By the time we reach The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, the question of the film score has become almost inadequate.
There is music.
There is colour.
There is food.
There are bodies.
There is movement.
There is architecture.
There is costume.
There is language.
There is violence.
There is eroticism.
And there is an almost overwhelming density of visual and auditory pattern.
The film does not simply contain these things.
It composes them.
Peter Greenaway's cinema was already committed to systematic organisation. The BFI describes his films as built around predetermined structures — alphabetical, numerical, pictorial, musical and chemical — while Greenaway himself has spoken of his fascination with numbers and systems. He also explicitly connects the "flow" of those systems with Michael Nyman's music and its repetitive, pattern-making character.
In The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, that tendency becomes almost overwhelming.
Perhaps that is why excess is the right word.
The film does not merely give us more.
It gives us so much that the boundaries between its modes begin to blur.
A world organised by colour
The restaurant is divided into spaces whose dominant colours change dramatically: the dining room is red, the kitchen green, the bathrooms white. Costumes change colour as characters move from one space to another.
This is not naturalistic colour.
The spaces do not merely happen to look different.
Colour becomes a system.
Movement through the restaurant becomes movement through a sequence of visual domains.
A character crosses a threshold and the colour of their clothing changes.
The same person therefore appears differently according to the space they occupy.
Space becomes a semiotic resource.
Colour becomes part of the film's grammar of movement.
And music enters this system.
Nyman's music does not merely occupy the spaces
Michael Nyman's Memorial is perhaps the most important musical presence in the film.
It does not simply accompany the action.
Its repeated structures establish continuity across scenes whose visual environments are constantly changing.
The music creates an ongoing temporal field against which the film's spaces can change.
The colour changes.
The bodies change position.
The camera moves.
The food is prepared.
The lovers meet.
The violence escalates.
But the musical organisation gives the whole sequence a kind of continuity.
The film can therefore change almost everything except the underlying formal relation.
Music provides one of the threads through the excess.
And the music was there first
There is an extraordinary fact about the climactic sequence.
Nyman tells us that the sequence was deliberately choreographed to his pre-existing Memorial. In other words, the conventional direction of film scoring was reversed. The music did not merely respond to an already completed sequence; the visual action was constructed around music that already existed.
This changes the conceptual problem.
We are no longer simply asking:
How does music change the image?
We can now ask:
What kind of image becomes possible when the music is one of the conditions under which the image is constructed?
That is architecture in the strongest sense.
The music has become part of the conditions of possibility of the visual sequence.
Choreography rather than accompaniment
Once the sequence is choreographed to the music, bodies and camera movements can become elements in a temporal form established musically.
Movement acquires duration.
Camera movement acquires rhythm.
Visual recurrence can correspond to musical recurrence.
A change of colour can coincide with a change in musical organisation.
The scene begins to behave like a single composition distributed across modes.
It would be misleading to say that the image "illustrates" Memorial.
It does not.
Nor does the music simply "illustrate" the image.
The two are mutually organised.
The restaurant becomes a score
The restaurant itself begins to resemble a musical structure.
There are recurring spaces.
Recurring movements.
Recurring people.
Recurring colours.
Recurring actions.
And there are differences within repetition.
The lovers appear in different locations.
The same visual system is reconfigured.
The camera revisits spaces.
The music returns.
The viewer begins to perceive not isolated events but variations within a formal system.
The restaurant becomes something like a score written in space.
The kitchen, dining room and bathroom
This is particularly striking because the spaces have different functions but also become different expressive worlds.
The dining room is associated with the violence and grotesque sociability of the restaurant.
The kitchen is associated with preparation, labour and the creation of food.
The bathroom becomes a space of secrecy and intimacy.
The lovers move between these worlds.
The colours change.
Their clothes change.
The musical continuity persists.
The result is a peculiar sensation: the characters seem to be moving through different states of one composed environment.
The film does not merely locate action in space.
It makes space itself part of the meaning-making system.
Bodies become part of the architecture
The human body is drawn into this system too.
Clothing changes with space.
Characters move in choreographed patterns.
The camera tracks them.
Food is carried.
Tables are arranged.
Bodies are displayed.
The restaurant becomes a stage whose movements are governed by formal relations.
This is one reason the film can feel almost theatrical and painterly at the same time.
The BFI describes Greenaway as a multimedia artist and notes the immaculately composed nature of his images; commentary on The Cook likewise emphasises its saturated colours, choreographed camera movement and elaborate visual construction.
The image is not merely showing action.
The action is composed as image.
And the music participates in that composition.
Excess as formal organisation
The film's excess is not simply a matter of quantity.
There is too much colour.
Too much food.
Too much decoration.
Too much movement.
