Peter Greenaway

• The Draughtsman's Contract, his first feature (1982), an eighteenth-century tale of a young draughtsman commissioned to do a series of sketches of a country house, with interesting consequences for the household;
• A Zed and Two Noughts, (1986) a weird but fun film about twin brothers whose wives die in a mysterious accident caused by a swan, and who develop an obsession with decay, filming the decomposition of larger and larger animals.
• And: Belly of an Architect,(1987) with an excellent soundtrack by Wim Mertens and Glenn Branca,(as opposed to Greenaway's usual composer of choice Michael Nyman). Starring Brian Dennehy as a worried architect - who thinks he has stomach cancer - trying to set up an exhibition of the work of Étienne-Louis Boullée in Rome. Some amazing shots of the city. Chloe Webb (from Sid and Nancy) also stars as his slutty wife who has an affair with the son of the exhibition's curator;
• and many others, mostly short films, notably a TV production of Dante's Inferno and the 1995 film The Pillow Book with Ewan McGregor*.

Greenaway is exceptionally good at visual composition, spinning luminous images together from lighting and scenery and costume, often based on the works of painters such as Vermeer. He works with geniuses, like Sacha Vierny (extremely respected cinematographer), Jean-Paul Gaultier (who created the costumes for several of the films) and Nyman, and has cast some of the best actors in the industry. The quality of his work unsurprisingly shows through.

He was born in Wales in 1942 and originally trained as a painter, producing some fairly interesting art (a lot like R.B. Kitaj's later stuff: he's a big fan of Kitaj) before taking up film. He follows his own bizarre agenda, writing all his own movies, sometimes along disturbing lines: the films do not always have recognisably good plots, sometimes have needlessly sickening subject matter and can feel pretentious - but they always look beautiful.

Peter Greenaway

Over career that spans more than forty years he's made independent, or let's say alternative films. Peter is a trained painter but soon became more interested in film making. In 1962 he started his studies at the rather unknown Walthamstow College of Art, there he made his first film Death of Sentiment. In 1965 he started working as an editor and director at the rather bureaucratic sounding British government institution the Central Office of Information. There he started collecting archive footage of various things which are kind of descriptive of his work, his self admitted admiration of encyclopedic knowledge, enumeration, classification, categorisation, ad nauseam.In an interview he mentions James Joyce and Georges Perec, who wrote Life A User's Manual, as influential on his work.¹ Originally being a painter, Peter thinks modern movies are too text-based, of contemporary cinema he says "I don't go to the cinema very much, because I find it boring and uninteresting. When I do go and see something which is amazing, then I'm filled with a great sense of envy and jealousy. So my cinematic viewing experiences are always very negative."¹ which also serves to point out his self-admitted arrogance.

Cut to the talk he gave on 17th of March 2007 at the BFI. - Peter is an angry old man², he feels that the potential of cinema hasn't been realised. How so? Well let's make one thing crystal clear, if you haven't understood it yet, Peter's movies are what most people would call arty in a condescending tone. In any case, if you truly appriciated American Pie or Black Hawk Down, in all likelyhood, you won't like his films. Greenaway laments how visual education, as he puts it, is lacking. He counted three venues where they are taught: art & design schools and architecture schools. According to him most people are visually illiterate. Partly to blame here is the tradition of films being text based i.e. scripted.

Greenaway, who lives in Holland, wondered why there was such a long tradition of amazing painters there but writers in England and respectively few writers and few painter. How come? Is it something cultural?... He also stated that, although it is a bit of a simplification, cinema was invented in 1895 by the Lumière brothers => Eisenstein made the first masterpice, Strike in 1925 => Welles perfected the art form (probably with his Citizen Kane) => Godard threw it all into a trashbin (my favorite being Weekend). And so, since Godard and R.W. Fassbinder cinema has been stagnant. Greenaway actually provides us with a date of death, 31st September 1983 when the zapper or remote control was introduced to households. What Greenaway is saying is that cinema is a passive medium but come the remote control and cable access a certain level of interactivity becomes possible. Passive interactivity (an oxymoron, I know), but now the viewer is able to choose at any given time what to watch. With the advent of the VCR, when to watch it.

Greenaway's concern is that cinema is lagging behind and he desperately wants it to catch up. So his newest project, which I saw at the London IMAX, is an attempt to bridge the gap between modern technology (interactivity and multimedia being keywords) and the cinema. The London IMAX has a big screen and a massive sound system. The show featured Greenaway's 93 suitcases belonging to his alter ego Tulse Luper, each containing "an object that represents life" (such as uranium or a baby). Peter worked on 30 inch touch-screen on a small platform, selecting which scenes to roll and a DJ played alongside (I recognised one song from Rossz csillag alatt született). It was fun but rather chaotic (which I usually like).

In the talk he gave before the show he let us in on his latest project. Nighwatcher³ is a 1642 Dutch painting by Rembrandt. He borrowed it from it's host museum and, if I understand correctly, devised precision lighting equipment (the painting measures 363 × 437 cm or 142.9 × 172.0 inches) used to the effect to highlight certain areas of the painting or create the effect of rain or lightning. In addition he made sound effects; dogs barking, drums beaten, people talking in dutch and environemnt noises. The overall effect being quite breathtaking, the painting became alive. (He told us that more masterpiece paintings will get the same treatment (in production?))

• Death of Sentiment (1962)
• Tree (1966)
• Train (1966)
• Revolution (1967)
• 5 Postcards From Capital Cities (1967)
• Intervals (1969)
• Erosion (1971)
• H Is for House (1973)
• Windows (1975)
• Water Wrackets (1975)
• Water (1975)
• Vertical Features Remake (1976)
• Goole by Numbers (1976)
• Dear Phone (1977)
• A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (1978)
• Eddie Kid (1978)
• Cut Above the Rest (1978)
• 1-100 (1978)
• Zandra Rhodes (1979)
• Women Artists (1979)
• Leeds Castle (1979)
• Lacock Village (1980)
• The Falls (1980)
• Country Diary (1980)
• Terence Conran (1981)
• The Draughtsman's Contract (1982)
• Four American Composers (1983)
• The Coastline (1983)
• Making a Splash (1984)
• A Zed & Two Noughts (1985)
• Inside Rooms: 26 Bathrooms, London & Oxfordshire (1985)
• The Belly of an Architect (1987)
• Drowning by Numbers (1988)
• Fear of Drowning (1988)
• The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)
• Hubert Bals Handshake (1989)
• Prospero's Books (1991)
• Rosa (1992)
• The Baby of Mâcon (1993)
• Stairs 1 Geneva (1995)
• Lumière et compagnie (1996)
• The Pillow Book (1996)
• The Bridge (1997)
• 8½ Women (1999)
• The Death of a Composer: Rosa, a Horse Drama (1999)
• The Man in the Bath (2001)
• Cinema16 (2003)
• The Tulse Luper Suitcases, The Moab Story (2003)
• The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Antwerp (2003)
• The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Vaux to the Sea (2004)
• The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Sark to the Finish (2005)
• A life in Suitcases (2005)
• Visions of Europe (fragment "European Showerbath", 2004)
• Nightwatching (in production, 2007)

References

1 - http://www.salon.com/june97/greenaway2970606.html
2 - http://myspace.com/petergreenaway - On his Myspace page he says "Film is dead, I tried to save it, didn't work out...enjoy your pyscho-dramatic linear narrative you bloody philistines."
3 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:RembrandtNightwatch.jpg