interesting point in drowning by numbers

Deadman's Catch

If a player in the game of Deadman's Catch drops a skittle, he is obliged to suffer a succession of handicaps. First to catch using one hand, then to catch kneeling on one knee, then on two knees, then with one eye closed. If a player finally drops a catch with both eyes closed, then he is out and must take his place in the winding-sheet.

Consider that there are seven people playing the game - a game which is essentially the children's game of handicap-catch. They play it on the lawn in the late afternoon sun. A coffin containing someone they all know passes behind them on its way to a hearse parked nearby. The widow of the man in the coffin is one of the game-players. In deference to the widow's feelings, all the characters unite in pretending that the coffin is not there. The seven players play anti-clockwise in a circle throwing three skittles - two read and one black. The coffin-carriers pass, making a diagonal line outside the circle. The whole plan of the action works succinctly as a flat geometric design and composition.

On the horizon of the landscape that stretches a mile or more away from the lawn across the marsh and sunlit water of the estuary - is a building - a tower - it creates the apex of an invisible triangle of which one side is the trajectory of the coffin carriers. The flat-plain triangle that works in the same plan as the cinema screen now can also be seen as a three-dimensional shape stretching back to the horizon - a triangle leant backwards over the landscape. Inside the triangle and the circle is a white square - the winding sheet - in which players ousted from the game are obliged to lie - making a square within a circle within a triangle.

The building on the horizon could be a church-tower, but it is in fact a water-tower - thus by implication - all the players - due to the elegant compositional device - are contained in the water-tower conspiracy which is soon to make itself felt in the narrative. The seven players are hung in a geometrical cage of the triangle, the circle and the square which is hung on the nail of the water-tower.

The game-players are three females and four men. Consider three as female and four as male numbers - consider the configuration they make on a dice - three make a diagonal and four make a square. The game is played such that the four men are losers. All the male protagonists in the film die - they meet unnatural deaths - largely due to their own inadequacies or incompetence and they lose in the game on the sunlit lawn in the order in which they will eventually succumb - Hardy, Bellamy, Smut, Madgett. The fifth male - Jake, Cissie One's husband is already dead - in the coffin on the way to the crematorium where soon all the others will follow.

When the men have lost and are lying in the sheet - the women - never dropping a catch - come closer and form a triangle - they become an inner triangle pressing closer around the square.

All this takes many clumsy and inexact word-descriptions to describe - but if we read paintings like we read books - it would not be such a hidden language for painting can effortlessly produce such elegant solutions.

you can also visit its website, there are more interesting things about the film

http://petergreenaway.org.uk/games.htm