Too much violence.
Too much beauty.
Too much sensuality.
But the excess is itself organised.
This is crucial.
The film does not produce an undifferentiated sensory flood.
It gives the excess structure.
Colour differentiates spaces.
Music establishes continuity.
Camera movement creates trajectories.
Repetition establishes pattern.
Costume marks transitions.
Food becomes visual material.
The apparent abundance is therefore held together by formal relations.
The excess is composed excess.
Meaning through saturation
This creates a different kind of multimodal meaning from the relatively sparse shark experiment.
The shark study demonstrated that one changed mode can alter the construal of another.
Greenaway gives us a system in which many modes are changing one another simultaneously.
The music affects the sense of movement.
Colour affects the sense of space.
Space affects the significance of bodies.
Bodies affect how we experience the music.
Food affects the sensory character of the image.
The dialogue and narrative give these formal relations a story.
The resulting meaning cannot easily be assigned to any one mode.
It belongs increasingly to the saturated configuration.
The music and the image can exceed one another
This also changes our notion of multimodal correspondence.
The music does not have to match the image exactly.
The image does not have to reproduce the musical form.
Each can exceed the other.
The music can continue while the image changes.
The image can accumulate detail while the music maintains a repetitive pattern.
A visual transformation can occur inside an unchanged musical framework.
A musical transformation can reorganise how we experience a visually continuous space.
The relation between the modes therefore produces a kind of surplus.
Something remains after we have accounted for each mode separately.
That surplus is where co-construction becomes visible.
The lovers
The relationship between Georgina and Michael provides a particularly revealing case.
The film repeatedly places their relationship within the restaurant's highly organised visual and musical world.
A critical discussion of the film notes the recurring musical phrase associated with the lovers, while the visual organisation of the restaurant changes around them.
The result is significant.
Their relationship is not simply represented through dialogue or performance.
It acquires a formal identity.
The music helps make the relationship recognisable.
The spaces through which they move give it visual form.
Their bodies and movements give it temporal and spatial expression.
The colour changes as they move from one part of the restaurant to another.
The relationship has become a multimodal event.
Love and the restaurant
This also creates a striking contrast.
The restaurant is controlled by Albert Spica's grotesque appetite and violence.
The lovers' relationship develops inside that same environment.
Their intimacy therefore becomes meaningful partly through its opposition to the system surrounding it.
The musical and visual organisation can make this difference perceptible without explicitly explaining it.
Love appears as a different mode of relation within the same architectural system.
The film does not merely tell us that the lovers belong together.
It gives their relation a formal coherence.
Food becomes more than food
Food is another essential component of the film's multimodality.
It is material.
It is visual.
It is sensual.
It is social.
It is connected to pleasure, labour, hierarchy, consumption and violence.
And because the film is about a restaurant, food is already part of its narrative structure.
But Greenaway makes it part of the visual architecture too.
The abundance of food contributes to the film's sensory excess.
It also helps establish the moral contrast between refinement and brutality.
Food therefore participates simultaneously in several systems.
The same material resource can matter gastronomically, visually, socially and symbolically.
The title itself becomes a system
Even the title is doing formal work:
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.
Four roles.
Four positions.
A system of relations.
The characters are initially defined almost archetypically.
The film then complicates those positions through movement, desire and betrayal.
The categories remain recognisable while their relations change.
This is another recurring Greenaway principle.
A structure is established.
Then it is subjected to variation.
Meaning emerges from both.
Visual quotation and cultural repertoire
The film also draws on the history of Western visual culture, particularly seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painting. Critics and scholars have frequently noted this relationship between the film's sumptuous materiality and its painterly visual world.
This gives the film another layer of semiotic depth.
The viewer's cultural repertoire can bring paintings, still lifes, banquets, theatrical compositions and historical ideas about taste into the experience of the scene.
Greenaway does not need to explain these references.
The visual form recruits them.
Nyman's music adds another repertoire.
So does the theatrical tradition behind the narrative.
The film becomes a meeting place for several cultural histories.
Excess creates a perceptual problem
There is another important consequence.
Greenaway gives the viewer so much to perceive that attention itself becomes part of the film.
One critical account describes the crowded frames as presenting an array of stimuli rather than directing the viewer's attention to a single privileged element.
This is important for our theory.
The film does not necessarily tell us what matters.
It creates a field in which we must select what becomes salient.
The viewer's repertoire therefore becomes part of the film's semiotic ecology.
We scan.
Select.
Connect.
Remember.
Compare.
The film's meaning is partly produced through this active organisation of attention.
Music helps organise the excess
This is another role for Nyman's music.
When the image becomes saturated with simultaneous information, musical repetition can give the viewer a temporal thread.
