A Zed & Two Noughts
| A Zed & Two Noughts | |
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DVD cover
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| Directed by | Peter Greenaway |
| Produced by | Kees Kasander Peter Sainsbury |
| Written by | Peter Greenaway |
| Starring |
Andréa Ferréol Brian Deacon Eric Deacon Frances Barber Joss Ackland |
| Music by | Michael Nyman |
| Cinematography | Sacha Vierny |
| Distributed by |
Artificial Eye (UK) Skouras Pictures (US) |
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Release date
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4 October 1985 |
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Running time
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115 minutes |
| Country |
United Kingdom Netherlands |
| Language | English |
| A Zed & Two Noughts | ||||
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Original UK cover
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| Soundtrack album by Michael Nyman | ||||
| Released | 1985 | |||
| Genre | Contemporary classical music, film scores, minimalism | |||
| Length | 41:25 | |||
| Label |
TER (UK) Virgin Venture, Caroline (US) |
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| Producer | David Cunningham | |||
| Michael Nyman chronology | ||||
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| A Zed And Two Noughts | ||||
Copyright 1990 Virgin Venture
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A Zed & Two Noughts is a 1985 film written and directed by Peter Greenaway. This film was Greenaway's first with cinematography by Sacha Vierny, who went on to shoot virtually all of Greenaway's work in the 1980s and 1990s, until Vierny's death; Greenaway referred to Vierny as his "most important collaborator". The film is a rumination on life, love, bad sex, doubling, man's mistreatment of animals, artifice vs. the life force and the inevitability of birth, death and decay.
Twin zoologists Oswald and Oliver Deuce (Brian Deacon and Eric Deacon) are at work studying the behaviour of animals at a zoo, when their wives are killed in a car accident involving a large swan which crashes through the car windshield. The woman who was driving the car, Alba Bewick (Andréa Ferréol), is not killed, but has a leg amputated.
Venus de Milo (Frances Barber), a woman associated with the zoo, attempts to forge a relationship with the twins, ostensibly to help them recover from their loss. Meanwhile, Oswald and Oliver gradually become obsessed with images of growth and decay, watching videos on the origins of life and creating time-lapse video of decomposing life forms. They begin this latter task with a green apple, bitten into and rotting before their camera lens.
The twins' descent sees them become romantically involved with Alba, and increasingly attached to one another. Venus de Milo remains involved with them enough to observe their obsessions grow: they take to video-taping the decomposition of prawns, and they take a personal interest in Alba's childhood, going so far as to ask her to show them a field seen in a photograph on her bedside table. They become obsessed with snails, and they take advantage of their contacts at the zoo to create decomposition videos of more and more complex animals, moving gradually up the food chain. Excerpts from Sir David Attenborough's TV series Life on Earth, including his narration, are featured in the film.
Alba becomes a subject for the experiments of her surgeon, who eventually amputates her other leg, claiming it is putting stress on her spine. His true motive is to fashion Alba into a subject of his recreations of Johannes Vermeer paintings; Venus de Milo participates in this process, as well.
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Wikipedia