Greenaway's Vertical Features Remake is self-reflexive to the point of seeming, to unknowing eyes, a convincing - and, no doubt to some, a rather dull - documentary on having to remake a film all about natural and man-made vertical objects which contradict otherwise serene and banal landscapes. Interested in notions of the grid, or the parallelogram which we have decided constitutes the film frame, Greenaway shoots various footage and reassembles it all to differently timed sequences, each becoming more and more complex and musically-bound as it goes on. A mockery of the rampant structuralism at the time, it also happens to be as haunting as it is intellectual, with Brian Eno's entrance music going into each remake, and the images themselves have a loneliness about them, much like the empty, "dead" frames in Dear Phone.

The Falls (again, Greenaway): on the one hand it might be best to view this in one sitting, so that all the interrelated fictions are appreciated best in all their intertextual density, but on the other, one would be forgiven for dividing it up, perhaps into hourly sittings, in order to take some sort of break - or indeed retreat - from the absolute absurd mass of information overload. Narrated mostly in voice-over, with translations of fictional languages spoken over footage of interviews, landscapes, and footage of people naming as many birds as possible. It's a fascinating and rich experience exploring lists in the form of dictionaries and directories, knowledge in the form of catalogues and encyclopaediae, ornithology, languages, and the form of the medium itself - it's constantly witty in its verbal rhetoric, and editing must have been an unimaginably difficult process in which Greenaway no doubt found great excitement.

I watched last night Hitchcock's Secret Agent and The Skin Game.

Secret Agent: As good as anything Hitchcock made before hitting Hollywood, an overlooked masterpiece with a lively romance in the form of a ménage à trois, a killer wit and memorable characterisation (helped by good performances), and possibly the best sound design in any of his films: in the church, in which a corpse plays an intense organ drone, a murder scene at the top of a mountain, with the distant, almost non-diegetic wailing of a dog (it's edited over from a different strand in the narrative), and the industrial, overwhelming chugs of a chocolate factory; not to mention another climax on a train, with all the momentum and thrill of Hitchcock's best works.

The Skin Game:
Hitchcock turns away from murder suspense and into family drama stroke rather strange landowning hokum; it lacks both the experimental tendencies of previous films (it's two years after Blackmail) and the astonishing form he hit mid-thirties, but there are notable marks of interest even so, mostly in the wip-pans during otherwise theatrically-filmed conversation scenes, and the one standout sequence, the auction scene, the dialogue in which hardly flows, but the camera cranks up some sort of thrilling "who's going to get it" game of cat-and-mouse. Subject matter seems dull and almost laughable regarding the usual requirements of a dramatic feature-length narrative, but it shifts into a fascinating and ironic tragedy towards the end when the villain of the piece (brilliant performance from Edmund Gwenn) and his family are turned upon, and our sympathies move from wishing for his downfall to feeling some sort of deep sorrow for him.