Trained as an artist Peter Greenaway works with architecture and film in a very different way. Exhibiting the same experiments in fragmentation, typical of other postmodern films, “Zed and Two Noughts” uses a particularly interesting framing technique that has its roots in classical painting. The tableau vivant is a nineteenth century performance style which utilizes live actors in the recreation of famous works of art. In” Zed and Two Noughts” the most direct translation comes in the intermittent staging of famous Vermeer paintings by the doctor, Van Meegren, and a medically retained Alba Bewick.. As suggested by film studies professor Amy Lawrence: “art withholds an essential part of itself, preserving, in the face of intense study, a sense of something ineffable, intensely private but at the same time open- qualities most often associated with Vermeer” (Lawrence, 1997, 87) .  As such, the ambiguity of the spaces of the paintings are re-introduced into the, and projected into the real-time spaces of the film viewers. A Similar practice, and a second iteration of the tableau vivant, would be Greenaway’s very particular and quite rigid cinematography. Every shot is thoroughly crafted and quite densely packed with possible symbolism, symmetry and textures. As if traversing a series of static landscape paintings, Oliver and Oswald Deuce must interact with each frame in order to piece together their meaning of life after the deaths of their wives:

“…all the events are open to re-interpretation [sic], re appraisal, and reinterpretation. Film has the desire of the zoopraxiscope; to restore movement and meaning to the discontinuous, dislocated, instantaneous …made intelligible in the present by a process of montage, of semantic construction. But making intelligible is a constantly repeated process, as the fragments are reassembled to form new wholes, potential lessons or allegories” (Scott, 1999, 164)

Inevitably, if every artefact in the film is some how endowed with a symbolic purpose, or if there is a homogeneous field of possible references, it creates a condition of confusion.  Operating in both the fictional realm of the film and equally in the individuated experience of the audience, Greenaway’s sets are like game boards, constantly illuminated by a sense of eccentric curiositiy.

The coding of the city into these various time frames and motifs allows for a landscape which is at once a mixing pot for pop culture references and signifiers of a past technological age while simultaneously providing a conveniently fragmented environment for malicious action to occur. Joker needs the chaos of the chemical factory to carry out his plan, the city needs the public square for their celebration and cautious gathering, and Batman needs the roof tops, catwalks and dark niches in order to sustain his mysteriousness. In this film the plot is ultimately affected by the dynamism of Burton’s setting.