Peter Greenaway

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Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway , CBE (born April 5, 1942 in Newport , Wales , United Kingdom ) is a British film director , experimental artist , screenwriter , cameraman and film editor .

Life and filmmaking

Youth and education

At the age of twelve, Greenaway decided to become a painter and went to Walthamstow College of Art. After working on easels, murals and drawing, collages later became his main medium. Painting became an important influence in his later filmmaking.

First films

At the age of 22 he decided to pursue his future development in the film industry and bought his first camera, a 16mm Bolex . After being rejected from the film school of the Royal College of Art in London, he started as a film editor and director at the Central Office of Information, a British government agency producing information films. He soon translated the experiences he made there into an exploration of the absurdity of bureaucracies and the possibilities of documentary form.

In parallel with his daily work, Peter Greenaway began making his first experimental short films . In “Train” (1966) he created a mechanical ballet when a steam train comes into the station. In “Tree” (1966) he shows the life of trees in relation to the concrete in the streets of London. “Voice-over in Windows” (1975) tells a story about the frequency of window falls in the city while idyllic landscapes are filmed through windows.

These works didn't bring him much recognition. Only when his hitherto most ambitious work, the three-hour fictional documentary “The Falls” (1980), about an absurd “Violent Unknown Event” was shown at a film festival in Rotterdam, did he become better known. He got to know the Dutch producer Kees Kasander, who from then on produced his films.

Feature films

Greenaway's feature films revolve around the themes of art, sex, violence, religion and death. His first feature film " The draftsman's contract " was a criminological puzzle about a vain painter in England at the end of the 17th century. In 1983 " Four American Composers " was published, a collection of four documentaries about the composers Robert Ashley , John Cage , Philip Glass and Meredith Monk . The surreal feature film “ZOO - A Zed & Two Noughts” about animals, rot, symmetry, fate and the painter Jan Vermeer , as well as the films “ The Architect's Belly ” and “ Drowning by Numbers ” followed soon afterwards Women ”).

Greenaway became known to a larger audience in 1989 with the black grotesque " The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover ". In 1991 he created a film adaptation of Shakespeare's " The Tempest " with John Gielgud in the lead role under the title " Prospero's Books " . The music for six of his films (“The Falls”, “The Draftsman's Contract”, “A Z and Two Zeros”, “Conspiracy of Women”, “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” and “Prospero's Books” “) Wrote the English composer Michael Nyman .

The church satire " The Miracle of Mâcon ", which was exaggerated and often obscene even for Greenaway , fell through with critics and audiences. “ Die Bettlektüre ” with Vivian Wu and Ewan McGregor received more positive feedback . With "8½ women" Greenaway created a humorous homage to Federico Fellini full of sexual obsessions.

The Tulse Luper Suitcases

Greenaway's monumental project "The Tulse Luper Suitcases" includes three feature films, a television series, 92 DVDs, CD-ROMs and books about the life of Tulse Luper and his 92 suitcases with obscure contents. Tulse Luper appears as a character and employee (e.g. Production Assistant for “A Walk Through H”) in several Greenaway films, such as in “The Falls” or in the short films “Vertical Features Remake” and “A Walk Through H ". In Greenaway's films, a kind of mythology unfolds around Luper, which includes a number of recurring characters (e.g. Luper's opponent Van Hoyten). The number 92 also appears in Saskia Bodekke's (Greenaway's wife) production of “Gold - 92 bars in a crashed car” at the Schauspiel Frankfurt / Main in November 2001, which Bodekke and Greenaway had developed together.

Since 2000

From 2007 he worked in " Nightwatching " with Rembrandt van Rijn and in particular with his painting The Night Watch . The film was a return to the style and subject matter of the draftsman's contract . Even avowed Greenaway opponents found the comparatively emotional film “bearable”. As a visual jockey he showed a live remix of Leonardo da Vinci's “Last Supper” in Milan in 2008 . Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015) is a kind of film collage with biographical elements from the life of the Soviet director Sergej Eisenstein , especially about his trip to Mexico in 1931.

Film language

In Peter Greenaway's view, the language of film has not seen any development since the 1960s. Greenaway's artistic claim is therefore to fundamentally renew it. In doing so, he refuses rationally understandable stories and relies primarily on the power and beauty of the images. His films are characterized by long, total shots on meticulously designed, static arrangements of decorations and actors as well as long tracking shots. Greenaway regularly uses elements of expression from other art forms, e.g. B. the fine arts (“The draftsman's contract”), architecture (“The architect's belly”) or calligraphy (“The bedtime reading”). His work is based on the idea of ​​the Gesamtkunstwerk , whereby he organizes his films according to formal systems, such as reference systems from semiotics , number series from Kabbalah and codification . In “Drowning by Numbers”, for example, Greenaway incorporated the numbers from 1 to 100 in numerical order into the images and dialogues. The film also contains 100 stars named by girls jumping on a rope, as well as 100 objects that begin with an "S".

Since, in collaboration with the video artist Tom Phillips resulting TV production "A TV Dante . cantos 1–8 ”and“ Prospero's books ”(1991) Greenaway is increasingly using HDTV and post-production technology, making interlaced frames appear and disappear on the screen, among other things. He also used this kind of film language in "Die Bettlektüre" and very often in "The Tulse Luper Suitcases".

Filmography (selection)

Quotes

“We are in danger of losing the old formal languages. But, and this is probably typically postmodern , we have to be able to recapitulate and revisit the ancient languages, to remain aware of their historical continuity. You can see in my films that I'm a real atheist, but I always got the best grades in theology. "

- Peter Greenaway

“In cinema, we have to break free of tyranny first, and there are four of them: the tyranny of the text, the tyranny of the actor, the tyranny of the frame and, most importantly, the tyranny of the camera. The film has to separate from the camera in order to break free from slavery. Because I'm quite sure: the camera is in the way of the film. "

- Peter Greenaway

Musical works

Greenaway wrote a series of ten opera libretti in the early 1990s under the title "Death of a composer" . The composers depicted include Anton Webern and John Lennon as real people .

Exhibitions (selection)

Awards

literature

Web links

Commons : Peter Greenaway  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Scott Tobias: Toronto Film Festival '07: Day Three. In: A. V. Club. September 9, 2007, accessed January 31, 2009 .
  2. ↑ Elisabetta Povoledo: A Filmmaker Adds a Cinematic Scope to a Storied Painting. In: The New York Times . July 2, 2008, accessed February 3, 2009 .
  3. ^ Eisenstein in Guanajuato. Film service , accessed on December 15, 2015 (short review).
  4. ↑ imdb.com
  5. ↑ Peter Greenaway in conversation with Hannah Hurtzig: Real cinema is yet to come . “How does the new come into the world?” (Conducted around 1997), p. 33.
  6. ↑ Peter Greenaway in conversation with Hannah Hurtzig: Real cinema is yet to come . “How does the new come into the world?” (Conducted around 1997), p. 32.
  7. ↑ http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/ausstellung-gehorsam- Zwischen-vaterliebe-gottvertrauen-und.1013.de.html?dram:article_id= 320571
  8. ↑ BBC ( Memento of February 16, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed February 3, 2009).
  9. ↑ Peter Greenaway CBE To Receive The BAFTA For Outstanding British Contribution To Cinema , BAFTA press release, February 10, 2014.
personal data
SURNAME Greenaway, Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British experimental artist and filmmaker
DATE OF BIRTH April 5, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Newport , Wales