Philadelphia Film Festival 2009

In Rembrandt’s J’Accuse, British director Peter Greenaway, who has lived in Amsterdam for the past dozen years, deconstructs The Night Watch, which hangs in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. The painting is considered to be the greatest of the Dutch master’s portraits of Holland’s 17th-century militias, always full of bonhomie and bravado to ward off those pesky Spanish.

But Greenaway, who began his career as a painter, is a fanatic crusader against visual illiteracy, of teaching people how to see. In what plays out as a detective story of sorts, Greenaway takes the painting apart, line by line, vector by vector, plane by plane, and reads it the way it was read in 1642 after Rembrandt completed it: as an outrageous piece of theater in which the painter bit the aristocratic hand that fed him by embedding within the painting a sensational charge of murder. With The Night Watch, which Greenaway calls the fourth most celebrated painting in the world after the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and the Sistine Chapel, Rembrandt delivered a work that charged Amsterdam’s leading citizens with a successful plot to eliminate a financial rival. Suddenly his lucrative portrait work dried up. Rembrandt went bankrupt and was effectively exiled to the Jordaan, the boonies on the then edge of town. Rembrandt’s J’Accuse amalgamates all of Greenaway’s research on the painting with scenes from his 2007 film Nightwatching, an entirely fictional account of Rembrandt’s undoing. One more example of just how dangerous art can be. In from the Int’l DocFest Amsterdam, J’Accuse was the hottest ticket in canal town. –Harlan Jacobson