A is for apple.
B is for butterflies.
H is for housesparrow, hedgesparrow.
H is for hen.
C is for cat.
H is for hedge, hedgehog, horsetail, hawthorn, heather, hemlock, holly, hellebore and hazel.
H is for [hats?], my [hat?]
H is for haberdashery, hunting, [harthing?], [halfing?], hog, horse and hiccup.
W is for the wren has a loud, dramatic song with high pitched phrases and trills.
H is for houseparrow, hedgesparrow. H is for holiday. H is for [hero?]. H is for [harris?].
H is for homemovie and Hollywood and R is for russets. G is for grannysmiths. C is for cox’s orange pippins.
H is for harvest.
H is for House, Peter Greenaway’s 1973 short, may be my ideal movie: under ten minutes; an organizing principle that distracts you from the highly personal motivation; orchestrated like a piece of music rather than a prose narrative. Has anybody else seen this? It’s so obscure it’s not even on YouTube.
The narrator litanizes all the words beginning with H that he finds in the Wardour (England) countryside where his family is staying. This is intercut with Greenaway’s small daughter Hannah reciting the alphabet from her primer: “A is for Apple,” and so on. Meanwhile, a domestic idyll flashes before us in brief shots of Hannah, her mother, and the bucolic homestead (which they are only visiting; they don’t own it).
H is for health and happiness, hearst, hepatitis, heretic, heaven, hell, horror, holocaust and His Holiness.
H is for hero and heroine.
H is for homily.
H is for hysteria.
H is for hapaxlegomenon. H is for hosepipe. H is for [?].
H is for hammock.
H is for hopelessness, happiness, homelessness…. hesitation.
B is for blackberries. I like those ones.
I think about this movie today because Greenaway once said in an interview that he was thinking of the concepts of heaven and hell back of this pastoral which on its surface adores Hannah and the House. There is nothing more repetitive and ritualized than the smooth management of a household; both forms and households can get claustrophobic; heaven turns to mock-heaven and hell into a farcical hell, and suddenly the heart goes all hugger-mugger (a Shakespearean hapax — hello Alicia!).
On the website where you can read the entire script of H is for House, there is a charming little note about the word haplography. “Is this the most useless word in the English language?” Answer:
As a calligraphy teacher, I find the word haplography useful. When concentrating on producing good letter forms it is easy to make mistakes such as writing ‘rember’ instead of ‘remember’. Its opposite is dittography: the writing twice of what should have been written once, such as ‘critics’ becoming ‘crititics’. There is also the homoeoteluton, in which, when copying, the eye returns to the same word but in a different place – either omitting the words in between or repeating words already written.
This scholarly minutiae takes us far away from the voiceovers of man and child reciting. Or does it? “Scholarly minutiae” is a delight, as is the sight of a child learning to read, as is poetry. And now it hits me that all along, thinking about “H is for House,” I am also thinking about Kenneth Koch’s “The Pleasures of Peace,” what seems to me the ultimate protest poem: evoking not the hell of war, but the fragility of the mundane.
H is for house.
D is for [it's very dark outside. Go to bed!]
I have seen it, actually! Years and years ago at a Peter Greenaway festival in, of all places, Bombay. Now that you recall it I’m struck by how vividly this compressed little thing comes back to me, and how much distance it managed to cover in its brief flicker. And I remember being struck (that is, this time, literally struck) at the appearance of heaven and hell in the film. Of course, much of Greenaway’s early work prepares us for this kind of revelation.
Posted By: Vivek Narayanan on October 20, 2007 at 5:36 amReport this comment
I’ve never seen the movie, but now I’m very keen too. Love the script and the notes! The business about haplography and dittography and homoteleuton reminds me of H for Housman as a critic… It’s certainly relevant to our new textual problems–that is, how poems are reproduced on the web. An error gets introduced as a poem is typed on some web site, and suddenly it pullulates and is everywhere. A Google search shows 2000 versions of the corrupt poem, and only 2 of the correct version. Such will be the issues for future editors!
Posted By: Alicia (AE) on October 21, 2007 at 8:00 amReport this comment