For all
the inherent absurdity of its premise, Peter Greenaway’s The Falls often
almost convinces you to take it at face value, as a public-service-oriented
alphabetically-ordered three-hour-fifteen-minute cataloguing of 92 people
affected by a “Violent Unnamed Event” that among other things left its victims bearing
mutations and afflictions both minor and outlandish (including in some cases
being rendered immortal), and spawned multiple new languages; the film’s
persuasiveness lies largely in its very existence, because if it weren’t in
some respect true, or at least necessary, who would ever think to invent it? The
Falls is in part then a great cinematic joke, maintained beyond what anyone
else would judge to be reasonable (this is the only respect in which someone
like Andy Kaufman comes to mind), its inventions often objectively funny, but
never delivered in a way that encourages or even allows laughter. Indeed, the
accumulation of so many ordinary-looking faces in dull interiors, of mundane traveling
shots along inner-city London streets, of outdated typefaces and technologies,
of so many references to birds (which in some way may have been responsible for
the Event) and other recurring motifs constructs its own sense of entrapment, of
being trapped in a work which might be not so much cataloguing as embodying the
trauma (Borges is a compelling reference point). One of the film’s final case
histories, involving a professional storyteller, cites an uncertainty over
whether his creations were received primarily as allegories or as metaphors: similar
questions might be applied to The Falls itself, being both a parody of the
classically well-made, po-faced British documentary tradition and a
near-ultimate application of it, exhaustingly trivia-obsessed and grandly
all-seeing, studded with alluring mysteries (including the citing of other
Greenaway works, such as The Tulse Luper Suitcases, which wouldn’t exist
until decades later, as if transcending normal rules of chronology and
causation).