A couple of months ago, Kevin Lee asked me to watch Peter Greenaway’sThe Draughtsman’s Contract, #922 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? list of the 1,000 Greatest Films of all time, so that I could contribute to his series of video essays devoted to the films on the list.

I’ve actually been known in the past as something of a Greenaway apologist, but for whatever reason, I found Draughtsman’s ridiculously difficult to get through. I kept returning to a note that I jotted down within the first couple of minutes of the film: “What was Derek Jarman doing the year this film was made? What was Duran Duran doing?” It’s that axis of British culture of the early 1980s that Kevin and I ended up exploring in the above video. But if it was my idea idea to travel down this road, the brilliance of applying the video effects from Rio to footage of Margaret Thatcher on the eve of the Falklands War was all Kevin. Watch and discuss.