Peter Greenaway

Intervals is an early example of Peter Greenaway’s interest in exploring structure and sound. Divided into three sections and arranged using the figure 13 — the harmonic structure of Antonio Lucio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (1723) — the film is an abstract study of how sound and image can function autonomously. Scenes of canals and narrow alleys in Venice are interspersed with images of people walking across and through the film’s frame. The rhythm of succeeding frames are edited alongside the beat of a metronome, a voice reciting the Italian alphabet and extracts from Vivaldi’s music, bringing into play the open-ended process of the indeterminate score.

‘I think it sums up everything I've done afterwards:  it's about statistics, it's very eclectic, it has a very lyrical use of landscape, [and] it's about death – four characteristics that have stayed with me ever since.’ Peter Greenaway, Film Comment, May/June 1990

Appalled and fascinated by the fatuous excuses given for the death of political prisoners in South Africa — pushed out of windows and reported to have slipped on a bar of soap — Peter Greenaway made an ironic film indexing statistics of people falling out of windows. Filmed in an early 19th Century country house, Windows provides a paradoxical illustration to its narration, with static views through the house’s windows to a beautiful English landscape and harpsichord accompaniment by 18th Century Baroque composer Jean-Philippe Rameau.

In H is for House, the story of a naturalist is recounted by actor Colin Cantlie over a home movie by Peter Greenaway. Scenes of an idyllic English landscape featuring Greenaway’s partner tending to mundane chores and his daughter playing are overlayed with sounds from nature, spurts of classical music and a voice-over that recites words beginning with the letter ‘H’. Greenaway plays with the confusing nomenclatures that occur in the process of ascribing meaning and words to objects, and in a nod to the late paintings of Surrealist René Magritte, he juxtaposes the words with images and create a fascinating dialectical relationship between image, sound and text.

Peter Greenaway has always opposed the idea of a cinema that presents itself as illustrated text, arguing instead that cinema should develop its own distinctive visual language. In Dear Phone Greenaway illustrates this argument by parodying the idea of literally filming text. Greenaway’s unintelligible handwriting is juxtaposed with a voiceover that narrates the various uses and abuses of an icon of British culture — the red telephone box — filmed in diverse locations, and at various angles and times of the day.

In Water Wrackets Peter Greenway acknowledges his interest in anthropological parodies and his enthusiasm for the world of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series by inventing a fictitious civilisation called the “Wrackets” in the beautiful Wiltshire area. Opening with melancholic images of running streams where movement is created by refracting light, the film’s narrator describes the character of Agateer who organises a military manoeuvre to dam a stream and create nine lakes.

‘I’ve always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going – in a sense its three tenses in one. It’s also an amazing ideogram of information that is very useful and, perhaps most pertinently, also not at all useful.’ Peter Greenaway, Film Comment, May/June 1990

A Walk through H introduces Peter Greenaway’s fictional alter-ego Tulse Luper, a mysterious character that is the subject of The Tulse Luper Suitcases trilogy. Luper is introduced as an ornithologist extraordinaire and expert on bird migration. We are informed that he has arranged a series of 92 maps for the narrator to follow and the film journeys through Luper’s afterlife via these unique pictorial maps created by Greenaway himself. A voice-over instructs the viewer that directions recorded in the maps function like a compass through the veritable “Kingdom of H” that is synonymous with the soul’s journey after death to reach either Heaven or Hell.

‘Vertical Features Remake is both a celebration and critique of structuralist theory… The subject is landscape, scrupulously filmed and framed in static ‘bits’ based on verticals. The organisation is based on rigid frame number counts – after all, cinema is both “truth at twenty-four frames a second” and a process to create the illusion of movement.’ Peter Greenaway, The Early Films of Peter Greenaway 2

In Vertical Features Remake a group of rival academics attempt the task of remaking an incomplete and missing film by Tulse Luper that studies vertical objects, both natural and man-made. Each employ methodologies for the remake that use a differing structure of counting and musical technique to count the 121 (11x11) vertical objects Luper allegedly planned for the project.

The Falls is an encyclopaedic film that chronicles the case histories of 92 individuals affected by the VUE (Violent Unknown Event), a strange phenomenon connected to systems of bird lore and man’s desire for flight. A multiplicity of effects and conspiracies are recorded throughout the film – some individuals become sterile after encountering the VUE while others are literally transformed into birds. Peter Greenaway’s interest in the slippage between modes of documentary and fiction (or presenting fictional material in a documentary manner) is reflected in the film’s carefully plotted case histories that create a labyrinth world that is at once real and absolutely fanciful. The filmmaking techniques and themes explored in Greenaway’s previous short films are revisited and fully realised within the innovative structure that holds The Falls’ compendium of individual episodes together.

