“I have been interested in a certain melodramatic curve of flight through the air for a long time. It is the trajectory of a thrown stone. It follows the hump of a humpbacked whale from nose to tail. It’s bounded like a smooth, sheep-cropped, grassy hill.” In his introduction to the catalogue for “Le bruit des nuages” (Flying out of this world), Peter Greenaway goes on to explain the way he approached this project, which consisted of choosing a number of works from the drawings collection of the Louvre and exhibiting them in a way that mirrored the trajectory of the thrown stone. Like his films,

“You saw nothing at Hiroshima, nothing.” The phrase from Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, mon amour, 1959, filters back almost subliminally. And at first glance, the black and white photographs that make up Jean-Paul Berger’s Autobiographie, 1988–93, could almost be film stills—a series of oneiric tableaux in a curiously shallow space, seemingly lit from behind. The visual stream of consciousness is, like the space it inhabits, impenetrable: a man’s nude body, nearly always decapitated by the frame, women’s faces, nearly always without bodies, a few hands, eyes, locks of hair, an emblematic bird,