M IMI Y IU Prospero’s Book of Architecture “For architecture, write film: for architect, write filmmakers” Peter Greenaway 1 Like a filmic Book of Hours, Prospero’s Books (1991) runs a course partitioned into twenty-four units, a number that evokes the organic wholeness of day but also the artificial division of clockwork. In director Peter Greenaway’s fallen world, a world coming to terms with itself after a tempest, a flood, the structuring units are not temporal but textual: Prospero owns twenty-four books, each of which a voice-over narrator displays and explains at a crucial juncture. In this respect, Greenaway’s narrative resembles an Advent calendar that counts down the twenty-four days before Christmas; instead of cardboard windows that children open with each passing day, however, viewers are treated to the vision of anonymous hands that open a series of books like presents. While the subject of each book often relates to a key theme about to emerge in the film - the Book of Love, for instance, prefaces the meeting of Miranda and Ferdinand - the books themselves do not segment regular chunks of narrative, nor do they foreclose the meaning of vignettes by imposing an interpretive rubric. 2 The books sometimes appear close together in short bursts, sometimes reappear much later in the film, sometimes present themselves with a numbered title, sometimes without a number, sometimes without a title. Neither bookmark nor book-end in the filmic structure, the unpredictable rhythm of these volumes pulsates across the fabric of Prospero’s Books like variations on a theme, making the film a surreal fugue that stacks and staggers twenty-four voices. Indeed, Prospero’s Books suspends any sense of linear order to create a visual artifact that resembles writing in its semantic and structural density, producing in cinematic form a differential space between each book - not to mention between Greenaway’s film and its source, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. If twenty-four frames make up one second of film, 3 then Greenaway breaks apart the clockwork sequence of this medium to construct a digital 1 Quoted in Marcia Pally (112). 2 Although at least one DVD version uses the books as chapter headings, this practice highlights the odd eddies in the film’s rhythm. 3 Peggy Phelan notes how the number twenty-four marks both the hours in a day and the frames of film in a second (cf. esp. 45). Greenaway himself makes this connection twice (Pally 132 and 150). M IMI Y IU 236 network of meaning, one that jumps from node to node. In the parlance of twenty-first century technology, Prospero’s Books embraces a digital textuality that layers frame upon frame, breaking through traditional borders by building hyperlinks between windows. Instead of effacing the lacuna between frames to create an impression of continual movement, an optical illusion engineered by unspooling film, Greenaway’s postmodern architectonic celebrates the fissures that destabilize relations between topoi, making each opened book a desultory microcosm of disjunctions, as we shall see. Despite this stormy roiling of the cinematic waters, an insistent directionality orients Greenaway’s visual language at times, not least because the film borrows heavily from the vocabulary of classical architecture. For Greenaway’s Prospero inhabits no ordinary island, no castaway’s wilderness with only a rough cave for shelter. While Shakespeare makes Prospero the “master of a full poor cell” (1.2.20), an ascetic monk devoted to his books, Greenaway reshapes this character as “an eclectic architectural scholar, perfectly capable of prophetic borrowing” from Piranesi’s eighteenth-century drawings of oversize arches and sweeping staircases (Greenaway 1991, 32). 4 Prospero’s island retains virtually no trace of its native topography, what Caliban describes as “all the qualities o’th’ isle: / The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile” (1.2.338-9). Instead, the film showcases a grand estate that resembles a dictator’s compound more than a scholar’s retreat, a denatured place where even beaches and cornfields are strewn with the remnants of antique construction, a dwelling suitable for an Ozymandias. Such an overbuilt island realizes the director’s vision of “an architectural capriccio planned and invented and built by a man yearning for the classical architecture of Europe - of Renaissance Italy” (Greenaway 1991, 55). Yet how could this figure of desire not point back to Greenaway himself, the architect-filmmaker? How could this architectural capriccio be anything other than Prospero’s Books? Wrenched from a time and place remote to the viewer, if not most characters in the film, Greenaway’s postcard-worthy buildings function as literal metaphors, as carriers of meaning that travel from one culture to another, from one semiotic system to the next. 5 While the boat that carried Prospero to the island, loaded by Gonzalo with books “prized above” his “dukedom” (1.2.168), constitutes one vessel for the migration of material texts and bodies, the travelling library also provides the cornerstones for an intellectual crossing of oceans, a crossing that assumes physical shape when Prospero draws upon designs in these books to build an elaborate collection 4 Greenaway published the volume Prospero’s Books: A Film of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a companion to the film. 5 Cf. Michel de Certeau’s explication of metaphorai as means of transport, as spatial stories, in The Practice of Everyday Life (155). Prospero’s Book of Architecture 237 of edifices. Borne on the back of an ostensibly barren island, this rebirth of Renaissance architecture derives from Prospero’s textually mediated desire to create another empire, to project another Rome from the memories locked in his head and in his books. Greenaway’s notion of Prospero as an “eclectic architectural scholar” (Greenaway 1991, 32) thus demands that we attend to how the film’s built spaces perform - like books - as material objects, vehicles of cultural transmission, and instruments for self-fashioning. If Prospero indeed neglected his political duties as the Duke of Milan by turning inwards to his books, “being transported / And rapt in secret studies” (1.2.76-7), then the island’s magnificent complex of buildings makes clear that architecture is his open secret, his occult fantasy of world-making. Transporting his book knowledge from mental to physical ground, unwrapping his rapt studies to construct buildings all’antica, Prospero curates a ‘greatest hits’ collection of mainly Renaissance buildings that surpasses what any locale in the Old World can offer. Greenaway thus disarms that