N I G H T W A T C H I N G
 

 

S Y N O P S I S // A M B I T I O N S // P R O D U C T I O N
 Logline:
 In 1642 in Amsterdam, the painter Rembrandt reluctantly accepts an onerous commission, to paint the Amsterdam Militia in a painting that will later be called The Nightwatch. Although it is the start of his world fame, it is the beginning of the end of his good times, for it is a painting whose 32 participants conspire beyond the point of murder to destroy him.

  

 Synopsis:
In 1642, at the height of his fame and wealth, Rembrandt, very reluctantly, is persuaded by his dying wife Saskia, to take on the commission of a large group portrait of the Amsterdam Militia, which will much later become known as The Nightwatch.
Rembrandt meets, considers and informally “interviews” its 37 potential participants who all have lives to investigate and interconnected stories to tell - greed, pride, infidelity, arrogance, treachery, gluttony - making a portrait of Amsterdam society at the centre of the Dutch Golden Age. Grand gestures and rich exhibitionist costumes hide congratulatory self-righteousness. The sitters variously disdain, humour, insult, praise, cheat, enjoy, drink with, bribe and ignore the painter. Using the knowledge gleaned from the participants, Rembrandt manufactures a painting that is challenging, ironical, witty and prophetic, and contains many allusions to the sitters by gesture, action, position and symbol, hinting at many dramas the sitters might not want revealed in a consciously religious community, dramas that might be construed as certainly sinful, probably criminal. The painting is both an accusation and a critique, and is also variously influenced by the circumstances of Rembrandt’s domestic life as he paints it.
Rembrandt’s wife dies. The buoyant good times are over. The day-light is over. With the death of his wife, the nightwatching has begun. Miserable and lonely, he buries his wife. He stops painting. Often drunk, he is prepared to be seduced by the servant Geertje, who has been employed to look after his sickly infant son. Their relationship becomes deeply carnal and abusive and destructive.  When this relationship sours because of her stealing, nagging and scolding and his self-disgust, he turns his attentions to a second servant, Hendrickje, and is encouraged to start painting again. He falls in love with Hendrickje.
The Militia painting is finished. It becomes the subject of praise, derision and heated debate, causing jealousy, treachery, infidelity and finally murder. As a consequence, to avoiding being tainted with criminality, many of the unhappy sitters arrange circumstances behind the scenes to bring about Rembrandt’s social discomfort and financial ruin through blackmail and financial chicanery. Rembrandt’s reluctance to take on the commission has proven to have been highly prophetic.
 

 

 Ambitions:
The proposition is that the most famous painting by Rembrandt, indeed the most famous Dutch painting, is the central focus to the life of Rembrandt. It broke him forever, the same time as it made him forever.
It is difficult to understand why a man so rich - considered to be a millionaire in the 1640s - should end up so badly. Financial mismanagement surely cannot entirely be blamed. There are no records of  wanton spending or abject drunkenness, and his output was continuous and prolific, even after the bankruptcy declaration. Rembrandt would have had to squander money very vigourously to be so high and then fall so low, and there is no evidence. Many have blamed political and social change, economically altering the market, but other painters did not fail, and the success of the Dutch painting school continued to develop for another generation until the French marched in in 1674. Some have blamed a change in artistic fashion - a move towards more Italianate models, but Vermeer follows Rembrandt in the century and he succeeded with non-Italian characteristics. Some have suggested Geertje stole and spent and squandered, but it is not easy to see that she could have created such a financial problem. More understandably, some have suggested that Rembrandt began to speculate on the shipping and trading markets - a quick way to loose money. Such speculating was often necessarily keep secret to avoid exploitation and market competition - such secrecy could explain why there are no ready records. It could be that Rembrandt was persuaded to speculate against his better judgement, and there is some recently uncovered evidence to suggest this.
The Nightwatch - a title never used in his lifetime - in this project, is Rembrandt’s nightwatch, marking the fulcrum of his life, dividing his life into two halves. This film follows the painting’s manufacture from start to finish, and offers to suggest a possible plausible reason why Rembrandt was ruined, by suggesting a concerted social and financial vendetta, of which high-minded Calvinism could be responsible, through envy that a painter, an out-of-town, lowly craftsman could play the markets like a merchant and strut successfully on the stage made for them and not for him. Most of all it speculates on how a quite tightly-knit society, through a concerted effort, could punish a man who broke the rules of Dutch community. Rembrandt exhibited overt success, lived openly in sin with a servant, was not prepared to kneel before patrons. They were mortified that he could criticise, mock and scorn their self-righteousness and taint them with moral crimes and possibly include them in severe accusations of criminality, all publicly displayed in a painting commissioned by them for all to see. They paid for their immorality to be advertised.
 

 

Production:
 Written & Directed by:
 Peter Greenaway
 
 Producer:
 Kees Kasander (Kasander Film Company, Holland)
  
 Co-Producer:
 Sandor S–th (Intuit Pictures, Germany)
 

“Think global act local”