The Draughtsman’s Contract

Peter Greenaway’s first feature film. The year is 1694. An ambitious draughtsman arrives at a candlelit country estate, where he has been commissioned to produce a series of twelve drawings of the house and its gardens. Before his carefully sharpened pencil ever touches the page, however, the contract of the title is signed. Its terms, which place the rhythms of the household at the artist’s disposal, gradually lead to the uncovering of traces of a mysterious crime.

Exquisitely shot, the film stands as one of the most visually sumptuous works in cinema. It is an elegant blend of murder mystery and costume drama, in which the British postmodernist uses wit and irony to portray a world where art, desire and ambition become entangled in a dangerous game.

Greenaway once reportedly said, “I regret that paintings do not have music”. The Draughtsman’s Contract fully realises that ambition: Michael Nyman’s score – more widely known from Jane Campion’s The Piano – remains one of the great achievements of film music.

Filip Grzędowski

Peter Greenaway (b. 1942) – British director, screenwriter and painter. He started his career with experimental conceptual films in the 1970s; he became famous for his historic and culinary reconstructions of the 1980s, such as The Draughtsman’s Contract and The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover. Then, in the 1990s, came his controversial interpretations of great European and Japanese literature in Prospero’s Books and The Pillow Book. Among the best-known films by Greenaway are: Drowning by Numbers, The Belly of an Architect and A Zed & Two Noughts. His works are characteristic with their visual momentum, distance from reality and peculiarly theatrical style of imaging. With multiple cultural references and experimental combinations of styles they are recognized as the crowning of film postmodernism. Greenaway has been fascinated with new media, creating video-installations, short experimental films, directing theatre and opera performances and working as a VJ, too.

20th New Horizons IFF Catalogue