Post 8

Belly of an Architect has been my least favorite of all the movies we have watched so far. It also is one of the oddest films I have ever seen. The film shot by the artist Peter Greenaway follows the slow mental breakdown of the films protagonist Stourley Kracklite while he works to fulfill his long time dream of staging an exhibition dedicated to his idol, Etienne-Louis Boullee. The film shows how the genius of an artists can be turned into a slow and debilitating sickness that consumes their lives and hinders their ability to work. The film also focuses on the creation of things, weather it be life or the exhibit they both intertwine to show the creation of an artist.
The Boullee exhibit has been Kracklite's baby for almost 10 years. Married to his wife for 7 of them she has had to endure his constant obsession with the creation of his monument to his hero. He is so caught up in his"baby" that he does not realize that he has created a real baby with his wife for many months. He treats his exhibit with more importance than his wife and ultimately drives her into the hands of another man. It shows that his obsession with his exhibit takes any precedence over the other things it in his life. It shows the side of artistic creation, in which the artist becomes so obsessed with his work that he is unable to see anything else. This is often how parents of new born baby's act, which parallels his own life and his seemly disinterest in his own physical creation with his wife. When he becomes to sick to finish his vision and his exhibit is taken away from him, he can not live with not seeing it completed in they way that he envisioned, so the moment that they are about to open it, he kills himself and it is also at that moment that his baby is born. This lends to the idea that he also realizing that his baby will never be fully his, since his wife is cheating on him, he will never be able to realize his vision or creation of what his child would be. When he realizes that he has stomach cancer and will never be able to realize any of his creations to the fullest that is when he decides to kill himself and become a martyr for his creation.
The creation of his two "baby's" is also gender specific. It his is wife who is creating the being that will be able to carry on his genes and his presence in the world, and it is he who is creating something that will carry on the presence of a man that had been dead for around 200 years. Neither will ever be realized to the extent that he wanted them to be, much like Boullee who never finished most of his work. Neither his wife nor he get the choice to have the ability to crate something in the way that he would have wanted them to be. He is so obsessed with bringing past creations to life that he essentially begins to live in the past and pays no mind to the fact that his future is being created as well. He starts writing letters to his dead idol and becoming completely immersed in his past life. It all leads to his eventual unraveling and final decision to kill himself. Personally, I believe that this film is a tad off and a bit melodramatic.