A Zed and Two Noughts + Short: Ghost of The Past
classified 15Please note: This was screened in July 2025
Like his contemporaries Derek Jarman and Sally Potter, Peter Greenway came to feature filmmaking from a multi-disciplinary arts background. Supported by Channel 4 and BFI, his breakthrough feature The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) announced to the wider public a (very un-British) ideas-driven, visually experimental approach to cinema.
Viewed today his films’ cerebral provocative nature is very much a precursor to the work of Yorgos Lanthimos. A Zed and Two Noughts, his second film for Channel 4 is a striking meditation on death, decay, and duality unfolding through the twin obsession of twin zoologists with a double amputee and documenting animal decomposition, all this following the death of their wives in a swan-related car crash.
Greenaway’s interest in symmetry and Michael Nyman's insistently hypnotic score create a coldly beautiful cinematic universe where grief and scientific fascination merge. Striking time-lapse photography of rotting animals punctuate the increasingly surreal story, while Vermeer-inspired compositions from legendary cinematographer Sacha Vierny turn the grotesque into visually absorbing meditations on science and art.
Full of surprises and magnificent conundrums, A Zed and Two Noughts is as perversely comic as it is shocking and thought provoking.
The event will start with the UK Premiere of Bill Morrison’s latest short Ghost of the Past (7mins, 2025), with music by Bill Frisell.
With thanks to the BFI National Archive.