Rembrandt's J'Accuse...!

For Peter Greenaway, Rembrandt's Night Watch is not merely a group portrait but an indictment carrying the evidence of a murder inside it. The film sets out that claim in thirty-four points and argues them. It is not interested in an art history lesson. It is interested in visual literacy: Greenaway looks into the camera and addresses the viewer directly, telling us we do not know how to look at painting and treat pictures as pretty objects. That is why the register resembles a prosecution. The form is entirely presentation: the painting broken into parts digitally, layered images, reconstructions, and the points written across the screen. The film stands beside Greenaway's fiction feature on the same subject, Nightwatching; one tells the story, the other lays out the evidence. The two were conceived as a single project. Greenaway appears on screen himself, with Martin Freeman and Eva Birthistle in the reconstructions. Who it is for: anyone interested in art history and in reading pictures, and viewers who enjoy Greenaway's didactic side. Who it is not for: anyone expecting neutrality from a documentary. The film argues one thesis from beginning to end and gives no room to the other view.