The Draughtsman’s Contract proposes itself as a conventional murder mystery, where everyone is guilty and yet where the real culprit is revealed to be our materialistic social system. The story revolves around the twelve drawings draughtsman Mr Neville (Anthony Higgins) is commissioned to execute for Mr Herbert’s estate. Implored by Mrs Herbert to complete the drawings so she can win back her husband’s affection, Mr Neville agrees under the stipulation she also make herself available for his own sexual satisfaction. Unlike Mrs Herbert, the beautiful country landscapes prove less compliant, and contrary to his instructions, anomalous objects being appearing in the scenery. Neville proceeds to draw exactly what he sees, unaware that his pictures hold clues for Mr Herbert’s murder. In The Draughtsman's Contract, Greenaway gives us the real landscape, the drawn landscape and its cinematic representation in circumstances that make the distinction between all ambiguous. While the plot constantly reminds us of what is left in and out of the drawings, Greenaway’s self-reflexive filmmaking style reminds the viewer that a similar process is at work in the film itself.

A Zed & Two Noughts is an essay on twin-ship and the idea of meeting oneself, a dissertation on the world as an ark, and a celebration of 17th Century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, the master of light. The film centres on brothers Oswald and Oliver Deuce (Brian and Eric Deacon) who have lost their wives in a car accident caused by a swan outside the Amsterdam zoo. Both try to overcome and understand their loss by watching evolutionary documentaries narrated by naturalist David Attenborough and by experimenting with stop-motion recording processes to study the decomposition of animals. The driver of the car, Alba Bewick (Andréa Ferréol), survives the accident and both brothers soon become her lover. Through the characters of Oliver and Oswald, Peter Greenaway explores the tendency of men to blame the female sex for their fear of processes beyond understanding or control. Sascha Vierny’s cinematography pays homage to Vermeer, who can be seen as the first cinematographer, creating a world based on split seconds of time modelled entirely by light – the primary definition of cinema.

‘What I like about [Étienne-Louis] Boullée is that nothing of his is materialised: his work consisted of dreams on paper.’ Peter Greenaway, Positif, April 1986

The Belly of an Architect focuses on the story of architect Stourley Kracklite (Brian Dennehy) who is dying of stomach cancer and organising an exhibition in Rome on the work of extraordinary French architect Étienne-Louis Boullée. Like Boullée, Kracklite spends more time on uncompleted projects, producing visionary drawings rather than actual buildings. His fear of failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; the exhibition he is preparing faces obstacles by the Machiavellian schemes of Italian businessmen and his own physical decline. Throughout the film, Peter Greenaway explores the loss of integrity caused by art’s involvement with business. Playing with the symmetry between depth and surface, and recreating the architect’s dream of an ideal balance, the film is structured around the figure 7 – the seven Roman buildings that were a major inspirations for Boullée’s visionary architectural plans.

‘I admire those works of art which are somehow encyclopaedic in their intention, that try to sum up, if only mockingly, all the world’s knowledge in one place.’ Peter Greenaway, New York Times, April 1991

Drowning by Numbers is a film about sex and death in which physical games and psychological game-playing occur throughout. During an idyllic English summer, three generations of related women, all named Cissie Colpitts (Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson and Joely Richardson), drown their husbands and use offers of sexual favours with the eccentric coroner Madgett (Bernard Hill) to get away with it. Madgett and his son Smut (Jason Edwards) enjoy devising various sports and games and when locals sense a cover-up, Madgett organises a tug-of-war between the bereaving families and friends and the women. Throughout the film Peter Greenaway employs a symbolic system of numbers counting onscreen from 1 to 100, allowing the audience to also undertake their own game by counting their way through the film.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is a cruel, dark and opulent study of lust, greed and vengeance. Albert Spica (Michael Gambon) is a vulgar thief who presides over an elegant London restaurant with his entourage of cronies and his beaten and degraded wife Georgina (Helen Mirren). Each night the head chef prepares a lavish menu to be consumed by the barbaric and gluttonous mobster. When Georgina makes eye contact with the gentle Michael (Alan Howard) at an adjacent table, it’s not long before both begin meeting secretly in the bathroom and kitchen. When Albert discovers his wife’s infidelity he carries out a violent retribution on her lover that triggers a more savage retaliation from Georgina and the restaurant’s staff. Part black comedy, Jacobean tragedy and political satire, Peter Greenaway’s restaurant can be read as microcosm for the excesses of modern society — what Oscar Wilde characterised as “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing” —and draws upon Antonin Artaud’s concept of the theatre of cruelty to echo the angry reality of living in Britain in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher.

