Vertical Features Remake

An examination by a group of rival academics to remake an incomplete and largely missing film allegedly made by Tulse Luper. The film in question is called Vertical Lists, or Vertical Features, which shows vertical objects like posts, poles, tree trunks etc in a domestic landscape. Each remake uses a differing structure of counting and musical technique to count the 121 (11x11) vertical objects that Tulse Luper allegedly planned for the project.

In Vertical Features Remake, "vertical features" is an academicised joke phrase for any upright objects: a telegraph pole, a tree, a fence, rugby posts, and so on. True to its title, Greenaway's moyen métrage (academic shorthand for a film of 30-59 minutes) teems with such features. The premise is appropriately labyrinthine: a filmmaker named Tulse Luper-whose name, a recurring fixture in Greenaway's work, hints at the looping structures of his films-has created a "structural film" about vertical features. This film has been lost, Luper has vanished, and a fictional cultural organisation, the Institute of Restoration and Reclamation, takes it upon themselves to remake it. Using Luper's notes and scattered clues, the Institute attempts several reconstructions, each iteration sparking conflict with various cultural nabobs, theorists, and panjandrums within the institutions.

A "structural film," in this context, rejects traditional narrative in favour of fixed shots and a rigorous mathematical or geometric logic. Such films focus on the medium itself rather than the subject it might convey, making them nearly impossible to recount orally without inducing a yawn. Greenaway uses this highly specialised form as a canvas for comedy and critique, skewering the bureaucratic absurdities of cultural institutions-arts councils, NGOs, and other bodies that entangle artists in red tape.

Beneath its satire, however, the film is also a reflection of Greenaway's creative process. By the fourth reconstruction, Greenaway-or his fictional Institute-achieves something quietly beautiful. The result is an elegiac ode to forgotten British spaces: rural sports grounds, gymkhana paddocks, old cottages, and fields from a time before modern hyper-connectivity bred today's restless anxieties. What begins as an intellectual puzzle blossoms into a gently melancholic portrait of an undervalued world.

Greenaway's early career reveals an intricate, often self-referential style that yields moments of unexpected beauty.

This film is awesome! The character of Tulse Luper is one which crops up in many of Greenaway's work (he has just finished a new exhibition at Compton Verney called '92 Suitcases' which expresses psychological and physical episodes in Luper's life. It's great). Greenaway insists that Tulse Luper is not his alter-ego or anything and yet they share loads of things in common.

Greenaway has invested so much of his artistic time on Luper and it is so interesting to watch this film in light of this. Patterns of authorship are fascinating in 'Vertical Features Remake'. See it and others!

"Vertical Features Remake" (1978, Peter Greenaway) Haha, oh my god, Peter Greenaway just vaulted into my favorite directors.

"Vertical Features Remake", a 42-minute extra on the DVD for a film I'm watching directly after this called "The Falls", brings to mind such classic faux-sorta-documentaries as Orson Welles' brutally tricky "F for Fake" and Chris Marker's devastatingly funny "Letter to Siberia", but with Greenaway's very distinctive obsession with structure that seems to show up in much of his filmography.

Brilliantly lampooning preachy academics who presume to know more about an artist's work than the artists themselves, "Vertical Features Remake" is nominally about an artist named "Tulse Luper", who was apparently planning on creating a sort of film based upon photographs he pathologically captured of vertical objects (trees, telephone boles, sticks stuck in the ground, etc.), but died before being able to complete it, leaving it unfinished. The film depicts four attempts by presumptuous analytical academics trying their own hands at attempting to reconstruct his vision, and of course, they all completely disagree on what his "vision" *was*, and it becomes a sort of hilarious, almost "Rashomon"-esque breakdown as the four films depicted are drastically different in tone (to the point that the amusingly foreboding piano key poundings that accompany and punctuate each scene are wildly different between each version, with "Vertical" leaving me in hysterics as the pianist is just assaulting the poor thing).

The aspect that pushes the film to the lofty score it's going to receive, though, is ridiculously verbose and proper British narrator Colin Cantlie, whose narration is so hilariously detailed that it becomes unimportant what he's even saying, just the fact that he's saying so damn MUCH of it, and from there, the film gets so amusingly complicated that I just couldn't stop laughing...for instance, we're told that not only do they disagree on what Luper's vision was, no one's even sure if Luper even exists! (Some argue that all the pictures of Luper are actually the editor's father-in-law), or when the third film is criticized by the fourth director as being "too ingenious".

A good DVD special feature is designed to perfectly compliment the main feature, so if "The Falls" is anything like this, it may just have a shot at making my top 300, and considering "Zorn's Lemma"'s placement IN my top 300, I won't rule out this fabulous piece of work either.

{Grade: 9/10 (A-) / #4 (of 18) of 1978}

One of the funniest films I've ever seen.

It also provided one of the funniest showing of a film I've ever had the enjoyment to participate in.

After a house party when no one else was up i watched this on my own, after about 10 minutes some random came down stairs and decided to watch it with me...

He honestly thought it was a real documentary and was amazed at the detail of the academic reasoning. About three quarters of the way through he got up and left, so to this day he must think i was watching the most mind boggling documentary he had ever seen...funny that.