In the order I watched them over the past two days, all for the first time, all on DVD:

Intervals
Peter Greenaway 1969 UK
Several shots of Venice intersect one another repeatedly, with an interval of black in sequence to Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
An abstract, experimental film about Venice, without shots of water - its presence is felt, but never acknowledged visually. The soundtrack becomes more and more sophisticated as it goes on, with a very odd and difficult structure which comes to prominence once Vivaldi's music comes at the end.

H is for House
Peter Greenaway 1973 UK
Greenaway makes what he calls a home movie: at a time when his children are learning the alphabet at theit country home.
H is for House, yes, but it is also for Happiness, for Heaven, for Hell, Holocaust, Home movie, Hitchcock, Hollywood. An absurd notion, as Greenaway puts it, of collecting contradictory and disparate lexis under one category, as the dictionary does. It has a rhythmic, musical and verbal wit, an irresistable charm: decidedly English, in setting, in its distinct vocabulary, in look and feel.

A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist
Peter Greenaway 1978 UK
A narrator recounts the 92 maps he was given in order to find reincarnation.
A series of maps recorded with a keen, roaming camera, capturing all the fascinations of a map's minutae - for all their recurring simplicity, their various clashes of colour, shape, size and visual density makes for a fascinating 40 minutes or so, intercut with footage of birds, as the narrator walks his way through "H" (heaven or hell?) and into his next life.

Water Wrackets
Peter Greenaway 1975 UK
A tale of a mysterious, mythical dynasty of water-living species, without their visual presence, shot against footage of water.
Greenaway, with Intervals, explored the notion of making a film without actors, without the human figure dominating the frame - is it achievable and how? Even so, that film had Venetians walking to and fro across frame, whereas this is a step further into abstraction: all we see are close-up images of water in natural, rural flow: streams, burns, rivers, with the banks and shrubbery engulfing and sealing the imaginary, distant and yet somehow familiar world - familiar because we see them all the time, distant because of the attention paid to them. A serene voice-over lends some coherence or narrative order, and the soundtrack, of wind through trees, of water through valleys, is at once warming and haunting.

Windows
Peter Greenaway 1974 UK
In 1973, a narrator reveals to interior shots of panes and frames, 37 people died as a result of falling out of windows.
John Pym says of this, and quite rightly too, that it is "an example of making something out of nothing". For Greenaway, an artist with a tremendous imagination and obsessive drive, this results in short films that never really outstay their welcome (as short films so often do), blessed with a wit - both visual and audial, or visual because of audial - similar to the anonymous eclecticism of an Italo Calvino novel. Whatever of the original reason why he made this - appalled, he claims, of the statistics coming from South Africa of the time regarding mysterious deaths of people falling from windows. Juvenile and obviously made before his breakthrough into the maintained sophistication of feature films, it nevertheless it remains an important work in the context of his career thereafter, presenting in it four themes he himself recognises as having remained with him ever since: statistics, eclecticism, landscape, and death.

Dear Phone
Peter Greenaway 1976 UK
14 men, each with the initials HC, are caught up in various incidents involving telephone boxes.
Greenaway wishes to make an imagistic cinema, a filmmaker's cinema, as opposed to that wretched or neglectful, or lamentable or reductive usage of the medium: the writer's cinema - he argues that we've only seen 100 years of illustrated text, where the script provides the main bulk of a film, with little use made of what makes it unique. Here, then, he turns that on its head, filming actual text itself, first crudely scribbled writing and then finally moving towards (almost like a final draft of a script) typewriting. All instances involve phoneboxes, and all lead, in some way or another, from one to the next, not so much as a story, but definitely a cohesive narrative (all protagonists have the initials HC). In between, we have shots of that forgotten icon of Britishness: the red phone box. Shot in early mornings, by serene beaches, along rural lanes, popping out above high walls, alone or in pairs, behind obstacles and other geographical contexts, these lonely, almost empty shots, have a decidedly witty and complex air about them, much like the English setting of H is for House, with all the playful rhetoric and verbal repetition of a Calvino novel.

The Draughtsman's Contract
Peter Greenaway 1982 UK
In 17th Century aristocratic England, a draughtsman is hired to produce 12 drawings of a country estate before it changes hands, so long as he can have his way with the lady who owns it.
A delightfully acted film, a finely written film, a fast-paced romp and a visually disciplined one at that. Thematically dense, of course, as Greenaway's first venture into feature filmmaking, and so it is less abstract than his early shorts, but made with an arthouse flair which is a pleasure to watch: it's fresh, it's certainly original, it's rewardingly intellectual, and endlessly rewatchable. The most prominent question it raises (because cinema is an art for raising questions) is does a painter, or an artist, paint what he sees or what he knows; and what starts as a rather eccentric blend of list-making (the protagonist goes through the rules for his twelve paintings with arrogant naivety) and matter-of-fact eroticism turns eventually, through a convoluted structure of events, into a ludicrous murder mystery.

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
Peter Greenaway 1989 France / Netherlands / UK
A vulgar thief dines every night with his vulturous cronies and beautiful wife at an elegant restaurant, but it all goes tits up when the wife has a fling with another diner.
A very entertaining film, an often vulgar film (it opens with a man having shit poured over him), an always witty film, and an extremely well-acted, -written and -scored film (Michael Nyman's music takes it to emotional heights it would otherwise struggle to reach). Gambon relishes in his role as the Frank Booth-like villain, Mirren is astonishingly sexy in her costume design. It's an unashamedly artificial affair, with costumes changing colour according to the room in which they're shot, and the lighting is excessive; the camera crabs from one location to the next with all the distanced strain of Godard (La Chinoise and Weekend come to mind), at once flawless and demanding. Eroticism, food, violence and general vulgarities have never been blended with such an individualistic flair; and the first death in the film somehow, despite the self-consciousness and -reflexivity throughout, feels very (and tragically) real.

A Zed and Two Noughts
Peter Greenaway 1985 UK / Netherlands
The wives of two zoo-ologists, who happen to be twins, are killed in a car crash. The driver, who lost a leg and wants to lose the other, has an affair with both. Thematically dense, intellectually engaging and always challenging film, in its audacity, in its originality, in its merging of high art and avant garde tendencies with fictional narrative conventions. It's a collection of ideas or preoccupations in two chaotic hours, with arresting imagery, cinematography which demands and commands attention, and a dark and perverse tale of emotional weight. One might say it lacks soul, one might say it packs quite a punch - it depends on how close you hold Greenaway's thematic obsessions: death, decay, amputation, twinship, the uniqueness of so-called freaks, and an obsessive need to acquire information in order to understand life. Formally, on top of this - 'this' being essentially three different films in one - are explorations of the verticality and horizontality of the frame, compositional symmetry (to reflect the twins), the artificiality of the medium, and an obsessive experiment into litghting; Vierny's cinematography captures 26 different uses of light - moonlight, daylight, candlelight, car headlamps, etc. It's quite a masterpiece, really.

I've also watched Chaplin's Shoulder Arms, Triple Trouble, The Bond, The Adventurer and A Woman of Paris; the latter is a masterpiece.