Like Derek Jarman and Ed Harris with Caravaggio and Pollock, Nightwatching features one artist positing theories on the life, work, and death of another. Peter Greenaway’s subject is Rembrandt, the Dutch master who died penniless and disgraced after a career that at one time saw him regarded as one of the world’s greatest living artists. In [Nightwatching], Rembrandt is commissioned to paint a portrait of the Amsterdam Musketeer Militia, and in doing so reveals a conspiracy in 17th century Dutch society that eventually destroys him as an artist and a man. Jumping off from his most famous work, Greenaway envisions a society that would not tolerate its rules being broken by outsiders, and a man that was both defined by, and defied, his time. Far from creating a polemic about the nature of art, Greenaway has fashioned a biography about “… sex and death, what else is there to talk about?”