Right away, Peter Greenaway wants to make it clear that he’s never taken himself seriously as a filmmaker – although like many of the ironies that make up Greenaway’s identity, it’s unwise to take such a claim seriously.
“That’s a terrible confession to talk to you about,” he says via Skype from the tiny house on the Atlantic coast where he goes on weekends. “There’s always this sense of turning you away from the activity, of taking a step back and trying to look at it not in an ironic or derivative fashion, but certainly a great irony.”
Such a hoax is evident in Greenaway’s filmography, which spans 16 features, from Terry Gilliam-esque’s “The Falls” (1980), a three-hour catalog of eccentric survivors of a fictional disaster, to the maniac brain dump that’s The Tulse Luper Suitcases” (2003-2004), a deceptive trio of features centered on his alternate cinematic alter ego, the elusive Tulse Luper.
Greenaway boasts what is arguably the funniest autobiographical of any major live-action director, filled with visual puns, mathematical puzzles, and fantasy languages. He is obsessed with lists, maps, and all sorts of classification tools that humans have designed to make sense of the chaotic world (this is his structuralist drive at work), even if he apparently takes pleasure in subverting those very systems (for which he was described as “post-structuralist” by those who share his affinity for classification).
Now 80, the director of such racy slashers as the 1989 cannibal satire “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” and the 1996-rated NC-17 “The Pillow Book” hasn’t calmed down a bit. He still works – Greenway concludes Walking to Paris, a years-long portrait of the Romanian sculptor Konstantin Brankoy’s journey to the European art capital – and he still struggles in his own bold way against the idea that cinema is a medium for storytelling. He is convinced that he is capable of much more than that.
“We built our cinema on the idea of a script, but I always objected to it. Every time I started writing a screenplay, I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’” I want to make gifs! “
“I never planned to become a film director,” he explains. “I wanted to be a painter from a young age. Nothing in my family would suggest a support system of any kind, however, through a series of happy accidents, I ended up in art school in the early 1960s. At that time, all art schools had clubs cinema, and Nouvelle Vague was in full swing and it was an exciting period for Italian cinema, so those were my references.”
“Breathless” by Jean-Luc Godard made it electrifying. Alain Resnais “Last Year at Marienbad” blew his mind, and quickly became his favorite movie.
“It has crazy ideas where people don’t have names, and it’s all about memory, which is remarkably unreliable,” he says. “I’m not a huge fan of abstract art. I still believe in the concepts of forms and photography, but the film was as close to the wind, to the idea of being an abstract movie. It stripped anecdotal information and replaced it with other kinds of anecdotal information.” Upon seeing her, Greenaway realized, “I wanted to make the abstract art of cinema in a sense.”
After she was rejected by the Royal College of Art’s Film Program, Greenaway found work with the Central Office of Information, or COI, the “Marketing and Propaganda” (i.e., propaganda) department of post-war Britain, as a film editor. “I was constantly making films about Concorde and about hovercraft and all those things for which Brits are patting their backs, but all the time, I was so sad and enjoying this use of propaganda,” Greenaway says. “And it’s still going on, right? We are now in the era of extraordinary fake news.”
He spent a decade and a half compiling such material, giving Greenaway an incredibly sophisticated sense of how to put the images together, which he applied to a series of experimental short films, a handful of which have been critically acclaimed.
“I made a lot of films, which were about all kinds of fashions in filmmaking. I was fascinated by the art of the land, sowing balls as if they were seeds. I wanted to use the language of cinema to discuss that, he says, but I want as many audiences as possible. With The emergence of this unusual phenomenon called Channel 4, which suddenly decided because it was being run by academics and university students that we needed something smarter, a little more provocative.”
Thus, Greenaway found new support for such follies that it had been doing for years. If “The Falls” can be seen as the absurd culmination of the short work he’s done before, then 1982’s The Draughtsman’s Contract was a critical and popular breakthrough. Like Last Year at Marienbad, the movie is a bit of a mental suspense, though Greenaway insists the puzzle isn’t as complicated as it seems. (In fact, everything is explained very well in the director’s comment, for anyone looking for insights.)
“I’ve always been very aware that we have very literary cinema. I mean, cinema is supposed to be about images, but you can’t go to a producer who has 17 prints and charts about serial drawing and convince them. Traditionally, what a producer needs is a script, and the script is text, and the text It is literature,” Greenaway explains.
And so Greenaway stepped back, tested the limits of the medium, and provided enough plot to keep the audience interested, bending models as much as they could get away with.
“I’ve had another kind of serious problem: If I’m not very interested in the narrative, how am I going to hang everything together? We both use narrative. The events happen during the day, and we tell our wives and our dogs and our doctors and nurses what happened to us. But the narrative is very ephemeral and anecdotal.”
Therefore, Greenaway looked to other systems to build his films. “The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover” is an illustrated list. The menu consists of appetizers all the way to the coffee, so I used them as a structure,” he explains. “In Drowning by Numbers, the title tells you it all: It’s a movie simply about numbers. It’s a very self-conscious way of saying, “This isn’t reality, it’s a movie.” The movie is building. Let’s play with the artificial.”
Here it is again: the idea of play, so central to Greenaway’s aesthetic. To say he’s not serious about his art would be absurd, yet the best way to appreciate his work is to relax and embrace the rebellious spirit of experience. See how he uses color in “The Cook…”, the opulent choreography and compositions in “Prospero Books,” and laughs at the decadent excess of “Eisenstein in Guanajuato” (A Walk with the Silent Teacher).
“Maybe the really exciting days of cinema were the last 10 years of silent cinema, when they demanded that pictures tell the story,” Greenaway says. Since the introduction of sound, cinema has become constrained by literature, he says. Films are obsessed with realism – as painting once was, even liberating the camera from the invention of art. “Photography created the greatest century of painting we have ever known,” he says.
But he thinks the movies stuck. “Cinema has not yet reached its cubist era,” Greenaway once told an interviewer.
He did his part in shock, only to be shocked in return from the embrace of institutions.
“I think it was David Hockney who said, ‘If you turn 80 in England and you can still boil an egg, watch out, they’ll hang you a medal,'” he laughs, repeating a joke made nearly a decade ago, upon receiving the BAFTA Career Achievement Award “So I thought, ‘Damn. I’m going to make movies that I really, really want.’”
Aging did not tame him even a little. “The death date for most white males in Europe is 81 and a half, so I have a year and a half left,” he says. “Let’s hope I can extend that a little bit. I have lots and lots of movie scripts all ready to go.” Like “Joseph,” a blatantly profane investigation of Jesus’ fatherhood which Greenaway describes as “the catastrophic collapse of Christianity all at once.”
Or “Dialogue between Stalin and Dracula” reveals his secret to the Russian leader. “As a vampire, it doesn’t suck blood. It does something more powerful. It feeds on human semen at the source. So there’s another thriller I want to make,” Greenaway, well aware that one will never see the light of day.
“At the end of this summer, I’m supposed to make a movie with Morgan Freeman about death, which tries to find a plausible idea of suicide. I think death is unnecessary.”
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