Review of Prospero's Books (1991) by Tristan G — 10 Apr 2009

More a renaissance painting come to life than a film, Greenaway puts his lunatic film style to beautiful use here. What might be a distracting treatment for other source material, his use of multiple layers, dreamlike composition and constructed sound-scapes bring the bard's most fantastical text to energetic life.

How else to realize a tropic island seen through the eyes of a lonely genius whose only company is his daughter and his 24 favourite texts? A lovely, hopeful vision of indefatigability of creative genius: Prosperos's, Shakespeare's, Greenaway's and Guilgud's.