the old cinema of action and the modern cinema of time, and ZOO sits right on it.

Now look at how it's composed. Sacha Vierny — Resnais's cameraman on Last Year at Marienbad, Buñuel's on Belle de Jour — lights interiors as Vermeer canvases: pooled side-light, deep shadow, figures pinned frontally in shallow planes. Each shot is a closed set, a frame treated as a designed system, dense with information and symmetry, the human body slotted among fruit and glass and carcasses like one more specimen. Ben van Os and Jan Roelfs dress the world as a vanitas still life, arranged for balance and slow corruption. This is the Marienbad inheritance carried over whole: Vierny brought Robbe-Grillet's crystalline description with him, images that compose their object so completely they replace it. Greenaway doesn't film a room; he forges a painting and lets it rot.

And it rots from the inside. Deleuze had a name for an ordered, encyclopaedic world decaying within its own perfection — crystal-decomposition. Every system in ZOO is a defence against death: Darwin, the alphabet, taxonomy, bilateral symmetry, the title itself spelling Z-O-O, a zed flanked by two zeros. None of it holds. The more elaborate the order, the more visibly it putrefies. The Deacon brothers, real-life siblings, play the twins as flattened recitation, closer to terms in an equation than to people — what Deleuze calls the gest, the body held as posture and social attitude rather than psychology. Frances Barber's Venus de Milo, named for a statue missing its arms, extends the joke: everyone here is a classical fragment.

Step back and the film thinks like a brain rather than telling like a story — a Borgesian database where meaning lives in the relations you hold between the parts. Deleuze's relation-image asks the viewer to be a knowing third, reading the catalogue, and ZOO runs almost entirely on that recognition: you supply the rhyme between this amputation and that decay, this Vermeer and that swan. The encyclopaedia is the drama.

What did it move forward? Greenaway proved an art film could discard cause-and-motivation entirely and run on rule, list, and symmetry for ninety minutes without collapsing into mere exercise — that taxonomy could be a narrative engine. He found, in Vierny, the painterly tableau that The Draughtsman's Contract had promised and Barry Lyndon had pioneered, and pushed it past Kubrick toward pure citation. And he turned the oldest cinematic gesture, Muybridge's instant-sampling, back into a meditation on mortality. The film hands you better eyes for two things at once: for how a frame can be a system, and for the fact that everything in it, lovingly arranged, is already on its way to slime. Watch the snails take the camera. They were always going to win.