As in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, poetic essence and the conjuring poetic word – in Peter Greenway’s film version Prospero’s Books – become depicted by preceding bodies of time and amassed against the momentary threshold of political emotion. Bodies of time are fabrications of dress, and are nuanced by weights of discrepancy and nourished, satisfied by the shadows of a nightmare from Milan. The processions fathomed by Prospero in these texts approach a temporal sovereignty – they look, and are then both passed by.

Peter Greenway’s film conjures a much layered composite that would distract the eye of any lesser convinced, and cause them to stray with curious boredom their eyes and hands amongst the many strange and textured things hewn by the world. It is natural and passing that the rain of the storm overflow the framed device, whose bearings mark only the angle of the winds. The storm overlays montage of what is continual, of what occurs before and after and like a dream carries upon it the story of young Miranda and her small and wooden sea-fairing vessel.

Prospero is furnished with the many blessings of his library by the most humble Gonzalo, and this amongst many things he told his daughter Miranda – of how they were acquainted, the historic transgressions that lift accountability from suits of mere conception. Of the place we are shown things are most free, and in the place the best attempt is made to cradle the world: accounting for levels of individuality this micro threshold quickens and chafes upon the stone of monumental definition inhospitably.

Where in the play Miranda received her father’s words sympathetically and exuberantly receptive, during that which “would cure deafness,” Greenway submerges Miranda to be recovering from some stigmata. She tosses and is calmed by her father’s words that bear no smooth negotiation nor thicker backbone than the shards of mirrored glass with which they commune.