old chestnut of why Prospero did not simply use his magic to sail back to Milan, there to regain the throne from an unkind brother: Prospero was too busy usurping Milan elsewhere, dreaming up a master plan that expresses in stone and plaster his matchless sovereignty. Rome was not built in a day, and neither was Prospero’s island. During his twelve years of exile, this architect-magus has conjured into being an architectural corpus with as much care as the script we see him crafting in scene after scene. According to Greenaway’s map of the island, included with his published film-script, Prospero has constructed replicas of such landmarks as Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library, the Pyramid of Cestius, the Alhambra gardens, the Fire of London monument, and the Aracoeli steps near the summit of Rome’s Capitoline Hill. 6 Magically turned from books to marble, from memories to buildings, this constellation of celebrated architecture realizes a miniature version of the Old World, a well-edited library of spatial design. Yet the symmetries of Prospero’s classical idiom seem distinctly off-kilter in this anomalous locale, an insular setting that abstracts buildings from their original location and history. Assembled on a tropical isle of “a thousand twangling instruments” (3.2.137), Prospero’s idiosyncratic palace, his Xanadu, necessarily resonates in a different register than if we encountered these same edifices in their respective homes across Europe. Spliced together from parts of other buildings, other cultural bodies, such an architectural collage risks coming across to viewers not as a clever postmodern gesture, a pastiche to be understood in quotation marks, but 6 Greenaway’s map labels these sites, though not all the structures are visible in the film. His designation “Arcoli Steps on the Capitoline” likely references the famous steps to the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, located atop the Capitoline Hill in Rome. For more on Greenaway’s usage of maps, see Alan Woods (116-8). M IMI Y IU 238 rather a theme park that makes early modern culture into kitsch. Absent any other architecture to provide contextual meaning, deprived of a historical matrix that sediments identity, the island’s built spaces undergo a semantic drift as they float upon a self-referential sea. Indeed, the sole certainty that anchors this solipsistic universe is Prospero’s will-to-build, his desire to found and imprint a second Rome - a reborn empire - upon what he deems a tabula rasa. O brave new world that has such goodly buildings in it! Prospero’s Books implicates built space in the workings of power by teaching a “primitive” island to articulate the language of classical architecture, by taming this strange land with an uncannily familiar aesthetic. As the most visible marker of how Prospero establishes an alternate centre of dominance, this architecture necessarily structures every frame around the problem of cultural politics and imperialist history, troubling the sumptuous tableaux of a film that only seems to celebrate visual artistry for its own sake. According to Bridget Elliott and Anthony Purdy, “the reading of power in the play which, in most post-colonial productions and interpretations of The Tempest, has focused almost exclusively on the Prospero-Caliban relationship, is here displaced onto the question of textual control and technical mastery” (74-5). What counts as textual control and technical mastery, however, includes not only the lines of dialogue that Prospero records on the page, but also the architectural lineaments he inscribes on the ground: both are forms of built space. Thus, scattered among the books and papers on Prospero’s desk are various scale models that depict basic elements of architecture, including fluted columns and a circular pavilion in the classical style (fig. 1). Not only does Prospero himself appear framed between two miniature, marbleized obelisks as he writes The Tempest, but even his black strokes of calligraphy resemble the distinctive curves of Baroque architecture. In short, Greenaway composes a scene of writing that visually equates the building blocks of space with those of language, hence suggesting a certain fluency in translation between the two media. For an “eclectic architectural scholar” (Greenaway 1991, 32) who has graduated from reading to writing, the spatial plots that he inscribes with his designs seem no different from the dramatic plots that he devises on paper. Once brought into critical focus, this parallel between architecture and writing complicates how we understand the power dynamics of Prospero’s Books, especially in relation to issues of textual authorship and appropriation. After all, the film rewrites not only a literary masterpiece but also a variety of architectural masterpieces, which furnish a radically innovative setting for The Tempest - thus nesting the expression of one medium within another. By attending to the material history of architecture, we see more clearly how the film’s authorizing strategies map onto the questions of imperialist power so Prospero’s Book of Architecture 239 Figure 1: Prospero writes architecture: desk as construction site. Prospero’s Books (1: 05: 22). crucial to Shakespeare’s original narrative. Indeed, even as Prospero usurps and melds the creative faculty of numerous Renaissance figures, Greenaway extends this dictatorial control to the usurped and melded voices that the actor John Gielgud dictates. Beyond replacing Shakespeare by writing and staging The Tempest during the film, Gielgud’s Prospero also speaks the lines of every character as other actors lip-sync to recordings of his voice. Yet despite reducing family, foe, noble, and sailor to the same base level of mute obedience, forcing them as mere subjects to accept his words and cadences in their mouths, this authoritarian displacement of subaltern voices must be situated in the decentring architecture that Prospero himself erects and inhabits. For just as the home that he calls his own is not really his own, but rather a copy of someone else’s intellectual and physical property, the words that issue from his mouth resound to viewers, first and foremost, as Shakespeare’s. After all, the film’s entire premise rests upon a conceit that we might call textual squatting, a premise that involves occupying someone else’s premises. Like Caliban, this Prospero proves to be a trickster who speaks in another’s language, an interloper dwelling in another’s home; ironically, even as Caliban plots to steal Prospero’s book, the symbol of an imperial power so inexorable as to merit the name of magic, Prospero has already stolen his own mantle of