Peter Greenaway

[Mesh]

To me, it's actually very, very simple and direct: The Thief is Thatcher and his cronies are Thatcherites; Thatcher was a socioeconomic "cannibal" by almost anyone's standard, a terrorist vulgarian with an agenda to basically take everything away from the English working classes and restore the positively brutal classist social "order."

Everyone else is The English People.

Yeah, that's the part I do remember, though.  I'll have to rewatch and see if it seems to go much deeper than that.  Greenaway would probably say "No," I'm guessing.

I mean, where does a castrato singing boy fit into all of this?  

[godardian]

To me, it's actually very, very simple and direct: The Thief is Thatcher and his cronies are Thatcherites; Thatcher was a socioeconomic "cannibal" by almost anyone's standard, a terrorist vulgarian with an agenda to basically take everything away from the English working classes and restore the positively brutal classist social "order."

Everyone else is The English People.

Yeah, that's the part I do remember, though.  I'll have to rewatch and see if it seems to go much deeper than that.  Greenaway would probably say "No," I'm guessing.

I mean, where does a castrato singing boy fit into all of this?  

Well, the Thief throws coins at him and claims washing dishes is "women's work." I'm guessing the dirty comingling of art and commerce characterized by the eighties in general, and Thatcher's disdain for any public support of even the most revered of the arts in particular, comes into play with the castrato boy. He represents beauty and purity- "art"- unsoiled by greed and lust and tyranny, I guess.

[Mesh]

Well, the Thief throws coins at him and claims washing dishes is "women's work." I'm guessing the dirty comingling of art and commerce characterized by the eighties in general, and Thatcher's disdain for any public support of even the most revered of the arts in particular, comes into play with the castrato boy. He represents beauty and purity- "art"- unsoiled by greed and lust and tyranny, I guess.

That's good stuff.  I really do need to rewatch......soon.

edit:  What do you make of The Thief's last name, "Spica," being an anagram for "aspic"?

Oooh, another thing that refresher course reminded me of: His Wife's name is "Georgina:" a female version of British King George, perhaps, or some other Brit George I don't know much about?

[godardian]

Well, the Thief throws coins at him and claims washing dishes is "women's work." I'm guessing the dirty comingling of art and commerce characterized by the eighties in general, and Thatcher's disdain for any public support of even the most revered of the arts in particular, comes into play with the castrato boy. He represents beauty and purity- "art"- unsoiled by greed and lust and tyranny, I guess.

That's good stuff.  I really do need to rewatch......soon.

edit:  What do you make of The Thief's last name, "Spica," being an anagram for "aspic"?

Oooh, another thing that refresher course reminded me of: His Wife's name is "Georgina," a female version of British King George or some other Brit George I don't know much about?

Yeah, when it comes to the really fine points like that, I'm pretty lost, too. There should be a book. I know there was a book published in conjunction with 8 1/2 Women, but maybe that was just a really nice screenplay... these books should be like Cliffs notes, but nicer and more respectful. You know, collecting the trivia and all the subtexts rather than spelling out the basics for those who can't be bothered.

[Mesh]

Yeah, when it comes to the really fine points like that, I'm pretty lost, too.

So, like, Thatcher would be considered "Right Wing" politician, right?  Or no?

Because TCTTHWAHL has a wonderful spatial structure, too.  Spica and cohorts are WAAAAAAAYYYYYY to the right of the "stage" where as the real work happens in the kitchen, WAAAAAYYYY to the left.  Notice, also, that The Lover (Michael, right?) has a bookstore (knowlege, intellectualism) that exists well outside the stage/space of the rest of the narrative, in a kind of netherworld, sorta.  His library is very idealized; no shock, as Greenaway is such a filmic librarian/curator.

[ono]

I just wanted to confirm that, yes, Greenaway is the most pretentious, boring director whose films I've ever had the displeasure of watching.  C...T...W...L may have been terrible, but I've seen two more of his films since then and they're damn close.  A Zed and Two Noughts had an interesting premise, some crazy music, and some good scenes, but in the end, it was boring and pretentious.  And, well, The Draughtsman's Contract was just horrible all around.  Boring, poorly written, and yet again, pretentious.  I don't like Greenaway, but I sure do like reading Ebert writing about him.  His review of 8 1/2 Women is telling, and if I can get a copy of that, maybe I'll be a little less turned off by him.  This guy definitely gives British cinema a bad name.

[life_boy]

Everytime I see Peter Greenaway's name somewhere I think he's the guy who directed Xanadu.  But then I remember that's Robert Greenwald who I'm confusing him with.

[rustinglass]

Everytime I see Peter Greenaway's name somewhere I think he's the guy who directed Xanadu.  But then I remember that's Robert Greenwald who I'm confusing him with.

