The Times today features British filmmaker Peter Greenaway and his multimedia presentation at Da Vinci’s Last Supper in Milan. The presentation seems fascinating, except that we can’t exactly tell what it is. We know that Greenaway is somehow projecting things onto Da Vinci’s masterpiece, but what exactly? What does it look like? Is it cheesy or cool? Sentences like “Divine and natural light blurred as Marco Robino’s rhythmic music culminated in a furious crescendo†don’t really help. We looked to YouTube for evidence of Greenaway’s last similar production, based on Rembrandt’s Night Watch in Amsterdam, but all we got were cheesy-looking trailers for Nightwatching, the currently-in-festivals feature Greenaway made out of the project, starring a startled-looking (and buck-naked) Martin Freeman as Rembrandt. Luckily, the Guardian has high-quality video accompanying their story about Greenaway’s Last Supper presentation, which shows just how cool the project was.
A Filmmaker Adds a Cinematic Scope to a Storied Painting [NYT]
Greenaway’s hi-tech gadgetry highlights da Vinci for the laptop generation [Guardian]