Walker Art Center Presents Two by Greenaway, Featuring New Prints of The Draughtsman's Contract and A Zed & Two Noughts

“As usual with Greenaway, the ideas are large, endless, and perverse; and they are teased out with the exquisite formal perfection of a court minuet.” —Time Out London

The Walker Art Center presents

Two by Greenaway

, September 7–9, featuring new 35mm prints of two classic films by filmmaker Peter Greenaway. Honored by the Walker in 1997 with a Regis Dialogue and Retrospective, Greenaway has produced a wealth of short and feature-length films, making him one of the most innovative and influential filmmakers of his generation. The screenings include 1982’s The Draughtsman’s Contract (Friday, September 7, 7:30 pm; Saturday, September 8, 2 pm), a stylistic tour-de-force about murder, adultery, and blackmail; and the 1985 film A Zed & Two Noughts (Saturday, September 8, 7:30 pm; Sunday, September 9, 2 pm), which follows the Deuce brothers, zoologists and former Siamese twins, who lose their wives in a bizarre collision which leads to an obsession with photographing and measuring decay.

Born in Wales and educated in London, Peter Greenaway trained as a painter for four years, and started making his own films in 1966. He now lives in Amsterdam. He has continued to make cinema in a great variety of ways, which has also informed his curatorial work and the making of exhibitions and installations in Europe from the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice and the Joan Miro Gallery in Barcelona to the Boymans van Beuningen Gallery in Rotterdam and the Louvre in Paris. He has made 12 feature films and some 50 short films and documentaries, been regularly nominated for the film festival competitions of Cannes, Venice, and Berlin, published books, written opera librettos, and collaborated with composers Michael Nyman, Glen Branca, Wim Mertens, Jean-Baptiste Barriere, Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, Borut Krzisnik, and David Lang. His first narrative feature film, The Draughtsman’s Contract, completed in 1982, received great critical acclaim and established him internationally as an original filmmaker, a reputation consolidated by the films The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and The Pillow Book, and most recently by Nightwatching.

Tickets to these screenings are $8 ($6 Walker members) and are available at walkerart.org/tickets or by calling 612.375.7600. The screenings take place in the Walker Cinema.

Friday, September 7, 7:30 pm; Saturday, September 8, 2 pm

The Draughtsman’s Contract

In this seemingly idyllic 17th-century Wiltshire, England, an ambitious draughtsman is commissioned by an aristocrat’s wife to produce 12 drawings of her husband’s estate. In return, he receives board and bed—hers. Extravagant costumes, a twisted plot, elegantly barbed dialogue, and a score by frequent Greenaway collaborator Michael Nyman make the film a treat for ear, eye, and mind. 1982, 35mm, 108 minutes.

Saturday, September 8, 7:30 pm; Sunday, September 9, 2 pm

A Zed & Two Noughts

When a car collides with a swan outside the Rotterdam Zoo, two women passengers die and the driver, Alma Bewick, must have her leg amputated. Obsessed with the accident, the husbands of the dead women—identical twins and zoologists Oswald and Oliver—embark on an affair with Alma and then begin experimenting with the time-lapse aesthetics of decay. Densely packed with literary and art-historical puns and in jokes, Greenaway’s third feature is “like nothing you’ve ever seen before” (Boston Herald). 1985, 35mm, 115 minutes.