The eye can move across the frame.
The body can move through the space.
But the music supplies continuity.
A repeated musical figure can give shape to the accumulation.
The listener knows that something is persisting even while the visual field changes.
The score therefore becomes an organising memory for the image.
The film as relation among relations
At this point, our earlier formulation becomes especially useful.
A sign is a relation.
A multimodal configuration places relations among other relations.
Here we have:
colour relations,
spatial relations,
bodily relations,
narrative relations,
musical relations,
cultural relations.
The film composes them.
Its meaning therefore becomes something like a relation among relations among relations.
We are several steps beyond the simple model of a sign pointing to an object.
The music does not have to mean the same thing
This is why it would be misleading to ask what Memorial "means" in the film in isolation.
The music has its own identity.
Its own structure.
Its own cultural history.
The film gives it a new role.
But that role does not exhaust the music's meaning.
Likewise, the visual composition has its own history.
The colours have cultural associations.
The spaces have practical functions.
The bodies have narrative roles.
The food has material properties.
The film does not reduce any of these to a single symbolic meaning.
It makes them participate together.
The film becomes more than its modes
Perhaps this is the crucial point.
We can analyse the music.
We can analyse the colour.
We can analyse the editing.
We can analyse the acting.
We can analyse the food.
But after we have analysed them individually, something remains.
The film as a whole has a quality that none of these components possesses alone.
That remainder is not mysterious.
It is emergent from their relations.
The work is more than the inventory of its materials.
Why "excess"?
This is why I think excess is an important word for the title.
The film gives us more than we need for straightforward narrative comprehension.
That surplus is not accidental.
It creates the conditions for richer cross-modal relations.
The music does not merely accompany the plot.
The colour does not merely distinguish rooms.
The food does not merely establish that this is a restaurant.
The camera does not merely show people moving.
Each resource has an excess of possibilities.
The film brings those possibilities into relation.
Meaning emerges from the overflow.
The boundaries begin to blur
We can now understand why this film brings us close to the conceptual limit of "score" altogether.
Where exactly does the music stop?
The musical structure establishes movement.
The movement establishes visual rhythm.
The camera follows the movement.
The colour marks the spatial transitions.
The costumes respond to the spaces.
The spaces organise the bodies.
The bodies enact the narrative.
The narrative changes our hearing of the music.
The music changes our experience of the narrative.
There is no obvious point at which one mode simply hands meaning over to another.
They form a coupled system.
And yet they remain different
But the boundaries have not literally disappeared.
We can still hear the music independently.
We can still see the colours independently.
We can still describe the narrative.
We can still identify the camera movement.
The modes remain materially and formally distinct.
What has changed is the degree to which their organisation is mutually constitutive.
This is why "indistinguishable" should not yet be our conclusion.
The more interesting claim is that the distinctions remain while becoming less sufficient.
We can distinguish the modes analytically.
But the meaning of the work cannot be reconstructed simply by adding their separate meanings together.
From architecture to co-construction
This is the point at which our working distinction between recruitment and co-construction becomes useful.
The earlier film-score cases demonstrated recruitment.
Music enters an audiovisual system and changes its meaning.
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover pushes toward co-construction.
The music participates in the conditions under which the visual sequence is organised.
The image, in turn, participates in the way the music functions.
Colour, movement, space and narrative become part of the same formal field.
The work begins to look like something that is constructed through the relations among modes.
The next step is even more radical
And yet Greenaway has not reached the furthest point.
In The Cook, we can still distinguish a relatively clear hierarchy of music, image, narrative and performance.
But Prospero's Books will make that hierarchy much harder to sustain.
There we encounter:
Shakespeare's language;
Gielgud's voice;
music;
singing;
typography;
manuscripts;
painting;
bodies;
dance;
digital superimposition;
framing;
movement;
multiple layers of image.
The modes do not merely accompany one another.
They can occupy the same visual field simultaneously.
A word can be an image.
An image can contain a word.
A voice can belong to a character and to a literary text.
Music can establish a temporal layer over a composite visual field.
The film can become a palimpsest of semiotic modes.
The question changes again
With The Cook, we asked:
How can music become part of the architecture of the film?
The answer seems to be:
By entering the organisation of movement, recurrence, space and temporal form.
With Prospero's Books, the question becomes more radical:
What happens when there is no longer a single dominant mode around which the others are organised?
What happens when text becomes image?
When image becomes stage?
When voice becomes both character and quotation?
When music becomes one layer in a composition of many simultaneous symbolic forms?
Perhaps then we finally reach the point at which "score" becomes an inadequate concept.
And that is where we go next.
What happens when the modes become so deeply interwoven that the film itself becomes a single multilayered act of construal?
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