This just might be Greenaway at the top of his game: unbelievably funny and witty, a film that is a structurally magnificent testament to the wonderful madness of Joyce, or Perec, who not only wanted to distill the world but somehow managed to create a microcosm of their own in their work.This is certainly the cinematic answer to a work like "Life: A User's Manual". Really, this is so laugh-out-loud funny it's not even funny, considering Greenaway's work for the past 25 years has been rather… serious? What Greenaway manages to do is this: he is able to create a profound film that looks deep in the mirror and sees the world unfold upon itself in an endless swirl; then he's able to present it to us in a structurally coherent way, by means of documentary filmmaking; then he's able to poke fun mostly at those means and the film itself, and still turn that gentle and witty parody on its head. In short, this is wondrous filmmaking, something quite unparalleled in my books.I wish there were more films like this that make you laugh and not feel bad about it.And to think that Greenaway, who is such an aesthete and wonderful crafter of shockingly beautiful images, mostly uses stock footage and images that are very much of the ordinary sort. Knowing that he would go on to make such multi-layered works such as "Prospero's Books" (1991) and "The Pillow Book" (1996) only adds to the fun. By the way, we have Stephen and Timothy Quay, of all people, pop up in the film!

Greenaway's first feature length film after years of short, conceptual experimentation is a rich tapestry of absurd fabrication dressed up as fact. His prior experiments had developed this mock-documentary format with films like Dear Phone (1977) and A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (1978), in which facts that couldn't possibly have any believable anchorage to reality, were presented to the viewer with the straight-faced, stiff-upper-lipped austerity usually reserved for the news at ten. Here, Greenaway's goal is to create a visual essay based around word games, numbering, bizarre family lineages and a random outburst of 'Violent-Unknown-Events'. With this in mind The Falls (1980) could be seen as not only the director's first stab at feature-length storytelling but also something of an introduction to a number of subsequent Greenaway trademarks, characteristics and idiosyncrasies that would become more apparent in the later, more superficially linear film.So, we have the preoccupation with numbers and cataloguing, with 92 being our focal point (92 deaths that are chronicled throughout, 92 disparate languages, some fictitious, 92 different types of bird, and 92 known instances of Violent-Unknown-Events, or V.U.E.). Greenaway pieces the whole thing together over the course of the film's epic, multi-faceted narrative, which the director has himself stated can be enjoyed at the viewer's own leisure. This means that we can enter and leave the proceedings whenever we feel compelled, creating a form of cinema as encyclopaedia, with Greenaway creating a shattered mosaic of wavering strands and themes running parallel through the 92 various plots and sub-plots that are documented in the film. Though it clearly won't be for everyone, The Falls will certainly appeal to fans of Greenaway's other short form experimentations, such as the aforementioned Dear Phone and other films like Windows (1975) and Water Wrackets (1976), which create similarly intellectual, arcane and satirical scenarios rife with humour and imagination.

"The Falls" is an extraordinary piece of work. Nothing else comes close. The biographies of 92 victims of the "VUE" ("Violent Unexplained Event") whose surnames begin with the letters f-a-l-l, Greenaway's film is a mixture of the encyclopedic, the sinister, the silly and the plain mad. At 3h30, mad as Monty Python and as rambling as Laurence Sterne, shot and narrated in public television documentary-style, "The Falls" is designed to be exhaustive and wear you out; Greenaway himself has on occasion stated that nothing forces you to sit through, and that the film might actually work better if you just dip into it at random - "browse" was the word he used.When I saw it, there were only myself and two other friends still in the cinema by the time the lights came up. All three of us were absolutely delighted, exhilarated in the manner of kids coming back from the Science Museum. Words like "mesmeric", "entrancing" and "fascinating" were used to discuss it afterwards, as well as "plain daft" (meant as a compliment, of course.)Not sure if you'll enjoy "The Falls." It depends on what you want from your filmed entertainment, I guess. If you don't really think cinema should do anything other than tell stories that are easy on the brain, don't bother. If you love lists, however, and think intellectual challenge is entertaining, on the other hand, you're in for a treat. One final note - whoever thought of recommending "Titanic" to fans of "The Falls" is obviously on some really heavy drug I've never heard about. What is it, and what other side effects does it have?

Exhausting and brilliant, Greenaway's first feature may come as a surprise to those familiar with his more famous concoctions, such as THE DRAUGHTSMAN'S CONTRACT or DROWNING BY NUMBERS. Instead of sumptuous finery, set-design and colour, or studied, enigmatic performances, we have a, very local, documentary. A documentary which, like all others in the genre, seeks to examine realistically a particular problem in a particular area, through evidence, witness and analysis. A documentary whose 'real' elements are so preposterous that they develop not into an answer for truth, but full-blown mystery and fantasy, without ever moving beyond words and plausible images. What is very Greenaway is the numerology, the formalism, the very literary script, the arch jokes, the word-games, the nonsense-as-high-theory. Stunning, but you may not watch it again in a hurry.