authority from Shakespeare. In much the same fashion, just as the sorcerer’s or cardinal’s robe endows Prospero with a hieratic aura, the grandiose architecture that surrounds him furnishes a stage for political spectacle of the highest order, impressing upon subordinates his god-like ability to conceive wondrous new worlds ex nihilo. M IMI Y IU 240 Yet since even the fanciest garments seem no more than “trash” (4.1.225) when demystified as material “luggage” (4.1.232), the buildings hand-picked for their exquisite design come undone when revealed as borrowed trappings, as theatrical façades that bear no weight in the world. While the fine clothes that form the “trumpery in [his] house” (4.1.186) serve as “stale” (4.1.187) to catch naïve eyes, Prospero devises on a much larger scale the “trumpery” of his own house, a trompe l’oeil that deceives the senses into accepting his transcendent sovereignty. Yet as Prospero famously bemoans: The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. (4.1.152-6) When the spaces that he occupies appear to disillusioned viewers as an “insubstantial pageant,” when the little globe of his island feels like a playhouse, the most visible exponent of Prospero’s god-like power dissolves into the stuff of dreams, or perhaps the masks of parody. If architecture’s “rough magic” can be stripped away as easily as his cloak (5.1.50), then the omnipresent sight of these buildings always threatens to expose Prospero as a copyist rather than a master builder, as a reader who timidly parrots back rather than a writer who boldly forges anew. By cloaking himself in the cultural capital of others, Prospero finds his own mouth invaded by the words and ideas of others, his own hands suborned into executing another’s designs. What the island’s built spaces bring into stark relief, then, are the complex power relations that obtain when cultural texts not only descend through history but also travel across geographic terrain. Prospero’s edifices demand an account of intertextual mobility that includes both metaphor and metonymy, both linear time and contingent space. 7 Thus, when Amy Lawrence notes that Greenaway’s work can read as “the usual postmodernist shuffle through the rubble of Western culture, a leisurely stroll beneath the calves of England’s literary colossus,” a telling conflict emerges between a horizontal “shuffle” through historical debris and a vertical cowering beneath a “colossus” (144) unbowed by the centuries. Does a modern artist like Greenaway merely forage through a temple in ruins, a Renaissance now reduced to a clutch of stylistic motifs like those on Prospero’s desk? Or must this same artist always venerate the cult statue of an immortal father, a quasidivine Bard who casts a broad shadow of influence, whose words still make flesh, cinematic or otherwise? Lawrence’s spatialized tropes of cultural 7 I draw upon Roman Jakobson’s correlation of metaphor with causal time and metonymy with contingent space. Prospero’s Book of Architecture 241 transmission also raise the question of what counts as architectural and literary “rubble,” what remains of textual artifacts preserved in some inner sanctum of our collective memory. After all, the film begins with the sinking of a model ship and concludes with the drowning of books; the dissolution of these interior spaces forces viewers to consider the imbrication of archive and architecture, the intertwining of stories and spaces that renders both suspect, possibly seditious. While Audre Lorde argues that the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house (cf. 112), the island spaces forced to speak in a colonizer’s tongue may learn to curse. Such a means of refuting the dominant order might seem unlikely when Greenaway, a trained artist, has mapped the entire island like a master architect. On his beautifully rendered ground-plan and elevation, Greenaway charts a cohesive articulation of space that extends clear across the island, while inserting labels that specify which historical buildings inspired Prospero. This founding map-book of architecture thus schematizes the island both metonymically and metaphorically: Greenaway’s layout enjambs otherwise disjunct architectural parts into a contingent unity, while his linguistic references supplement this horizontal chain with historical depth. Despite his meticulous plotting of a cartographic language that considers both syntax and inflection, Greenaway refuses to anchor the viewer through panoramic shots that establish a totalizing overview of the island, or even of key facades. Instead, each appearance of a book from Prospero’s library serves to “wall off” one scene from the next, to section one unit of cinematic space no matter how uneven and elastic the terrain. Just as Greenaway’s map presents the island in linear profile, the film takes our eyes on a journey along a bookshelf, through the insular space of an archive that nevertheless roils from the dislocating forces of imagination. Prospero’s Books thus embraces an architectonic based profoundly on books, while its diegetical architecture springs up from lines drawn on a page. For in this world born not from hag-seed but book leaves, Prospero dwells within buildings that derive from, house, and even produce texts: the original twenty-four tomes seem to have multiplied like viruses to occupy the cavernous voids of Prospero’s study. Early in the film, Greenaway establishes the crucial relationship between book and building by presenting the Book of Architecture, an ur-text that enables other texts to flourish. In the show-and-tell tour through Prospero’s library that structures the film, a voice-over narrator introduces first the Book of Water, which details the qualities of that element most vital to The Tempest, and then the Book of Mirrors, which deals with subjective development. This foundational trinity reaches completion when an unusual volume entitled A Memoria Technica Called Architecture and Other Music appears on the screen M IMI Y IU 242 (fig. 2). Greenaway’s script describes this book as a magical, miniature world unto itself: When the pages are opened in this book, plans and diagrams spring up fullyformed. There are definitive models of buildings constantly shaded by moving cloud-shadow. Noontime piazzas fill and empty with noisy crowds, lights flicker in nocturnal urban landscapes and music is played in the halls and towers. With this book, Prospero rebuilt the island into a palace of libraries that recapitulate all the architectural ideas of the Renaissance (cf. Greenaway 1991, 21). 