By Michael Gilson
Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds:
The Draughtsman cannot afford to wait. He has 12 commissioned drawings to finish of the house and gardens in the same amount of days. Now, on one of his first sittings, to the north of the house, Compston Anstey, a mist has descended.
It is 1694, a Restoration murder mystery is to play out in these exquisite settings, one that will consume the Draughtsman. But for now he is in control. The master of the house is away and the mistress, Mrs. Herbert, has commissioned the drawings, apparently as a gift for her husband on his return. The Draughtsman, Mr. Neville, has extracted what seems to be a high price for his talents, a price that involves liaison with Mrs. Herbert for each of the drawings.
Now witness the scene to the north of the house. The camera holds its position, like a painter. In the sheep pasture the Draughtsman’s apparatus is formally and darkly displayed, perfectly and symmetrically framed by hazy greens and greys, chair and brolly to the right, drawing case in the centre, where his assistant dozes, his bewigged head bowed. To the left the Draughtsman’s chair and easel idle and in the mists behind, the outline of an English Oak and the sun beginning, too slowly, to burn its way through the vapour.
Hung on a gallery wall it would arrest the attention, here in this masterly, formalist film it is but one of many perfectly drawn scenes that build the narrative, refusing to allow us lazy, traditional signs of cinematic meaning, a jigsaw puzzle we might never complete.
Now the impatient Draughtsman stalks from left to right, spiking turf with his walking stick and another star of the film, its pulsating Purcell-inspired chamber music, takes up the narrative baton from our landscape painting, adding drama, pace and intrigue, drawing us further in.
For this is an inverted film where gardens and sawing strings and arch word play and optical angles are all foregrounded while plot, murder, motivation are placed in the background. Nothing must compromise the camera’s nor the Draftsman’s eye even if that view only promotes non-comprehension.
The music, Chasing Sheep Is Best Left to Shepherds, is throbbing now as the mist finally lifts and reveals the pasture and the house and formal gardens belonging to the Draughtsman’s middle -ranking gentry patrons. Through the Draughtsman’s quartered drawing frame, reaching to Mrs. Herbert’s bedroom, a ladder must be included that was not there when the picture was begun. The Draughtsman sees but he does not see.
Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract, with Michael Nyman’s astonishing musical score, had plenty of critics when released in 1982. Traditionalists decried its ‘art house’ pose. They have disappeared like the mist in our scene now. What we have left is a masterpiece, a paean to the possibilities of cinema, a thing of perfect beauty.
(2mins, 17secs in)