used to it and you want to throw up at the same time." Reception The film was screened out of competition at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival. Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader, however, noted that he "watched it to the end out of a sense of duty, not with pleasure or any hope of edification", while also describing the action as "lushly and rather beautifully filmed (by Sacha Vierny)". August 2002, film director Andrew Repasky McElhinney selected two rare motion pictures, Isle of Forgotten Sins (directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, 1943) and The Baby of Macon, to have their belated Philadelphia premieres (in archival 35MM prints) for a "fantasy double feature" film series at the Prince Music Theater. In the program notes for the screening, McElhinney wrote: "I have been insatiably drawn to termite and white-elephant art my entire movie-going life. ...white-elephant movies exist outside the bounds of rational criticism as immense and spectacular monuments to their director’s monstrous genius, ego and hubris. Peter Greenaway’s The Baby of Macon is such an animal, a multi-level Rocky Horror Picture Show set during a 1659 performance of a fifteenth century morality play, in which our perceptions of spectatorship, identity and construction are unsympathetically challenged and the fourth wall between “real” and “make-believe” continually assaulted. The beauty of the ravishing cinematography, deluxe production design, and a script that suggests the movie is merely “a play with music,” are abrasively juxtaposed with graphic depictions of unspeakably cruel atrocities. Everything and everyone is incriminated in this challenging, ritualistic, and agnostic essay on the Nativity". References External links Belgian historical drama films 1993 films French historical drama films German historical drama films Dutch historical drama films Films directed by Peter Greenaway Metafictional works Films set in the 1650s Films about rape English-language Belgian films English-language Dutch films English-language French films English-language German films Fratricide in fiction 1990s English-language films 1990s British films 1990s French films 1990s German films