I always confuse greenaway with paul greengrass

[I Don't Believe in Beatles]

Here's an interview with Greenaway (39 minutes long - there are some clips from the Tulse Luper films): http://www.submarinechannel.com/interviews/index.jsp?id=18753

Here's the game portion of Tulse Luper: http://www.tulseluperjourney.com/

[Pubrick]

Here's an interview with Greenaway (39 minutes long - there are some clips from the Tulse Luper films): http://www.submarinechannel.com/interviews/index.jsp?id=18753

that was extremely watchable. thanks. i'm so glad greenaway is not a wanker (aka. a barney), his ideas are brilliant, challenging, and yet accessible. like kubrick, they reward you for the knowledge you have and inspire you to learn more, instead of punishing you for all that you don't know (eg. a barney).

[polkablues]

Here's an interview with Greenaway (39 minutes long - there are some clips from the Tulse Luper films): http://www.submarinechannel.com/interviews/index.jsp?id=18753

that was extremely watchable. thanks. i'm so glad greenaway is not a wanker (aka. a barney), his ideas are brilliant, challenging, and yet accessible. like kubrick, they reward you for the knowledge you have and inspire you to learn more, instead of punishing you for all that you don't know (eg. a barney).

Exactly.  I'm convinced from what I've seen and what I've read by and about Greenaway that he's probably the most intelligent human being to ever make film his profession, a quality that's both his gift and his curse.  His curse because he's doomed to make movies that drive us normal people (or "Normies", as I call us) to pieces trying to comprehend them, and his gift because we all become smarter for the trying.

[MacGuffin]

Peter Greenaway says cinema is dead
Director knocks populism, current films
Source: Variety

Famously uncompromising British helmer Peter Greenaway declared cinema officially dead but said interactive forms of filmmaking offered exciting new possibilities.

"New electronic filmmaking means the potential for expanding the notions of cinema have become very rich indeed," Greenaway said during a master class at the Pusan Intl. Film Festival Tuesday.

"Cinema's death date was in 1983, when the remote control was introduced to the living room," said Greenaway, who has shocked and delighted auds, often simultaneously, with classic movies such as "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" and "Prospero's Books."

The Welsh-born, English-raised helmer shocked the film students in attendance by taking aim at some of the biggest figures in the biz.

"Here's a real provocation -- (U.S. video artist) Bill Viola is worth 10 Martin Scorseses," he said. "Scorsese is old-fashioned and is making the same films that D.W. Griffith was making early last century."

Greenaway then warned: "I like a fight" and he got one too, dismissing a comment on his views as "not intelligent" and "humbug."

He also spoke a line in Welsh, to the Korean translators' horror.

"Every medium has to be redeveloped, otherwise we would still be looking at cave paintings ... My desire to tell you stories is very strong but it's difficult because I am looking for cinema that is non-narrative," he said.

Greenaway went on to knock populism as well. "Cinema is predicated on the 19th-century novel. We're still illustrating Jane Austen novels -- there are 41 films of Jane Austen novels in the world -- what a waste of time," he said.

The director, whose film "Nightwatching" is taking part in the Pusan festival, trained as a painter, and considered cinema a "pathetic adjunct" to that medium.

His visually rich, difficult movies, often based on paintings or visual images, have earned him accusations of intellectual snobbery, but Greenaway said that he firmly believed the changes in how films were made would ultimately be acceptable to a wider audience.

" 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Harry Potter' were not films, but illustrated books," he said.

He also attacked fests in general, saying there were too many.

"Thirty-five years of silent cinema is gone, no one looks at it anymore. This will happen to the rest of cinema. If you shoot a dinosaur in the brain on Monday, its tail is still waggling on Friday. Cinema is brain-dead," he said.

[MacGuffin]

Greenaway prepares to create Da Vinci coda
· Film-maker to animate centuries-old painting
· Other masterworks in line for 'Cinerama' treatment
Source: The Guardian

For five centuries Leonardo Da Vinci's The Last Supper has stood majestically still on the walls of a Milanese friary, the only disturbance the slow flaking of its priceless paint.

Now Peter Greenaway, the iconoclastic British film-maker, has been granted permission to wheel in projectors and bring to life the hidden stories he sees in the masterpiece.

Greenaway, 65, announced yesterday that he is planning to use dramatic lighting, projections and recordings of actors' voices to transform the depiction of the moment Christ announced that one apostle would betray him into something close to a film.

Instead of capturing just one moment, as Da Vinci did, Greenaway will turn the Last Supper into a narrative that stretches from Christ's birth to his crucifixion with voice given to the thoughts of each disciple as they work out which of them will betray him.

Unsurprisingly for a film director who served up a dead man at a different kind of dinner party in his 1989 film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Greenaway is courting fresh controversy when his project goes on show in April and May. He plans to project on to the refectory walls "raw and heavy" images of Christ's genitalia and naked crucifixion, taken from Da Vinci's other works.

It will be "an act of some significance that some people might regard as blasphemous," he said at the launch in London yesterday.

The project is part of an attempt by Greenaway to animate the world's greatest paintings. His targets include Picasso's Guernica, Monet's Waterlilies in Madrid and a Jackson Pollock in New York. He has even asked the Vatican if he can bring the series to a climax by projecting on to Michaelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.

