Peter Greenaway

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Peter Greenaway

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
(1989)

Peter Greenaway,

Renaissance and Baroque painting, and Mannerism painting
in particular. Common traits in his films are the scenic composition and illumination and the contrasts of costume and nudity, nature and architecture, furniture and people, sexual pleasure and painful death.

Early life

Greenaway was born in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales,[1] to a teacher mother and a builder's merchant father.[2] Greenaway's family had relocated to Wales prior to his birth to escape the Nazi bombings of London. They returned to the London area at the end of World War II and settled in Woodford, then part of Essex. He attended Churchfields Junior School and later Forest School in nearby Walthamstow.

At an early age Greenaway decided on becoming a painter. He became interested in European cinema, focusing first on the films of

Last Year in Marienbad (1961) had been the most important influence upon his own filmmaking (and he himself established a close working relationship with that film's cinematographer Sacha Vierny).[3] He now lives in Amsterdam
.

Career

1962–1999

Greenaway at the 44th Venice Film Festival (1987)

In 1962, Greenaway began studies at

Waterloo station (situated behind the COI), edited to a musique concrète composition. Tree (1966) is a homage to the embattled tree growing in concrete outside the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank in London. By the late 1970s he was confident and ambitious, and made Vertical Features Remake
and A Walk Through H. The former is an examination of various arithmetical editing structures, and the latter is a journey through the maps of a fictitious country.

In 1980, Greenaway delivered The Falls (his first feature-length film) – a mammoth, fantastical, absurdist encyclopaedia of flight-associated material all relating to ninety-two victims of what is referred to as the Violent Unknown Event (VUE). In the 1980s his cinema flowered in his best-known films, The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), The Belly of an Architect (1987), Drowning by Numbers (1988), and his most successful film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). Greenaway's most familiar musical collaborator during this period is composer Michael Nyman, who has scored several films.

In 1989, Greenaway collaborated with artist

Inferno. In the 1990s he presented Prospero's Books (1991), the controversial The Baby of Mâcon (1993), The Pillow Book (1996), and 8½ Women
(1999).

In the early 1990s Greenaway wrote ten opera

libretti known as the Death of a Composer series, dealing with the commonalities of the deaths of ten composers from Anton Webern to John Lennon; however, the other composers are fictitious, and one is a character from The Falls. In 1995, Louis Andriessen completed the sixth libretto, Rosa – A Horse Drama. He is currently professor of cinema studies at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee
, Switzerland.

2000–present

Greenaway presented the ambitious The Tulse Luper Suitcases, a multimedia project that resulted in three films, a website, two books, a touring exhibition, and a shorter feature which reworked the material of the first three films.

He also contributed to

Rembrandt, released respectively in 2007 and 2008. Nightwatching is the first feature in the series "Dutch Masters", with the second project titled as Goltzius and the Pelican Company.[4]

On 17 June 2005, Greenaway appeared for his first VJ performance during an art club evening in Amsterdam, Netherlands, with music by DJ Serge Dodwell (aka Radar), as a backdrop, 'VJ' Greenaway used for his set a special system consisting of a large plasma screen with laser controlled touchscreen to project the ninety-two Tulse Luper stories on the twelve screens of "Club 11", mixing the images live. This was later reprised at the Optronica festival, London.

On 12 October 2007, he created the multimedia installation

Royal Palace of Venaria, which animated the Palace with 100 videoprojectors.[5]

Greenaway was interviewed for Clive Meyer's Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice (2011), and voiced strong criticisms of film theory as distinct from discussions of other media: "Are you sufficiently happy with cinema as a thinking medium if you are only talking to one person?"[6]

On 3 May 2016, he received a Honoris Causa doctorate from the University of San Martín, Argentina.[7]

Nine Classical Paintings Revisited

In 2006, Greenaway began a series of digital

Santa Maria delle Grazie[8] in Milan to a select audience of dignitaries. The performance consisted of superimposing digital imagery and projections onto the painting with music from the composer Marco Robino
.

