User Reviews

Water Wrackets is another short experimental film from Peter Greenaway from his early phase before he started directing feature films in the 80's. In truth, this one is very similar to the others I have seen from this period, in that it combines well-composed yet decidedly lo-fi imagery with a voice-over which recounts something strange. I find with these films, and Greenaway in general, that I have to find something intriguing in the imagery in order to enjoy it, as I find Greenaway to be a terrible dialogue writer. In these early shorts, this situation is made slightly worse by narrator Colin Cantlie's slightly grating plummy voice; while the stories he recounts are always absurd and ultimately tedious. Water Wrackets is no different to the others in all these regards, yet I found it to be one of the better ones for sure. The static imagery of country-side streams and such was really rather beautiful and somewhat beguiling at times. The voice-over, on the other hand, waffled on about some future people building a series of dams or something and I kind of tuned out after a while. But in this case, Greenaway's awful writing didn't overpower his graceful photography and Water Wrackets consequently made for a satisfying watch.

Intelligent, intriguing, interesting. Celtic or anglo-saxon warlike peregrination (imagined, we presume) overlaid on images of water, mostly running, structured like a symphony. For once no British repressed obscenities; view this early work as a five-finger exercise, mastered at last, assertive, showing class.

Lush pictorial landscapes and satirical juxtapositions of time are the order of the day here, with director Peter Greenaway spinning a yarn about a futuristic military manoeuvre in stark concurrence with the creation of five lakes. The description might suggest elements of science fiction, however, that really isn't the case, as the director creates a formal, visual essay, very much in-keeping with the style that he would later employ with his breakthrough film, the Borgesian mock-documentary, The Falls (1980). Here, the film also uses certain aspects of impressionist cinema, recalling elements of Werner Herzog's similarly experimental film Fata Morgana (1971), with the more recognisable style of David Attenborough's natural history films; a particular stylistic appropriation that Greenaway would return to on his later project, A Zed and Two Noughts (1985).

Unlike those particular productions, this is a very simple film that plays on the British tradition of an almost realistic approach to surrealism; with much of the narration delivered with a typically English, stiff-upper-lipped type series of announcements familiar from post war broadcasting. We also find many of the director's future trademarks beginning to take shape, however, with none of the bold storytelling devices or opulent cinematography and production design that would underline such films as The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover (1989), The Baby of Mâcon (1993) and the Pillow Book (1996) as such singular works of cinema.

This is a simply an experiment for the director, and thus, not really worth the effort of an audience unfamiliar with the broader aspects of Greenaway's career, instead being something that long-term fans might decide to seek out in order to give a great context to his later, aforementioned film, The Falls. As a side note, I saw this picture on a compilation tape that also featured Dear Phone (1977) and A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (1978) and this was the most abstract and bizarre.

The film begins with the idyllic images of running water in streams, then is interrupted by claps of thunder, and the image of a dead duckling in a stream. A narrator is telling us about a military manoeuvre around the year 12478. A character named Agateer gives orders to dam a stream in nine places to create nine lakes, although only five were made.

The first lake is called the Winter Lake. Some of the other lakes are joined by streams. The fifth lake is called the Palace Lake. The water in this lake was deliberately stained black, from the juice of the plant known as Agateer's Nightshade, which grew in the forest of Tersh. The Palace Lake was the deepest and widest of the lakes.

Here we have a simple experiment. We are shown extremely moving scenes of inland water. A narrator recounts a fantastic conquest and settlement on the river, dammed to create five lakes. The era is in the future (12474). The exercise apparently is to double the lushness of the images by reference to aural imagination. It works, but don't go out of your way to seek this small experiment.