Peter Greenaway: a Brief
Overview, with Links
PROSPERO' S BOOKS: A CATALOGUE ,1989
81x112 cm, pencil on card
Twenty-four expanded books are arranged grid-fashion in four columns of six.
This is a cataloque
of some of the books that Gonzalo may have surreptitiously placed in the leaky
boat that took Prospero and his daughter Miranda into exile. Amongst them there
was certainly an Herbal, a Book of Music and Architecture, a Book of Combustion,
Primers in Geometry and Erotica, several Encyclopedias, at least one Diary and
certainly the Autobiography of the Minotaur.
Quotations from Peter Greenaway Example: "In a sense I think it's already too late: Cinema is an old technology. I think we've seen an incredibly moribund cinema in the last 30 years."
More quotations from Peter Greenaway Examples: "If you want to be a storyteller, be an author, be a novelist, be a writer, don't be a film director. Cinema is not the greatest medium for telling stories. It is too specific, leaves so little room for the imagination to take wing other than in the strict directions indicated by the director. Read 'he entered the room' and imagine a thousand scenarios. See 'he entered the room' in cinema-as-we-know-it, and you are going to be limited to one scenario only."
"The cinema is about other things than storytelling. What you remember from a good film -- and let's only talk about good films -- is not the story, but a particular and hopefully unique experience that is about atmosphere, ambience, performance, style, an emotional attitude, gestures, singular events, a particular audio-visual experience that does not rely on the story."
Peter Greenaway as a Filmmaker "I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing."
Salon Interview with
Greenaway "Director Peter Greenaway
thinks most movies are empty and sentimental -- and that includes art-house
pictures, which Greenaway treats with as much disdain as mainstream
"Greenaway's best known film, 'The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover' (1989) mixed a savage critique of Thatcherite excess with generous helpings of sex and nudity -- all of it ending in an infamous cannibalism scene. Along with Philip Kaufman's 'Henry and June' and Pedro Almodovar's 'Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down,' 'Cook, Thief' wound up saddled with the notorious, newly-minted NC-17 rating, which led to long lines of sensation-hungry filmgoers at the few urban theaters willing to screen the movie. (Don't look for it at your neighborhood Blockbuster, though.) His other films include 'A Zed and Two Noughts' (1985), 'Belly of an Architect' (1986), 'Drowning by Numbers' (1998) and an adaptation of 'The Tempest' called 'Prospero's Books' (1991)."
Greenaway's Paintings "It was said by some English Shakespearean purists that in the film Prospero's Books, there was too much Greenaway and not enough Shakespeare. One of their objections must surely be the introduction of Prospero's books. But I believe the book device was legitimate. Prospero's friend Gonzalo had, as an act of friendship placed some of Prospero's favorite volumes into the leaky boat that saw Prospero and his daughter Miranda into exile. After a passage of sea and storm, a mere Duke of Milan miraculously becomes an emperor of magic on his island whose noises delight but hurt not. How come?"
"In a play about the uses and abuses of magic, where magic is a synonym for knowledge performed before an anxious James I (Shakespeare's current patron who was fearful of the occult), the gift of books can be a key. We invented twenty-four such keys, a bibliographical thesaurus covering the ground of experience: a floral, a bestiary, a book of Architecture and Music, a pornography, a cosmology, a dictionary, a book of comparative religions, a book of languages, and a book of mirrors to watch the past, the present, and the future."
"The film was completed in
"This cataloque of the twenty-four volumes is presently arranged for inspection in neat archival fashion in a four by six agenda each book of its kind a definitive volume and an archetype."
http://www.petergreenaway.net/eng/frameFore.html "In my film Prospero's Books, John Gielgud, playing Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest, colonises his island with creatures. Shakespeare does not elaborate about this island population. I did. Some of his island subjects are native, some are immigrants, some are magic-ed out of thin air. Using them all as raw material, Prospero invents, discovers, and creates a court that masquerades as a theatre of the world. Such was my unfinished fascination for these creatures in the film that I expanded on them - and began to write a fuller account of their purposes. Perhaps this new text may become a novel. Or a film. The images of words and pictures here are manufactured from the rejected pages of the first drafts of this new text."
Greenaway Anthology "In Greenaway's production there is a constant exchange between the making of paintings and that of films: paintings belong in an itinerary that leads to the films, whereas many paintings are integral components of the films, etc.:"
"The paintings, collages, drawings and photographs in this exhibition represent a small portion of speculative research which, in my opinion, develops within a wider working context together with the making of films, operas and novels". (Peter Greenaway, text for the Lindau catalogue)
"Thus, for instance, the series of paintings 'A Walk Trough H' and 'The Draughtsman's Contract' precede the similarly titled films, the first of which is centred on a picture gallery, while the second revolve."
Greenaway on Vision. A quote I culled from
an exhibition of Greenaway paintings in