The Belly of an Architect

Classical education (or rather education in classical art) can be felt in every shot of Greenaway's films, and few filmmakers would dare to present a subjective story about an architect against the background/through the analysis of classical European culture presented to the majority of people (in both the film and real world...) by a completely unknown architect. The author's sense of visual analogies and metonymies permeates the entire film (as always), here built on a basic axis: Boullé's architectural design of the Cenotaph (1784) is compared to the belly, with the belly as a symbol of indulgence, insatiability, etc. of classical European culture (the story takes place in Rome...). The belly becomes an obsession for Kracklite and he is forced, through his inner identification with Boullé, to experience the history of this culture first-hand. That includes everything = intrigues, egoism, insidiousness, and treachery, but on the other hand also with the persistent struggle for his goal, self-destructive idealism, an attempt to achieve (impossible) perfection, etc. Boullé truly becomes Kracklite and vice versa, and the 18th century enters the twentieth. From a cinematographic point of view, it is worth mentioning the symmetrical composition of shots, perfectly evoking the disposition of classical architecture. (26/01/2015)