‘Prospero’s Books is a film about “You are what you read”. We’re all products of our education, our cultural background, which very largely is perceived through text. Text is so desperately important in this film. All the images come out of Prospero’s inkwell, as though the inkwell were a top hat, with the magician pulling out the scarves, image after image.’  Peter Greenaway, Film Quarterly, 1991—92

Prospero’s Books is an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s last work The Tempest 1623, where a brave new world is situated on the fold of the rise of a new economic order. Prospero (Sir John Gielgud) and his daughter Miranda (Isabelle Pasco) are banished to an island which in turn becomes an expanded library; the library turned into a state where Prospero literally rules his subjects by the books. Gielgud’s narration enacts a cross-identification between Shakespeare, Prospero and Gielgud who at times become indivisibly one person. The film is divided into 24 parts, or more precisely 24 books, with titles such as ‘A Book of Mirrors’, ‘A Book of Mythologies’ and ‘The Book of Universal Cosmography’. Through this structure, Peter Greenaway tries to organise a multiplication of view points (“a chaos of visual realities”) and moves from the theatrical single-centeredness of representation to the cinematic multiplication of motions, senses, images and time.

‘For me, this film is not a criticism of Catholicism in particular. It talks about power, all ideologies that pretend to guide the thought and the imagination of the social body and what happens when one defies them. The Church finds itself deprived of the opportunity to exercise [power] in its own domain, that is, the domain of miracles, and it reacts forcefully, taking vengeance in an atrocious manner.’ Peter Greenaway, Postif, January 1994

The Baby of Mâcon is an elaborate and challenging exploration of contemporary voyeurism, the madness of religious faith and the spectacle of violence. In the famine-plagued medieval town of Mâcon, where women have long been infertile and believe it a punishment from God, a child is born to an old woman during a play being performed for nobleman Cosimo de Medici (Jonathan Lacey). The play itself concerns the miraculous birth of a child in a city hungry for salvation, and from the onset Peter Greenaway orchestrates an uneasy similarity between the actors’ lives outside the play and scenes performed within. Greenaway’s structures the film tableaux as a complex three-act play wherein the awareness between the play’s aristocratic spectators and the film’s self-conscious viewers are constantly interrelated. When the real mother’s virginal daughter (Julia Ormand) claims the baby as her own and the product of an Immaculate Conception, her social standing is elevated with claims she has mothered the Messiah. The naïve young woman begins to exploit the situation, exchanging gifts and money for blessings. However the enemies she has made in the process lead the young woman and child to become an object of excessive and gruesome retribution by the local bishop and a town on the brink of mass hysteria.

‘In the West we have continually separated the image and the text, and one would imagine that cinema would be the ideal place in which to remarry these two notions. But alas, it does not seem to have been the case. The Pillow Book is another attempt to readdress my particular anxiety or disenchantment about a cinema which is primarily text before it can be image.’ Peter Greenaway, Bomb Magazine, 1997

The Pillow Book reflects on the anatomical comparison of treating the body like the page of a book, to be read and written on. Drawing inspiration from the 10th Century Japanese manuscript The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, a female courtier’s observations on daily life and the arts, Peter Greenaway’s film draws together aspects of the Japanese calligraphic tradition with modern day tattooing. Nagiko (Vivian Wu) is a young woman who enjoys the powerful link between flesh and literature, sex and calligraphy. Her life seems defined by two memories: her calligrapher father (Ken Ogata) painting a birthday greeting on her face and witnessing the sexual exchange between her financially dependent father and his Publisher (Yoshi Oida). Escaping an arranged marriage, Nagiko moves to Hong Kong where she takes lovers that remind of her of the pleasures of calligraphy. When she meets English translator Jerome (Ewan McGregor), a great lover but bad calligrapher, she sees an opportunity to enact revenge on the Publisher who demeaned her father. Nagiko sends Jerome as her book, his body decorated with her own erotic Pillow Book. But when Jerome makes love to the publisher, Nagiko suffers another betrayal, and the film spirals into a dramatic exchange between Nagiko and the Publisher. The Pillow Book combines film and video, paintings and photos, spoken narration and visual texts to create an intricate web of desire and loss, what Sei Shonagon termed “the writing of love and finding it”.

‘It is an elaboration on the subject of eight and a half stereotypes of male sexual fantasy… But this is no documentary and hopefully more than a list of archetypes. All the material is fictional and develops its own eight and a half private, coalesced journeys, where, perhaps not unexpectedly, the females can run faster than the men and trade their freedoms by exhausting the male sexual fantasies and replacing them by some of their own. A Darwinist could say that such fantasies that are represented here might be an evolutionary necessity for both sexes.’ Peter Greenaway, www.petergreenaway.org.uk

In this parable of sexual indulgence and narcissism, recently widowed billionaire Philip Emmenthal (John Standing) and his son Storey (Matthew Delamere), invite a group of women to their Geneva mansion to console their grief with pleasure. All willing attendants, the women represent a series of sublime and ridiculous elaborations on female archetypes from Western art and cinema. With their harem of personal concubines, both men begin retraining their ability to experience intimacy through an inventory of sexual fantasies. While on the surface the premise appears misogynist, Peter Greenaway works to invert the gender roles with the film’s combination of farce and tragedy. 8 ½ Women remains a surreal comedy about grief, power and corruption, in which the wealthy but emotionally deficit men remain dreamers and the women simply move on when they grow tired of the game.