Peter Greenaway
“Cinema is dead. All the really interesting visual artists are now on the web” A memorable encounter with the art house provocateur
March, 2007
Film director Peter Greenaway polarises public opinion by creating films that are visually flawless, yet imbued with taboo themes of cannibalism, incest, rape and necrophilia. Not that the 65-year-old creator of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover really cares what others think. For the last five years, he has poured his heart into a mammoth multimedia odyssey called The Tulse Luper Suitcases, a set of five films he refers to as “the history of Uranium”. Never content with towing the artistic line, this month he will continue his pilgrimage to pull cinema into the modern age by donning his VJ hat and remixing each of the elements live as part of the Optronica festival at London’s BFI. When that’s over, he will set about completing Nightwatching, a film about the events that led up to the creation of Rembrandt’s most famous painting “Night Watch”.
Tim Noakes: Some people find your films confusing. Do you bombard your audiences with information to test their intellect or their patience?
Peter Greenaway: They’re not exactly Mike Leigh films are they? With my films you have to take your brain to the cinema, which on the whole entertainment cinema does not want you to do. I feel that cinema is an art form of great sophistication and complication, which is capable of holding multiple meanings. We are now in the information age, so I want to make movies that reflect that. I believe in the pleasure principle, I don’t want to give you a polemic, I want to entertain you, but I want to entertain you in a way that fits into the year 2007. Are you still listening to me?
Yes Peter, go ahead.
So you can see, in answer to your question, let’s for fuck’s sake, bring cinema into the information age. Our toes are a long way away from our nose but for Christ’s sake, we’re all one body. If it upsets you, if it confuses you, too bad, you’re going to have to catch up because this is what’s happening in the rest of the world, why shouldn’t it happen in cinema?
So is modern cinema completely redundant?
Cinema is dead. I’ll give you a date — August 31, 1983, when the remote control was introduced into the living rooms of the world. Cinema is a passive phenomenon. All the really interesting visual artists are now web masters, video artists or they’re manoeuvring into areas that make cinema look like an 18th-century lanternslide lecture.
“Cinema is dead. I’ll give you a date — August 31, 1983, when the remote control was introduced into the living rooms of the world. Cinema is a passive phenomenon. All the really interesting visual artists are now web masters.”
Does cinema spell too much out for its audience?
Well, it’s boring. I don’t think we’ve ever seen any cinema, all we’ve seen is 111 years of illustrated text. Every goddamn film starts life as a text. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings — these aren’t films, these are illustrated books. Even if you think of last week’s most recherché, avant-garde fashionable hit — that comes out of a textbook too. Our lives are zinging away from the bookshop, and I think cinema, if it is to be an adult medium, is going to have to move with the times.
So, is that why you’ve crossed over into VJing?
Yes. I’m looking for a present tense, active cinema that changes every time you see it. We expect that of our websites, we expect that of our television, why shouldn’t we expect it of our cinema? We’ve got all the technology to do that now. I shoot everything on HD of the highest possible quality, so the tape can be re-edited and re-edited. It’s a pain in the butt for cinema distributors but they’ve always been extremely old-fashioned and reactionary so we must kick them up the arse and get them into the 20st Century.
Indeed, but you could argue that people have that option when they buy a DVD.
Yeah, but when people buy DVDs there are two functions. You’re in control of the timeframe. It’s like going to an art gallery. You can go and see the Mona Lisa for 2 seconds, 2 minutes, 2 days if you wish — the timeframe is yours. This timeframe association, which is turning our galleries into cinemas and our cinemas into galleries, is why the DVD is so exciting. But, and there’s a big but here, most people use DVDs as a small-time cinema, they try to replicate their activity, as it would be, in the corner high street cinema. And of course, that’s a real waste of an opportunity. I want to make a product that’s relative to both camps.
“VJing is sort of masturbatory wallpaper. I want to turn it into a sophisticated art form, so it’s not just about wanking off on a wall with a few coloured pictures.”
What are you doing as a VJ that’s so pioneering?
