“Everything that’s not heartbreaking is ephemeral.”
Editorial design / Art direction / Illustration Shoot-One / Yair Huerta shoot-one.tumblr.com super.shoter@hotmail.com
This is a reinterpretation of one of the best movies of peter greenaway
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INDEX
INTERVIEW 4-7 Greenaway in Rome presenting Goltzius and the Pelican Company 8-9
The Falls (1980, 185 min)
10-11
The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982, 103 min)
INFOGRAPHIC 12-13 The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1: The Moab Story (2003, 127 min) The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 2: Vaux to the Sea (2004, 108 min) The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 3: From Sark to the Finish (2004, 120 min) 14 15 16 17 18-19 20
A Zed & Two Noughts (1985, 115 min) The Belly of an Architect (1987, 120 min) Drowning by Numbers (1988, 118 min) The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989, 124 min) The Baby of Mâcon (1993, 122 min) The Pillow Book
QUOTES BY GREENAWAY 21-24 Talk about himelf
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INTERVIEW
fig 1. Peter Greenaway, Rome, November 12, 2012
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British polyglot Peter Greenaway (filmmaker, painter, video artist, etc.) has never easily fit into any mold. The unique talent behind, among many others, “The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and Her Lover,” “The Baby of Macon,” “Prospero’s Books” and more recently the evocation of the life and work of Rembrandt in “Nightwatching,” is eternally divisive. Some find the self-conscious intellectualism of his approach appealing, others find it elitist and alienating. His new film, the bemusing but beautiful “Goltzius and the Pelican Company” is not going to settle the debate anytime soon (read our review here). Perhaps the very definition of iconoclastic, it explores sex and death (“What other subjects are there?” Greenaway asks) through the prism of the Bible, religion and 16th century Dutch politics. As so often in the filmmaker’s long career, the density of classical allusion and Greenaway’s instinct toward didactiscism do battle with the his almost impish desire to strip sacred cows of their stuffiness; to the casual viewer, though, seeing past the erudition to the irreverence may be a challenge. Talking to him in Rome last week, we got the impression of someone who is perfectly content to elicit a somewhat schizophrenic reaction, as long as he gets a reaction. A chatty, warm man with an inescapable, apparently insatiable intellectual curiosity, our conversation ranged from ‘Goltzius’ to the state of modern cinema to Sergei Eisenstein and back again, and left us, as often do his films, dazzled, but a bit dazed. Yes, I wanted to ask you about the relationship between words and pictures in your films - you frequently use words almost as pictures. Words as pictures, text as image -- it’s not really part any more of the European tradi-
tion. My film “The Pillow Book” -- that was my attempt to make a demonstration that there should be no separation and there isn’t in Japanese culture. There, text is image and image is text.
I deplore the fact that we have a text-based cinema. Every film you’ve ever seen has started with the written word, “Lord of the Rings” and ‘Harry Potter’ are obvious examples but even down to your Almodovar, Spielberg, Eisenstein, all film begins with the written word. I think we ought to allow cinema to be its own medium and I want to prioritize the image, but I never want you to forget this dichotomy that’s going on.
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How much do you see the role of cinema as educational? Hugely. The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education -- it lays out all the early books of the Bible. I always think that art is one of the most wonderful exciting curious ways to learn I have no worries or apologies about art being used as a teaching medium. And who do you consider your influences in that regard? I’ve always in my career looked East, living in London, rather than West. I’ve always been interested in the cinema of ideas which is far more prevalent through the greatest formative European movement that I am aware of, the Nouvelle Vague. I’m the same age as Godard so it’s not a historical subject, it’s a living situation for me. That, and of course Italian cinema which begins with DeSica and ends with Bertolucci, have been my big two learning associations, have been very much the model for all my ideas. Also, when I was 15 1/2 and in search of topless women in films I went to our local soft porn cinema to see Scandinavian films. But one day I went along and I’m quite sure this cinema manager didn’t know what he was putting on, and I saw an extraordinary film -- Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” and it had a profound effect on me. It got tarred with the brush of being a Scandinavian, risqué film so without any knowledge of its value it was shown in this cinema. But it’s a film that is absolutely ideal for 15 1/2-year-old adolescent; it’s about mythology, it’s about religion, notions of truth, it’s very entertaining, it’s full of shock tactics–Knights and Crusades, It’s a very very influential movie for 15 1/2 year old. You’ve made some gloomy prognostications about the future of cinema in the past. How do you feel about it right now? The cinema we’ve got now is certainly not the cinema of our fathers and forefathers. The alternatives in terms of entertainment are gross, we now have a system like in Amsterdam where young people simply don’t go to the cinema. And we have the prospect of the democratization of the medium… Already my Facebook is full of filmmakers and laptop users asking “when can we have the film so we can re edit and reorganize it?” and I think, well, that’s okay by me.
