It's a big criticism of Greenaway films that they are far too interested in formalism and not enough interested in notions of emotional content. It's a criticism I can fully understand from a public that has been brought up by Hollywood movies that demand intense emotional rapport.

Far from creating a new formalism what these can yield is something far transcending surface values since they not only embody form as beauty but also form in which intuitions or ideas or conjectures have taken visible substance.