Nightwatching

In 1642 Rembrandt receives a commission for a group portrait from an Amsterdam militia company. What the sitters expect is an orderly, respectable picture. The painter believes there has been a murder and turns the painting into an indictment: who stands where, what is placed in whose hand and what lies in the dark behind all say something. The subject is not art history but a painting being readable as an accusation. The film treats every detail of The Night Watch as evidence and accounts for its oddities one by one. The reading is not historically established; it is a thesis the film constructs. The form is like a theatre stage. The locations are openly sets, the light sources are visible, and the actors arrange themselves in frame as though entering a painting. Peter Greenaway builds every scene as pictorial composition. Afterwards the director took up the same subject as a documentary, defending in it the claims the fiction film advances. The two films complete each other. Martin Freeman plays Rembrandt, with Emily Holmes and Eva Birthistle in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like Greenaway's formal games and films built around painting. Who it is not for: anyone looking for naturalism; the film chooses artifice throughout.