8 Figure 2: Book of Architecture, A Memoria Technica Called Architecture and Other Music. Prospero’s Books (0: 12: 44). In other words, this book contains a collection of plans that constitutes a library for the building of libraries, providing an interior space that generates other interior spaces. As the template for buildings that transform the island into “a palace of libraries,” a sovereign theatre for the staging of interior space, the Book of Architecture shelters Prospero’s dreams of empire and defines the ground of his ideal city-state, his cell, his cella, his mind. Indeed, when a later scene reveals how Prospero directs the harpy banquet from a pyramid inscribed “Ex Libris Prospero” (fig. 3), likely an allusion to the ex libris label that marks a book’s source, this conflation of book and building confirms that Prospero regards the island itself as his library, imprinted with his mark of possession. 9 8 In the script, this book doesn’t appear until a later sequence when Prospero describes his building on the island. 9 Under the title “Ex Libris Prospero”, Greenaway also published a short narrative that recounts Prospero’s exile from Milan, see Parkett 26 (1990): 137-139. Prospero’s Book of Architecture 243 Figure 3: Ex Libris Prospero. Prospero’s Books (1: 11: 30). While water gives both life and death, while mirrors allow identities to form between these temporal markers, architecture constructs an inner/ outer binary that moves the world to sing. Despite the script’s allusion to “noisy crowds” in piazzas, 10 the paper models that emerge from this Book of Architecture appear devoid of people and sound; instead of music played in halls and towers, music stems from the halls and towers themselves, from the harmony of proportions so important to a classical aesthetic. The book’s structure reinforces how architecture resonates as a musical form, perhaps even as the prime musical form, by interspersing the two genres so that music formally underpins architecture, and vice versa. That is, while the open book initially shows several prints of Renaissance buildings, Prospero’s hands soon turn over the page to reveal a musical score inscribed in black, a score whose staves form as rigorous a frame as any edifice. Inhabiting opposite sides of a page as though inhabiting opposite chambers of a heart, architecture and music combine to create a textual pulse as they alternate recto, verso, tick, tock. Yet not only does this sonic and spatial music flow into a seamless unity, layering the counterpoint of two distinctive textures into a kind of chamber music, but the contours of such a harmonic structure also serve as a memoria technica, or mnemonic device. Inevitably, the term memoria technica recalls the memory palaces once used to guide orators through speeches, 11 providing a textual structure legi- 10 This description, “Noontime piazzas fill and empty with noisy crowds,” is cut from the film. 11 For a classic account of memory palaces, see Frances Yates. M IMI Y IU 244 ble only to the mind’s eye. While constructing an imagined palace assists the classical orator in remembering parts of a speech, allowing him to place objects in unique locations throughout the interior, this mental itinerary through built space parallels the journey that any reader and writer takes through a text. Unlike most books, then, the Book of Architecture does not simply examine a topic that bears no intrinsic relation to the page, swapping in a field of knowledge to produce the next generic “Book of ________.” While Prospero’s magical library attempts to mitigate this schism by making books “embody their contents” (Greenaway 1991, 28), the Book of Architecture yokes “book” to “architecture” even more closely than, say, a Book of Mirrors that merely describes mirrors through words and images, or contains a panoply of mirrors within its covers. Since writing itself forms a memoria technica, a method intended to prevent both personal and cultural amnesia, the Book of Architecture holds a mirror to itself by examining the very nature of books, by turning its critical lenses upon the constructed spaces of language and memory. 12 This self-reflexive function suggests why parsing the title as simply A Book Called Architecture and Other Music seems inadequate, and thus why Greenaway may have added the term memoria technica to spotlight the engagement of space and repetition, music and text. 13 As a mnemonic that conceives the mind as built space, thus enabling the mapping of linguistic structures onto a mental terrain, the memory palace makes architecture a tool for marrying spatial to rhetorical topoi, spurring the powers of recall by integrating form and content. Such a paradigm of space reveals that Prospero’s architecture concerns the processes of memory as much as the erection of actual buildings, or even the skills of design. Although the memoria technica genre seems to implicate architecture in techne rather than poiesis, the island’s grand building project not only resonates against the drama that Prospero continually writes into being, but also imbues every frame with a vital rhythm, a musical articulation. That is, while the film opens with the “establishing sounds” of water, writing, and voice (Tribble 166), the constant musical surround of architecture proves equally relevant to how we understand the sonic landscape, the interplay of cadences and intervals that comprise an ‘other music’ to most viewers. As a memory palace that begets a palace of libraries, the Book of Architecture creates a world whose interiority thrums with past events and past topoi, a world that marks its textual and architectural spaces as constructs of artificial memory. As a result, while other magi- 12 Peter Schwenger observes that the books “serve as an ars memoriae, each book representing a topos for Prospero’s past as well as the story he now develops” (96). 