Death by Design: The Art of Counting in Drowning by Numbers
Peter Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers begins not with narrative, but with a game and a count — a slow tally of stars by a young girl jumping rope. It’s our first signal that we’re not entering a realist world, but a constructed one — a place of rules, rituals, and repetitions. The score, by Michael Nyman, follows the same logic: looping, structured, composed of variation and return like a Bach fugue.
Soon, however, we enter the world of the film: three women, all named Cissie Colpman, all plotting unique ends for their husbands. Greenaway, a painter by training, approaches cinema as composition. The frames resemble classical paintings: static, formal, symbolic. The image is never neutral. Games, lists, and numbers fill the screen — not as decoration, but as guiding principles. His cinema isn’t a mirror to the world but a self-aware construct, more interested in patterns than psychology. And in his telling, “Cinema died with the birth of sound.” He cares little for plot and much for visual tableaux.
Meanwhile, the characters play absurd, rule-bound games, as if mimicking the larger systems that shape society — arbitrary, rigid, and often meaningless. The story unfolds with cool detachment; cruelty is stylized, dialogue literary and mannered. Emotional realism is replaced by design. Like Bertolt Brecht, Greenaway wants us to stay alert — not to “lose ourselves” in the story. This distancing, or Verfremdungseffekt, reminds us we’re watching a film. The mechanisms are exposed, the artifice laid bare. We’re meant to reflect, not empathize.
And yet beneath all the abstraction lies a classical sense of order. For all his postmodern provocations, Greenaway is an heir to Vitruvius — and to Pythagoras, for whom the universe was built on number and proportion. Even cruelty is composed. The human body, even in death, fits within a measured, harmonious system. In a world no longer held together by gods or ideology, numbers remain — a final scaffolding of meaning.
Drowning by Numbers doesn’t offer answers or catharsis. It asks a quieter, more disarming question: how do we feel about death, when it is rendered so orderly?
Anastasiia Tumys
Kyiv Cinema Society
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