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In a world where we can all be our own filmmakers, the old elites are disappearing and
there is no desire to look at somebody else’s dream anymore because you can go off and make your own. Maybe YouTube is the greatest thing that happened to cinema in
the last 10 years. 95% of it is crap but that’s always been the way, but there you can avoid the middleman. So [the future is all about] this notion of the democratization of the medium...whatever your nostalgia for “Casablanca” there is a big seachange happening. What I’m looking for now is a present tense cinema: I can make a film on a Monday I could remake it for Tuesday, re-remake it for Wednesday; you could never do that with celluloid cinema. It’s going to be absolute horror for distributors but they’re all disappearing anyway. It’s very difficult to understand but I’m looking for a nonnarrative, multiscreen, present-tense cinema. Narrative is an artifact created by us, it does not exist at all in nature, it is a construct made by us and I wonder whether we need the narrative anymore. I’m trained as a painter and the very best paintings are nonnarrative, why can’t we make nonnarrative films? The big revolution of the 20th century was to get rid of harmony from music with Schoenberg. People like Beethoven could never imagine we could get rid of harmony but we did. Then in imagistic terms that revolution was figuration -- we got rid of figuration in painting and harmony in music and now we have to get rid of narrative in cinema.
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The Falls
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fig 2. 1980 / First feature-length film after many years making shorts
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The Draughtsman’s Contract
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fig 3. 1982 / his first conventional feature film (following the feature-length mockumentary The Falls)
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Peter Greenaway, CBE (born 5 April 1942) is a British film director. His films are noted for the distinct influence of Renaissance and Baroque painting, and Flemish painting in particular. Common traits in his film are the scenic composition and illumination and the contrasts of costume and nudity, nature and architecture, furniture and people, sexual pleasure and painful death.
The Tulse Luper Suitcases 4 1
Greenaway was born in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales,[1] to a teacher mother and a builder's merchant father.[2] Greenaway's family left South Wales when he was three years old (they had moved there originally to avoid the Blitz) and settled in Chingford, Essex, England. He attended Forest School in North-East London. At an early age Greenaway decided on becoming a painter. He became interested in European cinema, focusing first on the films of Ingmar Bergman, and then on the French nouvelle vague filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and, most especially, Alain Resnais.
In 2006, Greenaway began an ambitious series of digital video installations, Nine Classical Paintings Revisited, with his exploration of Rembrandt's Night Watch in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. On 30 June 2008, after much negotiation, Greenaway staged a one-night performance 'remixing' da Vinci's The Last Supper in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie[5] in Milan to a select audience of dignitaries. The performance consisted of superimposing digital imagery and projections onto the painting with music from the composer Marco Robino. Greenaway exhibited his digital exploration of The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese as part of the 2009 Venice Biennial. An arts writer for the New York Times called it “possibly the best unmanned art history lecture you’ll ever experience,” while acknowledging that some viewers might respond to it as “mediocre art, Disneyfied kitsch or a flam-
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A Zed & Two Noughts
fig 4. 1985 / First first film with cinematography by Sacha Vierny
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The Belly of an Architect
fig 5. 1987 / References to the work of the 18th century French architect Étienne-Louis BoullÊe.
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Drowning by Numbers
fig 6. 1988 / The musical score is by Michael Nyman, and is, at Greenaway’s specific request, entirely based on themes taken from the slow movement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E flatv
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The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
fig 7. 1989 / British-French romantic crime drama, graphic scatological, violent, and nude scenes, as well as its lavish cinematography and formalism
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The Baby of Macon
fig 8. 1993 / Depicts the 1659 staging of a medieval morality play
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The Pillow Book
fig 9. 1996 / rich and artistic melding of dark modern drama with idealized Chinese and Japanese cultural themes and settings, and centers around body painting.
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“Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.�
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“Anybody who writes a diary insists it must be read by someone else.”
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“I obviously irritate people. I obviously antagonise them.”
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“We all know that we’re going to die, but we don’t know when. That’s not a blessing, that’s a curse.”
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Editorial design / Art direction / Illustration Shoot-One / Yair Huerta shoot-one.tumblr.com super.shoter@hotmail.com behance.net/shoot-one
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