Split-screen Effects and Decadence Aesthetics in Peter Greenaway's Drowning by Numbers

Abstract

The author focuses on Peter Greenway's film Drowning by Numbers which all the while remained by and large off the researchers' radars. The full-fledged analysis of the film’s aesthetics implies revealing the mechanics of balancing the architectonics of film matter both in the semantic and the visual contexts, taking into account the redundancy of meanings, accents, various stylistic and genre elements typical for this director.
The split-screen as a tool for organizing the intra-frame matter is for P. Greenway a kind of brand identity. However, the director prefers not to limit his poetics to one genre and style, nor to a universal artistic device. In Drowning by Numbers there is no split-screen in its traditional sense, however, the architectonics of the film matter evidentiates its complex structure, semantic segmentation and strong correlation of the segments, which allows to regard the frame architectonics in the context of the split-screen effect with connotations inherent in the tool. Forming the intra-frame contents in such an unconventional way, Peter Greenaway intensifies and expands the film space without loading its visual solution; he creates a close “three-dimensional” structure, arranges the semantic strata, fits the objects in the exact grid of a frame. In Drowning by Numbers the split-screen effect with its implied boundaries holds up the multi-dimensional aesthetics of the film including elements of postmodernism, symbolism and, more so, of decadence — with its inherent fascination with death and non-existence, its abysm of the unconscious and its static beauty. Typically, the film's characters move slowly, strike attitudes and put others to death emotionless. It appears that the decadence aesthetics proves to be the most emphatic in this work, and that’s what implicitly requires a split-screen structure of the intra-frame space.