Most of it’s masturbatory isn’t it? VJing is sort of masturbatory wallpaper. I want to turn it into a sophisticated art form, so it’s not just about wanking off on a wall with a few coloured pictures. We’ve made a seven-hour film that we’ve split up into 5,000 loops. Some of the loops are only a couple of seconds long, some of them are 20 seconds long. I can re-arrange these loops any way I wish based on colour coding, shape, texture, raising someone’s arm, crashing into a brick wall. So there are thousands of categories that aren’t simply related to boring old story telling. To control it all I use a huge touch screen, which allows me to manipulate 5000 images over as many screens as I want to. Every time the performance is different.
You also work closely with DJ Radar for these VJ sets. How does your approach differ to working with a DJ to someone like Michael Nyman?
I don’t use music as mood, that’s very ephemeral throwaway to do that. I use as structure. I’m sure you’ll agree that most music is very badly used in cinema. The pictures are laid down first and then the director says to the composer, ‘okay, now I want 45 seconds of suspense, then give me 21 seconds of sadness,’ and most ridiculously of all, ‘give me 40 seconds of silence.’ So the composers are sort of second-rate artists in the cinema; they’re slaves to the director. I’ve never tried to do that. I always try to make it an equal collaboration between the director and the composer. On Eisenstein’s films for example, nobody wrote a note of music, nobody turned a frame of film until they’d worked everything out and they’d found a really good balance for those sorts of associations. Well that’s what I want as well. So I would need to utilise everything that a DJ knows, all about beats, timing and pace, to make it relevant to the production of the pictures I use. I think the whole DJing phenomenon has enormous potential and I’d like to milk it.
How did The Tulse Luper Suitcases project begin?
Well let me give you a bit more of a back-story. I’ve been making films now for 25 years from, screens in aircrafts to screens on telephones. I think cinema language is fantastic but I think it is somehow wasted on cinema. In the early 90s I got very disenchanted with boring old narrative cinema so I began to make all sorts of other investigations related to the information age — to find new ways of doing things. So we manufactured The Tulse Luper Suitcases, not exclusively as a work of cinema but as a series of websites, multiple DVDs and also made them into physical objects — so we had exhibitions and theatre shows. I did a couple of operas too.
It is disorientating and fantastical. How much of the story directly references your own life?
The Tulse Luper Suitcases is what I would call the history of Uranium, the history of the last 60 years of the 20th Century. I am 64. I am 65 next week. So these 65 years are of course my history too. So if you ask me how much is fact and how much is fiction, like everybody who writes history, history can only be subjective. It is autobiographical, it is a history, but on the other hand it’s just an examination of all the different possible ways that I can play with a medium, utilise it for every single form of communication I can. You’re a communicator and so am I, let’s use the communication processes.
“I’ve always admired David Lynch’s notions of paranoia and subject matter. I’m far more interested in form and language than he is, but certainly, something like Blue Velvet, for me, is an absolute classic of very late cinema. I’d love to have made that film myself.”
Do you think the fact that everybody now has the tools to photograph and publish their work to a global audience will benefit or harm the art world?
You and I have been talking now for, what, twenty minutes, I bet you there were more images made in the last twenty minutes all over the world than there was in the whole 14th and 15th Centuries put together. Just think of how many cameras are whirring in the world. Godard famously said that ‘ cinema is the truth at 24 frames a second’. So every time you shoot one second of film you have 24 images. So just think how many images have been made in the last twenty minutes? But do we know how to handle it? Do we really feel we can both understand and manipulate that within any sense and notion of the truth? I doubt it. It’s all a peculiar subjective fiction. And then in a sense, this is one of the major metaphors of The Tulse Luper Suitcases, he could have done this or he could have done that. It’s a whole series of multiple narratives; there cannot be one narrative any longer.
Your approach to the Tulse Luper series is similar, in a way, to David Lynch’s Inland Empire. Do you see similarities between your work?
I’ve always admired his notions of paranoia and subject matter. I think I’m far more interested in form and language than he is, but certainly, something like Blue Velvet, for me, is an absolute classic of very late cinema. I’d love to have made that film myself. I’m not so sure that his particular notions of paranoia are really relevant to the way I feel about the world, but
I think he’s a filmmaker we all ought to respect.
