I only just discovered that the title definitively omits the word “and” in favor of a proud, fastidious ampersand. This work of this British filmmaker struck me as a transmission from a richer, more refined world, where language was sculpted and surfaces were blindingly luminous.

It took a film as aggressively “directed” as Zed to make me reflect on cinema itself. This was the first time I’d ever really considered filmmaking as a set of visual and aural decisions, a system that an artist was creating to convey certain kinds of information beyond mere narrative. At that time, I was pretty invested in “important” middlebrow fare-Oscar winners, prestige pictures, sweeping biopics. It was not only the first Peter Greenaway film I’d seen, but also really the first “art film” I’d encountered. When I was 17, a high school friend of mine named Michael Stuckey invited me over to his apartment to watch A Zed & Two Noughts (1985). And eventually, Greenaway entered his own century, making films inspired by the likes of Fellini ( 8½ Women, 1999) and Eisenstein ( Eisenstein in Guanajuato, 2015). The Pillow Book was adapted from the Heian-era Japanese diary of the same name, written by Sei Shōnagon. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) borrowed much of its visual design from High Renaissance painting, and the screenplay was inspired by Englishman John Ford’s 1626 Jacobean play ’ Tis Pity She ’ s a Whore. The 18th-century utopian architect Étienne-Louis Boullée was a central figure in Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect (1987). This is ironic since, around the release of The Pillow Book (1996), Greenaway remarked in an interview that he “didn’t want to make films with an expiration date stamped on the can.” And when one looks at many of his films, it’s plain to see that he’s fascinated, besotted even, with the art of previous centuries, work that has thus far stood the test of time.

A zed and two noughts