13 In both the script and the list of books that Greenaway provides, the book is known merely as the Book of Architecture and Other Music — thus, the “memoria technica” aspect seems to be a later refinement. Prospero’s Book of Architecture 245 cal books that “embody their contents”(Greenaway 1991, 28) tend to negate the printed surface, or at least transform the page into something rich and strange, the Book of Architecture draws its greatest power from the materiality of paper, from the stroke of inscription that breaks ground and raises a creative edifice. Figure 4: Pop-up in the first book, looking from the library interior (reading room) towards door. Prospero’s Books (0: 12: 49). Like Athena from the head of Zeus, buildings emerge wholesale from the wondrous interior spaces nestled within the Book of Architecture. An endless abyss that disdains orientation, the book consists of leaves that flip over from left to right, then unfold vertically to open a pocket of space tucked between the original pages. For the musical notation that we noticed earlier, this second gesture uncovers a pop-up building whose contours have been cut from paper, rendered purely with cut paper, which springs into shape as the interior of Prospero’s library (fig. 4). With a start, we realize that we are looking at a miniature version of the very room where we are reading this book; in other words, the Book of Architecture contains a paper cut-out of the library that now houses it. Travelling across media in a game of stone, paper, and scissors, Prospero’s library derives from cardboard designs that in turn derive from Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library, trimmed in dark sandstone. Before we can absorb these self-reflexive moves, however, the camera quickly roams beyond the Book of Architecture to reveal what seems to be an identical book lying in the background, a textual double whose pages unfold to disclose another pop-up structure (fig. 5). Since this second pop-up shows the outside of Prospero’s library, more specifically, the Baroque staircase that M IMI Y IU 246 leads from the atrium to the reading room (fig. 6), the books together construct an interior cross-section of Prospero’s library as well as an exterior façade. Greenaway thus devises his own twist on the classic draftsman’s techniques of elevation and section, echoing the dual modes of representation seen on his island map. Figure 5: Camera reveals second book being opened in the background. Prospero’s Books (0: 12: 51). Yet while an architectural drawing permits us to assume different perspectives without actually moving, Greenaway’s paper buildings force us to occupy a spectrum of visual and spatial positions that destabilize our relation to the cinematic world. For instance, the first pop-up situates viewers inside the library, looking down its length towards an exit, but the second pop-up situates viewers in the atrium outside, looking back towards this same door. Without changing the camera angle, Greenaway effectively swivels our gaze 180 degrees to survey our former position, a spatial reversal that evokes the operations found in the preceding Book of Mirrors. Indeed, given the synchronized opening of the two architectural books, identical down to the hand motions of a blue-cloaked figure, we might suspect the second book to be an immaterial reflection of the first. While our inability to see a mirror neither proves nor disproves this premise, we also cannot see ourselves, or rather, the camera that serves as our surrogate eye, even when we zoom straight into the second book’s façade. The wall common to both pop-ups thus divides our sense of self, prompting us to imagine ourselves as other - inaccessible behind the façade. Stymied by a paper whose writing we cannot interpret, a Prospero’s Book of Architecture 247 mirror that vanishes into smoke, we can only project a fullness of interior space beyond this screen, a fullness that nurtures our other self. Figure 6: Pop-up in the second book, looking from the library exterior (atrium) back towards the same door. Prospero’s Book (0: 12: 56). That other soon arrives in unexpected form. As the camera focuses in on the cardboard façade of this second book, the shot dissolves into an image of an identical, full-size façade not the Laurentian Library itself (fig. 7), but rather the ad hoc copy built for filming (fig. 8). As the illusion of books yields to the illusion of cinema, the architecture incised from paper seems no different from the flimsy sets we construct for our fantasies, if not our everyday lives. To further alienate us from the spaces we inhabit, to dislocate our point of view, Prospero and his attendants emerge from a door opposite the camera, then descend towards our implied location. While previously we had followed Prospero’s journey at his side, we have evidently taken a quantum leap through space, catapulted by the mirroring book into a discrete position ahead of ourselves, contra ourselves. Such progress allows us to wait for ourselves to appear; at any time, we expect our other self to trail in Prospero’s wake and come through the door. After all, Prospero doubles as The Tempest’s writer and hero, alternating red and blue cloaks to signal changes in his role, even walking past himself on occasion. But since the architecture that splits our subjectivity refuses to gratify this dream of a reunited self, we wander through the rest of the film watching for a spectral other lurking in a remembered place. Just as Gielgud’s voice undergoes various electronic distortions to distinguish each character, thus sowing disorder within a uni- M IMI Y IU 248 Figure 7: Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library, Florence. Scala/ Art Resource, NY. Figure 8: Pop-up becomes ‘real’ as Prospero exits. Prospero’s Books (0: 13: 01). Prospero’s Book of Architecture 249 tary soundscape, the architecture that should anchor both viewer and actor keeps repeating with an uncanny difference. On the one hand, Renaissance architecture inherently repeats classical architecture with a difference by rethinking ancient rules of proportion, by reviving ancient techniques for use in new contexts. Striving for a perfect symmetry based upon a recurring module, a resonant interval, neo-classical architecture is complicit with the construction of single-point perspective, a method of representing space that becomes, arguably, the dominant visual ideology of modernity. As Brunelleschi discovered in the fifteenth century, objects painted on a two-dimensional surface can appear to have threedimensional volume under certain geometrical conditions. Artists must foreshorten their landscape using gridlines that recede towards a vanishing point on the horizon, while viewers are reduced to a solitary eye directly opposite this “distance point.” By locking the gaze along an axis that extends into infinity, or so the artist wishes us to believe, single-point perspective demands that viewers sacrifice bodily movement to luxuriate in the optical illusion of depth, to make space in the mind’s eye. Such a visual contract allows the subject to achieve poiesis through techne, to wield a world-making power through the gaze, to construe “I” through the eye. By constantly dislocating the viewer, however, Greenaway breaches this singular vision of space as the camera sutures an array of viewpoints to achieve the illusion of a holistic world. Indeed, Prospero’s Books subverts how we gaze upon the built space of classical architecture, not to mention the built space of a cinematic frame. While the measured distribution of columns and arches