The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. A Walk Through H (1978/UK/dir. Peter Greenaway) appeared at #50 on my original list.
What it is • The screen is occupied by a succession of drawings, caught somewhere between outlandish abstraction and ridiculously detailed cartography. The soundtrack is occupied by narration and an occasional burst of frenzied music, the narration leaning to the latter reading - in fact, our guide specifically refers to the sketches as maps - while the music often accompanies activity, be it quick cutting or zooms. At a glance, this is perhaps the simplest film on the list, a thirty-five minute journey through an art gallery with a voiceover telling us stories we can hear but not see. The deeper we dig, however, A Walk Through H is actually an incredibly complex experience. The drawings are both ornate and suggestive, not entirely obscure but with a significance just out of reach - like we're waking from a dream. The narration jauntily assumes our familiarity (or rather, hinges on our baffled amusement) with a dense mythology of people and places as if we've just cracked open a spin-off book attached to a central text we never read. The deadpan non sequiturs and Carollesque absurdities are amusing on their own terms, but all the more intriguing for their offhand references to a bigger story. This was one of Greenaway's earliest works, and while his later films (like The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover and A Zed and Two Naughts) would grow ever-bolder in their fusion of obsessive categorization and bohemian experimentation, A Walk Through H remains the purest expression of his unique sensibility.
Why I like it •
