Resident film aficionados and aspiring auteurs will want to circle this Friday (March 7) on their calendars. The 2007 Best of the Bay-winning International Cinema Series is returning with a screening of Peter Greenaway's bizarre and painterly A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) starring Andrea Ferreol, Brian Deacon and Eric Deacon.

My first experience with a Greenaway film was in my freshman year of film school at Valencia Community College in Orlando. For a lecture on key cinematic lighting, the professor (a heavy drinker whom I later encountered stumbling over himself at a Built to Spill concert) decided to show the class The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). I remember awakening from my disheveled morning haze with utter fascination at the movie's vivid reds and blues. Every shot is like a meticulous canvas. It comes as no surprise that Greenaway trained as a painter before working as a film editor for the British Central Office of Information in 1965. SPOILER ALERT: Cook also sticks in people's minds because of a scene in which Michael Gambon's character is forced to devour a cooked penis in his own restaurant. And, Gambon's a knight, for chrissake.

Later that semester, the same drunken professor popped in A Zed & Two Noughts for a discussion on Sacha Vierny's cinematography and Greenaway's mise-en-scene. The plot is significantly more amorphous than Cook, but I was captivated nonetheless. Zed is the story of a car wreck involving a rare swan in front of the Rotterdam Zoo.

Two women die and a third, Alba (Ferreol), loses her leg. The two widowers, twin zoologists Oliver and Oswald (Eric and Brian Deacon), fixate on their wives' bodies. They slowly become obsessed with evolution and decomposition. Meanwhile, a mad surgeon plots to use Alba as a subject in his experiments with animals and Vermeer homage.

The combination of lighting, production design and bone-dry British humor reflected in the cartoonish acting and

tongue-in-cheeck musical score from Michael Nyman began to make Greenaway's touch fairly recognizable to me. Few directors ever capture their voice and present it with such Kubrickian symmetry (Stanley Kubrick arguably being greatest technical filmmaker of all time).

Zed will be presented as part of the “Surrealism and the Avant-Garde” in conjunction with the Dali and Film series at the Salvador Dali Museum. Like Dali's own foray into film, Un Chien Andalou (1929) (better known, unofficially, as "the one where the girl's eyeball gets sliced open with a shaving razor"), Zed displays more attention to dream-like shot composition and experimental editing than most international cinema. In the academic spirit of Louis Bunuel, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and of course, Dali himself, Zed is a fine example of truly innovative counter-culture. Every snot-nosed adolescent who thinks directors like Sam Raimi are continually reinventing the cinema should trash their Spiderman trilogy and attend this event. After all, it is free.

Fri., March 7, 7:00 p.m., Miller Auditorium, 200 54th Avenue South, St. Petersburg, Florida, Free Event, 727-864-7979. English, 115 min —Jason Kushner

This article appears in Mar 5-11, 2008.