often impart a rhythmic quality to the scene, these markers of spatial regularity balance against the historical movement towards greater disorder, against the entropic forces that level even the most magnificent palaces. Not only do fragments of classical architecture litter the island from the “Antiquarian Beach” to Prospero’s innermost study, but even the intact places should be understood in the future anterior tense of postmodernism: this island will have been ruined. The film’s opening sequence exhibits these competing impulses to construct and destruct, as Prospero splashes in a pool while sinking a toy ship. Aptly, for a site analogous to a civilized ocean, this bath-house stands enclosed within serried rows of arches that Greenaway uses to frame multiple shots. Indeed, when viewed through columns, the bath-house evokes the painting of an ideal Renaissance city (fig. 9, 10), albeit a blue-tinted interior version. Yet some of the arches visibly support nothing but the film’s aesthetic, serving mainly as props that fill out a desirable pattern and conjure a sense of pastness. Casting shadows that resemble inky loops of calligraphy, these arches foretell architecture’s role in the struggle between control and chaos, utility and ruin, as we follow Prospero further into his compound. M IMI Y IU 250 Figure 9: Bath-house shot through columns. Prospero’s Books (0: 05: 59). Figure 10: Francesco di Giorgio Martini (? ), Ideal City (Berlin), bpk Berlin/ Germäldegalerie/ Joerg P. Anders/ Art Resource, NY. Fussed over by attendants in a ritual that evokes a French king’s levée, Prospero rises from the pool, dresses, and embarks on a stately procession along a corridor. This arcaded passage resembles sections of Vasari’s outdoor corridor in Florence (fig. 11), one of the first such linking structures in Renaissance architecture; sometimes known as the “Prince’s Route” (Percorso del Principe), this enclosed walkway was built in 1565 for Cosimo de Medici to connect his various residences and offices, allowing him to move between these spaces without entering the public sphere. While Greenaway retains Prospero’s Book of Architecture 251 this sense of a privileged route that navigates through a princely complex, he plunges his version into a darkened interior that leads from a bath-house to a library, providing a transitional passage from physical to mental inwardness, from piracy (the shipwreck) to privacy (the enclosed study). To emphasize the ceremonial length of this corridor, Greenaway employs a sinuous long take that not only follows Prospero and his attendants across the screen, but also immerses us into their world of fantasy, drawing us “[f]ull fathom five” (1.2.397) into an exotic realm whose inhabitants seem already made of coral and pearl (fig. 12). Indeed, as we delve further into Prospero’s court, our gazes are seduced away from his calm, central figure to feast on riotous frames crowded with dancers, jugglers, and assorted “freaks” who compose a spectacular pageant: this Tempest is all masque all the time. As a formal constraint upon this revelry that threatens the measured, boxed-in movements of Prospero’s retinue, columns and arches punctuate regular intervals of space along both sides of the bath-house corridor. Although passages also branch off from this corridor at right angles, Greenaway forecloses these alternate routes either because too much activity in the foreground blocks our view, or because dim lighting renders these recesses mere shadows. Figure 11: Vasari Corridor, Florence. Author’s photograph. M IMI Y IU 252 Figure 12: Prospero and his retinue processing along colonnade. Prospero’s Books (0: 08: 17). The inward journey promised by the corridor thus proves to be a sham, as the tracking camera steadily refuses to deviate from its sanctioned route, shrouding the secrets of Prospero’s cosmos from our curious eyes. Denied the possibility of a visual line of flight into the distance, precisely the extension in depth that single-point perspective idealizes, we must accept a superficial cosmos that unfurls across a single horizon of meaning, unfolding a narrative in sequence. Indeed, the columns form vertical markers that frame units of space like a film spool, defining miniature tableaux vivants that move past at an unhurried pace. Yet no matter how richly eccentric the surrounding characters may seem, the totalitarian control that Prospero exerts over his itinerary exposes this dense vitality as an illusion. Although Prospero briefly disappears behind a huge open book - thus showing this corridor to serve also as a reference library, or a library of references - even the implied, spectral presence of his body keeps the whole retinue moving at the same steady pace. Just as Prospero’s all-powerful voice brooks no distraction, his linear trajectory proceeds like a single expelled breath, an imperative. Indeed, as the opening credits that flash on-screen punctuate and overlay this procession, we are reminded that Prospero’s spatial journey always beats with a linguistic pulse, compelled by a narrative drive that in some respects eludes his control. As though echoing the regular syntax of this spatial scroll, Michael Nyman’s score furnishes a percussive accompaniment that features a repeating motif, driving the music forward with a momentum that matches Prospero’s. Yet shortly after the procession begins, a mysterious anvil-like Prospero’s Book of Architecture 253 sound also insinuates itself with insistent repetition into the aural fabric, adding a metallic clang whose syncopation disrupts Nyman’s wash of sound. Soon, the music ceases entirely as the clang continues, with minor variations in timbre and rhythmic motif, thus reducing the aural landscape to a stark temporal beat, a plangent knell with no obvious source or meaning. 