Murder he drew
The Draughtsman's Contract, about killings in a country house, is famous
for being utterly baffling. It's perfectly simple, says director Peter
Greenaway. It's all about the colour green - and wigs
Peter Greenaway
Friday August 1, 2003
The Guardian
The origin of the plot of The Draughtsman's Contract is
autobiographical. I was very keen on drawing. I trained as a painter
initially, and spent a lot of my time drawing from life. One of my
particular interests was architecture.
It was always extremely pleasant to sit in the hot English sun and draw
in a leisurely fashion. I had a very young family at that time and the
four of us would spend as much time as we could in the countryside away
from London. I discovered a house on the border of England and Wales not
far from Hay-on-Wye, where I attempted to draw a fairly modest early
Victorian house.
The weather was unusually fine. For about three weeks, I did some
drawings. I set up a series of permanent vantage points by moving chairs
out of the house and situating them in the garden, so that very early in
the morning, from breakfast till mid-morning, I would draw maybe the
north side of the house. Then, when the shadows moved so much that it
changed the complexion, I would move on to the next seat, so that from,
say, mid-morning until lunchtime, I would draw another view of the
house, etc, on into the afternoon. There were about, I think, five
different places in the garden.
But also, since I was on holiday and enjoying myself, there were
constant interruptions that I made no attempt to avoid: playing with my
children, doing a piece of gardening, going to the shops, having meals,
simply falling asleep in the sun. And this is the premise for the film.
It's a story about a draughtsman who draws a country house and is
constantly interrupted. I have to add that the uses of his drawing - for
sexual and financial reward - were far away from what happened to me.
This is a fictionalisation of an autobiographical event.
It is also a fictional evocation of a long-vanished age in which
draughtsmen and painters were employed by country-house owners in
England to draw or paint their estates, their property, their houses and
gardens. They commissioned such works to show off to their neighbours,
or maybe even simply to delight themselves with their prosperity and status.
For the gentry in England in the late 17th century would be very much
associated with their estates. Indeed, right up to the encouragements of
Mrs Thatcher, England always believed the notion of owning property was
a sure sign of having a position in the civilised world. So this is a
story about a group of aristocrats worrying, arguing, discussing
questions about property, money, heredity and continuity. But what the
draughtsman slowly realises as he works is that he is drawing things
that he does not know anything about: a series of clues that are
apparently leading to a murder. This film is not a thousand miles away
from being an Agatha Christie story about a country-house murder.
So I developed a script about a draughtsman. I created a man who was
both extremely arrogant and rather naive. And between the arrogance and
the naivety, the whole plot is shaped and creates its perspective. He is
employed by the wife of a country-house owner to make 12 drawings of the
estate. The year is 1694, a significant year in English history for lots
of reasons. It's the year the Bank of England is founded. It's several
years after the battle of the Boyne, so the Dutch Protestant aristocracy
is now firmly in place in England. That year also saw the introduction
of a comparatively minor law that was very significant for women and
very significant certainly for this film: the Married Woman's Property
Act. This finally meant that women could inherit property and have
limited control over inheritance, their own children and certainly
property. The film revolves around these ideas of female and male
inheritance.
We tried very hard to create a sense of artificiality about this
community, by taking the costumes of the period, but extending them and
exaggerating them. A lot of the characters have excessive wigs that
completely disguise their features. The whole tradition of wigs, of
course, is curious. It was suggested that Louis XIV was in danger of
losing his hair and the origins of these early wigs was an attempt to
disguise this fact, and of course what the king did, the whole court
did, so gradually it became an important characteristic that all members
of aristocratic courts should wear wigs.
For women, lace was hugely important. The more lace a woman could
display, the richer not only herself but her husband and her husband's
estate. There is also colour-coding in the film. In the first half, the
aristocracy are all dressed in white. But the draughtsman always wears
black. And then halfway through the film, after the essential, pivotal
plot change, the costume colour-coding changes completely so the
draughts-man turns up in white when everybody else is in black. Like a
classic outsider, he always gets it wrong.
It was very important for me that there should be a correspondence
between the actual drawing of the country house and the circumstances of
what the camera sees. Every time you see a hand in this film, it's my
hand actually drawing the landscape and the people concerned.
The draughtsman uses an optical device constructed as a frame. Recent
publications by David Hockney have suggested that artists after and
during the Renaissance resorted to all sorts of optical equipment in
order to improve the artificiality of their medium. The notion of the
frame as a filmic device, and also as a drawing device, is related very
significantly to the notion of a frame-up. Though we imagine the
draughtsman rules the roost and governs the action, he's in fact slowly,
scene by scene, being framed. So the notion of the subject matter of the
film - to frame somebody, that is, to put them up as a victim of a
conspiracy of some description - is also relative to the way the film
itself is very self-consciously framed.The form and the content should
ideally be brought closely together.
The whole film is very much a landscape film, which would relate to the
traditions of Claude Lorraine and Poussin, two Frenchmen who spent most
of their lives and their painting careers in Italy and had an enormous
influence, not only on French landscape but on English landscape. The
three predominant colours of this film are black, white and green. The
black and white essentially of the costumes, and the green of the
English countryside. So there is an overall colour-coding characteristic
that is certainly true of all the exterior shots of the film.
At the end of the film, it becomes apparent, rather like Murder on the
Orient Express, that the entire family was responsible for the death of
Mr Herbert, the unpleasant and antagonistic owner of the house. The plan
was that the women of the family could partake of the Married Woman's
Property Act. So there's only one more thing to do, and that's to
finally not only get rid of the drawings, but also to get rid of the
architect himself. And now we have, or are about to have, a copycat
murder. So this draughtsman is killed and disposed of and his drawings
burnt in order to tidy up the whole story and destroy the final evidence.
So these 12 days of painful draughtsmanship all go up in smoke. Maybe
for an artist it's more damaging not simply to be killed but to actually
have one's works destroyed. I was the draughtsman of those drawings and
I had absolutely no intention of destroying them. What you see burnt on
celluloid are just extremely good photocopies.
· This is an edited extract from the director's commentary on the DVD,
to be released by the BFI later this year.
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