The project, which has returned Greenaway to his earlier career as a painter, started in his adopted home town of Amsterdam where in 2006 he animated Rembrandt's The Nightwatch. It opens with a cock crowing at dawn. Light plays across figures and the voices of men are heard. There are explosions, infernos and rain before night comes and the show ends with the midnight bell.

"We burned it, flooded it and covered it in blood," he recalled. "But if you go there today you will find it completely untouched.

"I just want to get people to look again at art. Most people are visually under-educated and after the age of 11 schoolchildren are encouraged to concentrate on texts while visual arts are regarded as simply decorative and entertaining."

He has permission to tackle Veronese's Marriage of Cana in the Louvre in Paris this autumn and Las Meninas by Velázquez at the Prado in Madrid in 2009. He is in talks over the rest of his series and wants to take Guernica from Madrid to the Guggenheim in Bilbao. "I have to have a Cecil B deMille Cinerama canvas," he said. "Otherwise it just doesn't work."

His plans have divided the art world.

"Quite frankly, I don't see how these paintings, which have been good enough to move generations of people, are improved by the interventions of any film-maker," said the art critic Brian Sewell. "The Central Restoration Institute in Rome [which is supervising the Last Supper project] is out of its mind to allow this. They can't predict the effect this will have on an extremely fragile painting."

But Martin Kemp, professor of history of art at Oxford University and a Da Vinci expert, said the painter would have approved. "Greenaway has a terrific understanding of how painters work which is not true of every film-maker. There's no need to be stuffy about these things. If Leonardo had been around he would have been into moving images. You get the sense that he wanted his paintings to move."

Greenaway plans to make a sun rise behind Christ's head and light will fall and rise on the famous hand gestures "to give the notion of a symphony of togetherness".

The arrangement of the objects on the disciples' table will be projected as a constellation on the ceiling and the seven-minute show will climax with the light fading over the group and the shadows of each disciple stretching across the floor. Because of the painting's fragility, only 25 people will be able to watch at a time, but it will be relayed to thousands more.

"The idea is to make connections between 8,000 years of art and 112 years of cinema," Greenaway said. "We have a lot of detractors who have told us we shouldn't turn Leonardo Da Vinci into a film, but the sense of possible aesthetic combat is very exciting."

[SiliasRuby]

'A Zed and Two Naughts'

This was creepy. An extremely experimental satire that deals with... well death for one. I still have to see 'The Cook the thief his wife and her lover'. I have that on VHS, the NC17 Version. Anyway, it quite strange. I don't want to give too much away because if I start describing the story I don't think I'll stop. Its that captivating. The images bring you in so relentlessly you don't care if some of it is absurd. Shades of Lynch are present and the camera moves are swift if not methodical. Quite miracly weird in the best way.

[ono]

Summer 2006 I watched a lot of movies.  Delved heavily into Greenaway's and Breillat's catalogues, to name two.  Nothing much in Breillat's, but for Greenaway, at least two intrigued me.  I was previously turned off by the depravity of Cook, and Draughtsman just bored me.  ZOO was next, and it was just weird.  I think I wasn't quite ready, much like with my first problems with Lynch.

Here to recant a teeny bit.

That summer I watched The Pillow Book.  I didn't say it then, but it really is one of the most beautiful, moving movies I've seen.  I just revisited it a couple week ago, and it holds up.  It's passionate, which is saying a lot for Greenaway, and once a tiny suspension of disbelief is given up by the viewer, you're in for quite a ride.  If there were a Dekapenticon, this'd be in my top 25, maye top 10.

I just ordered the Drowning by Numbers VHS because of my good memories about that one.  About a month ago I revisited The Falls and his shorts.  Vertical Features Remake is pretty good on seond visit, and if you can get through The Falls, it's agmirable if only for it's detail, its wealth of INFORMATION.  Too bad it wasn't more streamlined.

Around that time I also talked to crono about Tulse Luper.  I bought the region 2 DVD (and even was sent a second one, which I will part with for a discount price if anyone is interested -- just PM me).  It's quite a great work.  I don't think I finished it though, complicated by the fact that none of the DVD players I have can be made region free, and I hate having to change my Mac's region every time I want to watch it.  I'm disappointed that there's no word on parts 2 and 3 ever being shown stateside.  This would be a dream for Criterion to take on.

In other news, Greenaway has said in an interview he's considering killing himself when he's 70 (I think he's 67).  I haven't seen Nightwatching.  He's setting out on a new flick in which a casting call requires people willing to participate in graphic sex, involving menstruation, semen leakage... pity I can't locate the article right now.  I'll try to hunt it down.  EDIT: here's one: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/mar/18/peter-greenaway-nightwatching and another:

EDIT: Prospero's Books and The Baby of Macon are allegedly coming to Blu Ray in Sweden in August.  Still can't find the casting call; oh well.