14 While Timothy Murray associates this noise with the “loud clanging of tools and printing press,” rendering the corridor akin to a “loud, mannerist printing hall” (118) this link to print culture also returns us to the memoria technica whose allusion to “architecture and other music” dissolves any boundary between the two arts. After all, the German philosopher Friedrich von Schelling defined architecture as “music in space” (165), a kind of a frozen or congealed music (cf. 177). If the columns and clangs inflect Prospero’s space with a sense of harmonic proportion, then these regular intervals of space/ sound inspire a hypnotic trance in viewers, conditioning them to recall this corridor when the same motifs appear in other contexts - thus making Prospero’s palace itself a mnemonic. Like Caliban’s dream of an island “full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not” (3.2.135-6), the “thousand twangling instruments” (3.2.137) heard in this corridor transform space into a fantastic and resonant music. This harmonic progression through space must be juxtaposed against the distinctive mini-frames that Greenaway layers onto the cinematic image using Paintbox software. Just as Prospero’s library contains a smaller “cell” within (fig. 13), recalling Antonello da Messina’s portrait of St. Jerome (fig. 14), 15 these Paintbox frames often create nested spaces that reveal the interior space of a book, embed a digital animation within a book, or display a scene that occurs elsewhere. Yet rather than cloister ever-inner images, such digitized spaces violate our expectations of a coherent temporal, spatial, and textual logic. Just as Prospero’s voice negates a bounded corpus to jump from interior to interior, our gaze roams from frame to frame without a map, without a pre-set track that makes sense of this cinematic architecture. While single-point perspective aims to punch a window through a wall, granting viewers the illusion of unfettered exteriority, Greenaway undermines such confidence in linear extension by unfixing the relation between inside and outside, text and context. Like the doubled books of architecture, each frame 14 These sounds may be related to the way Pythagoras formulates his theory of musical intervals, and by extension to the music of the spheres, by listening to the pitches of blacksmiths’ anvils. George Hersey relates this episode to Schelling’s notion of frozen music, cited below (25-27). 15 David Pascoe explores the art-historical links to Jerome in Peter Greenaway: Museums and Moving Images (166-71). Woods compares how Greenaway treats architecture versus other art forms (78-90). Paula Willoquet-Maricondi argues that Prospero’s isolation in his cell is a form of mastery related to Michel de Certeau’s notion of “strategy” (esp. 188). M IMI Y IU 254 Figure 13: Prospero’s cell within his library. Prospero’s Books (1: 33: 18). Figure 14: Antonello da Messina, St Jerome in His Study (c.1475), National Gallery London/ Art Resource, NY. Prospero’s Book of Architecture 255 is enclosed by an interface that may function as a mirror or window, signalling reversal or continuity; like pages that turn in every way, each frame remains flexible in orientation. Indeed, using a myriad of editing techniques, Greenaway playfully obviates which frame comes first, which forms a copy, which rests within another, and which prevails atop another. Such indeterminacy haunts the Book of Architecture’s return in a later sequence. Although Greenaway repeats the trick of having doubled pop-ups, we see clearly that the two books are not mirrored: the book behind stands already open while the camera swoops over the first book, whose pop-up never deploys fully. Once we focus on this second pop-up, ostensibly of Prospero’s palace, the image is soon overlaid by a page on which Prospero inscribes lines from The Tempest (figs. 15-18). Both pop-up and page shimmer on screen, as though Prospero envisions an after-image, a memoria technica, before the pop-up dissolves into “real” architecture - first as a faint image that resembles a watermark on the page, then slowly gaining solidity as the page disappears. While the first pair of pop-ups decentre the self while seeming to animate paper buildings, this subsequent episode destabilizes the relationship between textual space, textual architecture, and architectural space. Which comes first? Figure 15: Opening pop-up in the first book. Prospero’s Books (1: 02: 30). M IMI Y IU 256 Figure 16: Mirroring book in the background. Prospero’s Books (1: 02: 32). Figure 17: Focus on pop-up in second book. Prospero’s Books (1: 02: 34). Prospero’s Book of Architecture 257 Figure 18: Page overlays second pop-up. Prospero’s Books (1: 02: 42). The question of priority becomes more complicated when we consider Greenaway’s borrowings from a Renaissance archive of design. On the one hand, edifices magically “pop up” on Prospero’s island as though jumping digitally from text to text, context to context. Yet since the “original” buildings in Europe exist outside the film’s diegetical world, Prospero does not so much recapitulate as simulate architecture, in Jean Baudrillard’s sense of a copy without a model. 16 Indeed, most viewers untrained in architectural history would assume the designs to be Greenaway’s, or perhaps just the “baseless fabric” of Prospero’s “vision” (4.1.151). 17 In this floating world without a head to recap, or a base to build upon, we must nevertheless remember the architectural corpus by returning to our initial understanding of a memoria technica. After all, as Greenaway notes in an interview: one must remember that Rome, both in the ancient empire and certainly in the Second World War, was the home of fascism. Ultimate power, ultimate narcissism, personified in someone like Mussolini, taken to extremes. And Rome is full of monuments to death and glory, ruins, enormous pyramids to Sestius [sic], triumphal arches representing slavery. (Rodgers and Greenaway 17) 16 See Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1-42). Peter Donaldson argues that the film’s digital technology engages a mode of “post-mechanical reproduction” that aims to make “copies that are as different as possible from each other, but constrained by a set of initial rules (176). More traditionally, Barbara Mowat claims that the film cannot achieve its full effect unless viewers recognize intertextual links (cf. 27-36). 17 In contrast, Lia Hotchkiss argues that the “drive to render the books cinematic” gives the actual buildings precedence over their pop-up versions (111-2). M IMI Y IU 258 Replete with arches, monuments, ruins, and even a pyramid to Cestius, Prospero’s island simulates a Rome that stands for Renaissance glory as well as twentieth-century Fascism. 