Prospero's Books · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The word arrives before the world it describes. A quill moves, ink gathers into letters that bloom and shimmer across the surface of the frame, and only afterward does the thing exist — the storm, the ship, the island. Peter Greenaway takes an old scholarly hunch about The Tempest — that Prospero the exiled magician-scholar is Shakespeare in disguise — and refuses to leave it a metaphor. He makes it the machinery of the film. For most of Prospero's Books, John Gielgud speaks not only his own lines but everyone's, dictating the entire play into being while the other players move their mouths around words that began in his throat and on his page. Watch a courtier: he is not conversing. He is being written.

Start there, because it tells you what kind of image you are looking at. Deleuze has a word for cinema that no longer shows us a world and lets us act in it, but instead stages the act of thought itself: the noosign, the image of thought, the screen become a kind of brain. Greenaway's screen is exactly this — not a window onto Milan or an island but a mind in the act of composing them. And the mind is legible because you can see it working: text scrolls across the picture, a second framed image floats inside the first like an opened page, calligraphy is written live into the frame. This is what Deleuze called the lectosign, the image that has lost its automatic sensory-motor sense and asks instead to be read. Every corner of a Greenaway frame is loaded — Vesalian anatomy, cartography, the Book of Water, the Book of Mirrors — so that watching becomes deciphering. He earned the density honestly: it descends straight from A Zed & Two Noughts, where the encyclopedic catalogue first became narrative armature, and from The Draughtsman's Contract, whose drawing-grid fixed and serialized the visible world. The grid there wanted to pin the world down. Here the writing conjures it.

What exactly is Prospero doing when he speaks the others into speech? Deleuze, following Bergson and Nietzsche, would call it fabulation — legending, storytelling as a founding act, subjects caught in the very moment of inventing themselves. And Prospero is the purest case of a figure Deleuze loved: the forger, le faussaire, the protagonist who does not report a truth but forges one, spinning identities and voices into existence. This is why the film belongs to what Deleuze named the powers of the false. Cinema usually signs a quiet contract — the image doesn't lie, what we see happened. Greenaway tears the contract up and makes the tearing generative. There is no 'true' Ferdinand behind the written one; the writing is all the reality on offer. That undecidability isn't a trick. It's the film's creative principle.

And it runs through the voice. Gielgud's single instrument, detached from the many bodies that lip-sync to it, is a textbook speech-act in Deleuze's sense — not dialogue traded between people but a legending voice that founds the fiction from outside it. The gap between that one voice and those many mouths is a genuine audiovisual disjunction: sound and image are telling two different stories, one of authorship, one of ventriloquized flesh. The camera never pretends otherwise. Its long lateral glides past friezes of nymphs, putti, and nude figures arranged as living Renaissance canvases carry Prospero's seeing as the film's seeing — author and world fused into one gaze, a free-indirect vision where you cannot separate the man imagining from the film imagining him.

That gliding camera is a direct inheritance, and worth naming precisely. Sacha Vierny — Resnais's cinematographer on Last Year at Marienbad — brings the identical grammar he invented there: the processional lateral track drifting past frozen, statuary figures in deep perspective. Greenaway hired the man himself to reprise it, and had just used it in The Cook, the Thief, where Vierny's colour-coded tracks read the set like a horizontally scrolling painted scroll. Michael Nyman's driving, repetition-locked score, carried over from Drowning by Numbers, supplies the forward pulse that keeps images this dense from stalling in their own beauty.

Why call the island a crystal? Because Deleuze's crystal-image is a world folded back on its own reflections, present and memory and dream grown indistinguishable — and in its saturated form, an enclosed world with no outside. Prospero's island, with its literal Book of Mirrors and its mirror-lined baths, is a perfect crystal: everything in it is the magician's projection, sealed, self-reflecting, mirror on mirror with no exit. The crack — Deleuze always looks for the crack, the line of flight out of the totality — comes only at the end. As Prospero moves toward forgiveness, the other characters begin, for the first time, to speak in their own voices. The author relinquishes his monopoly, and a world escapes the mind that wrote it.

Here is the deeper reason Greenaway matters to the history of the medium, and it is technological as much as philosophical. This is one of the first features to fold high-definition digital compositing — the Quantel Paintbox, run through NHK's imaging labs — into the body of a film as its primary expressive tool. Deleuze theorized the crystalline description, the image that composes its own object and then replaces it, at the very hinge where the optical era was ending. Prospero's Books builds that description out of pixels. Its layered, text-laden, multi-window frame — the writing that precedes the world — is the vocabulary that digital cinema would take up as common speech a decade later. Greenaway, reaching back to Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête and its poet-director conjuring creation-as-magic through living statuary, was drawing the picture the whole medium was about to draw. Watch it again and watch the ink. Everything you see was a word first.