Greenaway exhibited his digital exploration of

Films

Features

Shorts

  • Death of Sentiment (1962)
  • Tree (1966)
  • Train (1966)
  • Revolution (1967)
  • 5 Postcards from Capital Cities (1967)
  • Intervals (1969)
  • Erosion (1971)
  • H Is for House (1973)
  • Windows (1975)
  • Water Wrackets (1975)
  • Water (1975)
  • Goole by Numbers (1976)
  • Dear Phone (1978)
  • Vertical Features Remake (1978)
  • A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (1978)
  • 1–100 (1978)
  • Making a Splash (1984)
  • Inside Rooms: 26 Bathrooms, London & Oxfordshire (1985)
  • Hubert Bals Handshake (1989)
  • Rosa: La monnaie de munt (1992)[11]
  • Peter Greenaway (1995) - segment of Lumière and Company
  • The Bridge Celebration (1997)[11]
  • The Man in the Bath (2001)
  • European Showerbath (2004) - segment of Visions of Europe
  • Castle Amerongen
    (2011)
  • Just in Time (2013) - segment of 3x3D[11][12]

Documentaries and mockumentaries

  • Eddie Kid (1978)
  • Cut Above the Rest (1978)
  • Zandra Rhodes (1979)
  • Women Artists (1979)
  • Leeds Castle (1979)
  • Lacock Village (1980)
  • Country Diary (1980)
  • Terence Conran (1981)
  • Four American Composers (1983)
  • The Coastline (also known as The Sea in their Blood) (1983)[11][13]
  • Fear of Drowning (1988)
  • The Reitdiep Journeys (2001)[11]
  • Rembrandt's J'Accuse
    (2008)
  • The Marriage (2009)[11]
  • Atomic Bombs on the Planet Earth (2011)[11]

Television

  • Act of God (1980)[14][15]
  • Death in the Seine (French TV, 1988)
  • A TV Dante (mini-series, 1989)
  • M Is for Man, Music, Mozart (1991)
  • A Walk Through Prospero's Library (1992)
  • Darwin (French TV, 1993)
  • The Death of a Composer: Rosa, a Horse Drama (1999)

Exhibitions

  • The Physical Self, Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1991)[16]
  • Le bruit des nuages (as curator), Louvre Museum, Paris (1992)
  • 100 Objects to represent the World (1992) at the
    Hofburg Imperial Palace
    Vienna.
  • Stairs 1 Geneva (1995)
  • Flyga över vatten/Flying over water, Malmö Konsthall (16/9 2000 – 14/1 2001)
  • Peopling the Palaces at Venaria Reale, Palace of Venaria (2007)
  • Heavy Water, Chelouche Gallery, Tel Aviv (2011)
  • Sex & The Sea, Maritiem Museum, Rotterdam (2013)
  • The Towers/Lucca Hubris, Lucca (2013)

References

  1. ^ Abbott, Spencer H. (6 June 1997). "Interview with Peter Greenaway". Archived from the original on 26 February 2008. Retrieved 15 February 2008.
  2. ^ "Peter Greenaway Biography (1942–)". Filmreference.Com. 2011. Retrieved 12 January 2011.
  3. ^ Film-makers on film: Peter Greenaway: an interview with John Whitley in The Daily Telegraph, 14 June 2004. [Retrieved 27 February 2022]
  4. ISSN 1755-5485
    .
  5. ^ "Peopling The Palaces at Venaria Reale – Enciclopedia del cinema in Piemonte". Retrieved 12 February 2011.[dead link]
  6. S2CID 149797284
  7. ^ "Peter Greenaway llega a la UNSAM » Noticias UNSAM". Archived from the original on 10 January 2017. Retrieved 9 January 2017.
  8. ^ "Leonardo's Last Supper" Archived 21 February 2009 at the Wayback Machine, Peter Greenaway's official site.
  9. ^ Roberta Smith, "In Venice, Peter Greenaway Takes Veronese's Figures Out to Play", The New York Times 21 June 2009 online.
  10. ^ "TULSE LUPER 'A LIFE IN SUITCASES' BY PETER GREENAWAY". Luperpedia Foundation. 2011. Archived from the original on 13 February 2016. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  11. ^ a b c d e f g "Peter Greenaway". Luperpedia Foundation. 2011. Archived from the original on 29 January 2016. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  12. ^ "3x3D". imdb. 2013. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  13. ^ "The Sea in Their Blood (1983)". imdb. 2016. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  14. ^ Greenaway, Peter. "Act of God". Archived from the original on 19 January 2016. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  15. .
  16. .

External links