 |
|
Peter Greenaway
Biography | Lectures | Bibliography | Resources | Links
|
|
|
|
Video Quotes Top |
|
An exhibition by Peter Greenaway of the 92 Suitcases
from THE TULSE LUPER SUITCASES
at COMPTON VERNEY NEAR STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, WARWICKSHIRE, ENGLAND
Exhibition: 27 March to 31 October 2004
www.tulselupernetwork.nl
The photos below were taken when Peter Greenaway received an honorary doctorate from the European Graduate School. Read the full story here.
Reuters Photo
|
|
CANNES, Saturday, May 24: Catherine Bremer from Reuters reports that the British film director (and EGS professor) Peter Greenaway "wrote off today's cinema as formulaic and predictable, as he presented his latest bizarre visual feast on Saturday.
Greenaway, whose "The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1: The Moab Story" is the first in a trilogy, suggested advances in multimedia, the Internet and audience interaction means traditional cinema — sitting quietly in a dark theater — was dead.
His trilogy is complemented by 92 DVDs which show nothing but the contents of the film's hero's 92 suitcases — ranging from live frogs to blood-spattered wallpaper — and also by endless Web content. The new piece tracks Greenaway's alter-ego hero Tulse Luper through a historical voyage around the world, from wartime Wales to warped adventures with Mormons in Utah and on to Europe. Essentially an eight-hour film cut into three, the movie plays around with narrative, script and avant-garde visuals to produce something most will either adore or utterly loathe. The story begins on a stage set and moves to the Utah desert where Luper soon finds himself tied to a post, his genitals smeared with honey, fighting off flies.
Greenaway said people should see the film more than once to appreciate it. The film is aimed at the Internet generation who prefer clicking through frames to sitting through an orthodox story. Fans of Greenaway sung his praises after the screening, while others were exasperated."
|
|
|
Photo Quotes Top |
|
|
|
|
Photo Video Top |
|
Cinema is not a playground for Sharon Stone.
Peter Greenaway
Cinema has reached a dead end.
Peter Greenaway
Here was opportunity to make an audience walk and move, be sociable in a way never dreamed of by the rigors of cinema-watching, in circumstances where many different perspectives could be brought to bear on a series of phenomena associated with the topics under consideration. Yet all the time it was a subjective creation under the auspices of light and sound, dealing with a large slice of cinema's vocabulary.
Peter Greenaway
Works of art are never finished, just stopped.
Peter Greenaway
Most cinema today is an illustration of 19th century novels. A lot of it is disastrous, formulaic and predictable. The sense of pluralism has been curtailed.
Peter Greenaway
We are discovering the multifariousness of telling stories. The subjectivity of narration should be high on the agenda. Any self-respecting filmmaker should acknowledge the audience.
Peter Greenaway
I make no apology for saying the TULSE LUPER SUITCASES are films that should be seen many times. I want to make films that can offer up their meaning only after repeated viewing.
Peter Greenaway
Shakespeare wrote a play called Hamlet in which you have to take in all you want to know about him in 2-1/2 hours. I can stretch my hero's life to 3,000 light years.
Peter Greenaway
… there are those who think that Zeffirelli's Hamlet is the way to treat Shakespeare. I think that cinema can handle much more. We somehow expect cinema to provide us with meaning, to console us. But that's not the purpose of art.
Peter Greenaway
I think that every artist dreams of renewing the forms which came before, but I think very few can be considered to have achieved that. We are all dwarves standing upon the shoulders of the giants who preceded us, and I think we must never forget that. After all, even iconoclasts only exist with respect to that which they destroy.
Peter Greenaway
Creation, to me, is to try to orchestrate the universe to understand what surrounds us. Even if, to accomplish that, we use all sorts of strategems which in the end prove completely incapable of staving off chaos.
Peter Greenaway
I always think that if you deal with extremely emotional, even melodramatic, subject matter, as I constantly do, the best way to handle those situations is at a sufficient remove. It's like a doctor and a nurse and a casualty situation. You can't help the patient and you can't help yourself by emoting. And I don't think cinema is intended for therapy, so I object also to that huge, massive manipulation which is perpetrated on the public.
Peter Greenaway
We suddenly sparked off an enormous amount of vituperative antagonism, though that's not unfamiliar. Such that, when a film of mine has been cheered, I begin to think 'Good Lord, what have I done wrong?'