18 By putting into spatial dialogue some of the most striking monuments from imperial powers of the past - Italy, England, and Islamic Spain, for instance - Prospero conjures an architectural fabric that disdains national borders to cohere through a shared fantasy of empire. Figure 19: “Real architecture emerges from page. Prospero’s Books (1: 02: 54) Such an ideology, rather than stand frozen in time, echoes through history with local shifts in tone; in Greenaway’s visual lexicon, for instance, the classical arch resonates with accreted meaning as the style fetish of Fascist rulers. After all, in the simplified outlines of the bath-house arcade, repeated later as a book pop-up (fig. 20), viewers may recognize one of Mussolini’s best-known buildings in Rome: the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, a square tower whose arched façade evokes the Colosseum (fig. 21). Hence known as the “Colosseo Quadrato,” this civic showpiece featured in Greenaway’s earlier film, The Belly of an Architect (1987), which follows a Prospero-like architect’s physical and mental breakdown during an extended stay in Rome. 18 As James Tweedie notes, “Greenaway’s work makes heritage itself an object of inquiry and destabilizes many of its most precious monuments” (122). . Prospero’s Book of Architecture 259 Figure 20: Pop-up of arches as cluster of geometric motifs. Prospero’s Books (0: 37: 48). Figure 21: Colosseo Quadrato. Backcat/ Wikimedia Commons. Repeating with a difference this theme of external spaces that signal internal corruption, Prospero’s Books employs the clean, futile contours of Fascist arches virtually everywhere on the island - including the cornfield where Miranda first meets Ferdinand (fig. 22). As empty frames that stand but fail to deliver, as abortive “bad copies” of antiquity run amok, these arches comprise a species of architectural writing that foretells doom. When the young lovers’ romance unfolds within arches that support no greater edifice, can their pairing truly herald a fertile dynasty that makes the Old World new? M IMI Y IU 260 Figure 22: Arches that support nothing in the cornfield. Prospero’s Books (0: 42: 45) Pregnant with meaning yet functionally sterile, the arch that forms the arch-symbol of hubris reaches its logical end in Flying over Water (1997), an exhibition that Greenaway curated on the theme of Icarus. To reach the main gallery, visitors passed under a triumphal arch of “glass stuffed full with pure white feathers, accompanied by the sound of the sea” (Greenaway 1997, 1). Likewise, passing through the overarching frame of Shakespeare’s Tempest, viewers who arrive on Prospero’s sea-swept island must activate a historical and aesthetic remembrance that overlays his neo-classicism with whispers of neo-Fascism, tempering the soaring ambitions of feathers with the fragility of glass. While “Prospero’s books are those of a Renaissance imperialist” (Keesey 102), Prospero’s architecture inscribes a collection of imperialist memories that always threatens to collapse, an archive on the verge of tumbling into oblivion like the textual pages and building fragments that litter the filmic landscape. As Greenaway himself muses, almost nostalgically, on the future of grand building projects: Maybe the original Michelangelo staircase will be gone in a millennium, to join those earlier ascents of architectural history, the ziggurats and those de-marbled, de-stoned exposed stairs of the stepped pyramids, and every hypothetical Tower of Babel that fascinated Brueghel with the vanity of reaching the impossible, of reaching Heaven, of making a stairway to God. (Cf. Greenaway 1994, 57) The Book of Architecture thus works in tandem with Prospero’s Love of Ruins, an essential “volume for the melancholic historian who knows that . Prospero’s Book of Architecture 261 nothing endures” (Greenaway 1991, 124) 19 - and for the melancholic filmmaker who knows that all worldly matter comes down to a matter of words. If the bath-house arches can be reduced to paper cut-outs, perhaps the island’s buildings will vanish not by falling into disrepair, but by folding again into a book. Just as the memoria technica of Prospero’s books may drown, the memoria technica of his architecture may shimmer and dissolve, a mirage like the “insubstantial pageant faded” of Greenaway’s film itself (4.1.155). Yet rather than figure an Icarus soaring beyond permitted bounds, a stairway to God, might Prospero’s attempt to rebuild the Renaissance produce only an architecture for the birds? In a 2008 project entitled “Super Kingdom,” the artistic partnership known as London Fieldworks constructed a series of birdhouses that were “a sculptural installation of animal ‘show homes’ in a woodland environment, based on the architecture of despot’s palaces.” 20 One of these birdhouses drew upon the Colosseo Quadrato’s motif of an arched opening within a rectangular module, but exploded the geometry of a modernist frame (fig. 23). Like the Lego-set of a child - or dictator - who has gone wild, this birdhouse stacked blocks of different volumes in an absurdist syntax, wrapping a madcap cubist fantasy around the trunk and two main branches of a mature tree. In contrast to the relentlessly horizontal layout of Prospero’s architecture, emphasized by Greenaway’s tracking shots through mysterious interiors, the Mussolini birdhouse sheers upward into a verdant canopy, offering multiple perspectives from below and multiple pathways into the interior. Prospero may dictate architecture into being, collecting museum-quality design to create an insular cabinet of curiosities, but the birdhouse that climbs upon a tree allows its structure to be dictated by nature, exposing its wooden blocks to the elements and leaving its arches open to all comers. “Super Kingdom” thus dissipates the neurotic control suggested by an island empire and embraces instead an arboreal ecology whose borders extend as far as birds can take flight. 19 Greenaway’s script uses “indispensable” instead of “essential” (124). 20 London Fieldworks consists of artists Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson. Their project statement can be found at http: / / www.londonfieldworks.com/ projects/ super-kingdom / index.php. M IMI Y IU 262 Figure 23: Mussolini birdhouse. London Fieldworks. Such a creative response to Fascism deconstructs the structure of centralized power, breaking down the division between human and monster that totalitarian regimes seek to uphold. If Caliban could write his curse as architecture, he may well devise a Mussolini birdhouse that playfully thumbs its nose (or beak) at the arrogance of human domination over the landscape. In the devolution from bureaucracy to birdhouse, the arches that once composed an impenetrable façade now became apertures in a democratic range of sizes, ready to shelter winged creatures great and small. Although Greenaway often treats the classical arch as a pure signifier, a paper motif devoid of any purpose, the Mussolini birdhouse transforms the triumphal arch into a homely entrance, making the grandly imposing into the whimsical but utilitarian. Rather than resign itself to an abject relation with history, London Fieldworks scavenges cultural artifacts to create a colossal birdhouse that deforms and dethrones the architectural corpus. In so doing, they succeed in building a surreal theatre where the revels have just begun, where actors have truly melted into spirits of the air. 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