Peter Greenaway’s Dear Phone, from 1976, alternates narrated passages of text with visually low-key, documentary-style footage. The text, initially hand-written and extravagantly altered by crossings-out and substitutions, concerns a series of narratively convoluted tall stales, all relating to some aspect of telephonic communication. Punctuated by images of telephone boxes in a variety of city and country-set locations: glimpsed through passing traffic; trees, or by the sea, each is accompanied by variations on dialling, ringing or engaged tones. Settings echo themes within the evolving text, which refines recurring character names down to initials; transforms messily hand-written script into neatly typewritten form and reduces the essence of character interaction, in the final passage, to the phrase which functions as the work’s title.