Peter Greenaway
I was trained as a painter. I'm very familiar with the nude body, masculine and feminine. I do, I suppose have a soapbox position, and I want to be certain that the human body is in the center of the frame. Its physicality is important and is always very, very strongly positive because I think that that physicality would begin to lose perspective over all the other senses.
Peter Greenaway
It's precisely on the Internet that the majority of the writing is terribly bad and uninteresting.
Peter Greenaway
I was continually connected with the whole world and never got any rest. At the moment, I spend only a few hours weekly on the net, that's just better for me.
Peter Greenaway
As you probably know, I'm often accused of intellectual exhibitionism and all forms of elitism. Although I can understand this point of view, it's a rather wasted argument because, if we regard areas of information as being elite and therefore somehow not usable, it means our centre-ground of activity becomes very, very impoverished.
Peter Greenaway
Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure.
Peter Greenaway
I suppose on another level, I'm often irritated that, basically, certainly should we say Hollywood orthodox cinema deals in nudity primarily from the point of the view of the female body and she has to be aged between 16 and 30. What happens to the rest of us? What happens to the whole mass of man/female, masculine/feminine kind who do not get represented in this context? We ought to be there along with everybody else.
Peter Greenaway
I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a "message", but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world.
Peter Greenaway
It seems to me that dominant cinema seems to require an empathy or a sympathy between the film and the audience which is basically to do with the manipulation of the emotions and it seems to me again — and this is a very subjective position — that most cinema seems to trivialise the emotions, sentimentalising or romanticising them.
Peter Greenaway
That comes from most people having an American film model in their heads which is nothing but a total illusionary masturbatory massage.
Peter Greenaway
I suppose I have a concern for this extraordinary, beautiful, amazing, exciting, taxonomically brilliant world that we live in, but we keep fucking it up all the time.
Peter Greenaway
My personal obsessions are much more interesting to me than other people's.
Peter Greenaway
Americans don't understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They're extremely good at making straightforward, linear narrative movies, which entertain superbly. But they very rarely do anything else.
Peter Greenaway
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 it's three tenses in one.
Peter Greenaway
On the other hand, I view the whole matter from a cosmic perspective. I don't take a position. I believe that there are no more positions to take, no certainties, no facts. Many people find this confusing about my films; they say I am hiding out behind irony. But from a cosmic viewpoint, it is eternally unimportant whether one lives or not.
Peter Greenaway
You don't go into the National Gallery of any famous capital city and cry, sob, laugh, fall about on the floor, become very angry — it's a completely different reaction. It's a reaction which is to do with a much more composed sense of regarding an image; it's a reaction with a thought process as opposed to an immediate emotional reaction.
Peter Greenaway
All my films are somewhat experimental, they are all, each one, taking a certain amount of risk, but there's always the basic assumption that we should be able to appreciate the cinema as much with the mind as we can through emotional empathy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
Peter Greenaway
I think it is really important to be in some way provocative — either intellectually or viscerally — in the films one makes.
Peter Greenaway
I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable; so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it.
Peter Greenaway
Film is such an extraordinary rich medium which can handle so many different modes of operation, combining together in the same place all these extraordinary disciplines which may be executed in their own right — music, writing, picture making of all kinds, and I often feel that some filmmakers make films with one eye closed and two hands tied behind their backs.
Peter Greenaway
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. In a sense Godard destroyed everything — a great, great director, but in a sense he rang the death knell, because he broke cinema all apart, fragmented it, made it very, very self-conscious. Like all the aesthetic movements, it's basically lasted about 100 years, with the three generations: the grandfather who organized everything, the father who basically consolidated it and the young guy who chucks it all away. It's just a human pattern.
Peter Greenaway
I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realizing all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film.
Peter Greenaway
I suppose I am basically a clerk, a cataloguer. I like the reductiveness of that, I like the stripping down, the basic form of organization.
Peter Greenaway
I have a very, very secret drive to become a dilettante, without the pejorative overtones or the obligation to produce myself. There's so much to examine, so much to contemplate. I have enormous enthusiasm when I start a new project but then there's the meetings and the counter-meetings, the rehearsals, the struggles. You have to keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get your dreams realised.
Peter Greenaway
|
|
| |
|
;)
 "Click here or the thumbnail above to enlarge the image"){kind=small}
;)
 "Click here or the thumbnail above to enlarge the image"){kind=small}
)
)