“I like provoking a reaction. Everybody’s fascinated by sex and death, but I think you have to do it with some sense of responsibility. So I’m not here just to shock, but I am here to disturb.”
The New Yorker once said ‘Greenaway is an intellectual bully — he pushes us up to the ground and kicks art in our faces.’ What did you make of that?
Yeah, and somebody else said that he would rather read the New York phone directory five times than see a Greenaway film. So, I obviously do irritate. But then that’s what the obligation of an artist is. I don’t want to just massage your prejudices telling you what you know already, and repeat last night’s experiences.
Why do you people either love or hate your work?
That’s probably a sign of good health isn’t it? You know, I’d be terrified if suddenly everyone loved my cinema. I’d think I’d done something wrong. I don’t think, ‘Ok, now I’m going to shock all those spinsters in Tunbridge Wells.’ That’s really counter-productive. There’s still an awful lot of taboos in the world that need to be tackled. My next movie is going to be out and out pornography. I’m going to make stories about all the blasphemous pornographic stories in the Old Testament. That’s going to upset a few people.
Is that what drives you, upsetting people?
No, I like provoking a reaction. Everybody’s fascinated by sex and death, but I think you have to do it with some sense of responsibility. So I’m not here just to shock, but I am here to disturb.
Are you making a film about necrophilia?
Yeah, that’s true. I could never get the money for it, but now the Russians have just given me €12 million to make it, so finally we shall do it. There are thousands of horror films that have already touched on this phenomenon, so it’s not such a brand new subject. But I think it’s profoundly interesting in an age where we’re now all refashioning our bodies and interfering with genetics. I think necrophilia’s on the cards.
Why are you so preoccupied with sex?
There are really only two subject matters. One is sex and the other phenomenon has to be death, which is the inevitable outcome of everything. So the beginnings and ends, the two non-negotiables are going to always fascinate us. They’re always on the cards. Cinema constantly goes back with it. Balzac suggested that money was a third subject matter, but I think money can easily be subsumed into the other two if only to avoid one and pay for the other. So we always go back again to these two phenomenon. I think it is the life source of most of the novels that we read and write, as well as most of the cinema that we see.
Many people think that your film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and His Lover was all about money, about the Thatcherite years coming to an end.
PG: Well it was about that for one of the characters, who, just like Mrs Thatcher, could pick up a book and say ‘does this book make money?’ He thought that that was the sole purpose of what a book should do. But obviously the big themes about that film were notions of cannibalism. When we’ve eaten up everything that exists in the world then we end up eating one another. It starts off as a metaphor and, of course, at the end of the film becomes a grizzly reality. So it’s about that sort of eating, consumer society eating itself. For the central protagonists it’s all about sex. You know, lust in the lavatory and if that develops into something worthwhile called love. It all goes way beyond Mrs Thatcher’s injustices and stupidities to something far more potent and valuable for the way we all try as desperately as we can to organise our lives.
Do you consider that as your greatest work?
Well it’s the most popular, something like 30 million people have seen it, which isn’t bad for a European art house movie. Journalists sometimes play this game that film directors are only allowed to make three good films in his life. Of course I haven’t made them yet, that’s the first thing I’d like to say, but if somebody really pushed me I’m sure The Cook and The Thief would be one. The Draughtsman’s Contract would be probably the first one, that was my calling card. It was dearly loved by French intellectuals. And then the third one would probably be Ewan McGregor in The Pillow Book.
Why do you think those films crossed over and other didn’t?
If you get the right distribution, maybe you can hit the right zeitgeist. For example The Cook is fantastically popular in Russia, even taxi drivers in Moscow could quote the script back at me. They took it to be a sort of paradigm of the collapse of Russia, the moving in of capitalism and the notions of personalised greed. I couldn’t double-guess that was going to happen.
Why do you continue to work so relentlessly?
It’s just a fascination. I don’t really know how to take holidays, because I’m on holiday all the time.
