In the 1600s, Holland, then one of the world’s wealthiest nations, gave rise to a prosperous middle class whose merchants, shippers and wholesalers decorated their walls with pictures of themselves in their everyday surroundings. They looked for quality and insisted upon getting their money’s worth. The great Dutch masters, whose paintings would later fill museums and reach incalculable value, were treated as tradesmen, carpenters rather than cultural figures.
Such is the backdrop to the career of Rembrandt, the most famous Dutch master, and Peter Greenaway’s fascinating 2007 film, Nightwatching (out on DVD). The title alludes to The Night Watch (1642), one of art history’s most recognizable yet little understood paintings. Greenaway pursues the theory that The NightWatch was, among other things, a visual indictment of the men it portrayed—a company of well-heeled, corrupt musketeers who murdered one of their number in a power struggle over politics and money. Aware of his prodigious talent, Rembrandt was often prickly with his patrons. Nightwatching dramatizes a conspiracy theory of scheming musketeers determined to punish Rembrandt for The Night Watch, which spoofed them and hinted at their crime.
As in previous films such as The Pillow Book and The Cook et. al., Greenaway blends the conventions of theater and cinema and doesn’t flinch from depicting human depravity. In Nightwatching he draws additional visual inspiration from the Dutch masters, whose damp lighting suffuses many frames. Realism has little place in Greenaway’s world, where even the worst deeds look grander and more significant than they could in the dull setting of everyday.
The DVD includes Greenaway’s documentary on the making of Nightwatching, which is as interesting as the film itself. Along with visually witty depiction of the theories behind Nightwatching, Rembrandt’s J’Accuse includes a series of monologues that reveal Greenaway as an astute and engaging art historian, another Simon Schama. Greenaway speaks knowledgeably on many topics, including the influence on Rembrandt of mass produced prints of Italian Renaissance art; the Dutch genre of militia company paintings, whose stouthearted conventions were turned inside out by The Night Watch with mocking satire resembling a moment of “frozen theater”; even the spread of artificial lighting in the 1600s with the introduction of cheap tallow candles.
Greenaway also comments on widespread visual illiteracy in text-based cultures. Witness the public’s appreciation of Rembrandt, reverent in the knowledge that the old master commands enormous sums at auction, but oblivious to the encoded messages, the irony and scatology, in many of his paintings.
