Peter Greenaway

Last updated

Peter Greenaway
CBE
Peter greenaway.jpg
Greenaway in 2007
Born (1942-04-05) 5 April 1942 (age 82)
Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales
Occupation(s) Film director, screenwriter, visual artist
Years active1962–present
Notable work The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)

Peter Greenaway, CBE (born 5 April 1942 [1] ) is a British film director, screenwriter and artist. His films are noted for the distinct influence of 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.

Contents

Early life

Greenaway was born in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, [2] to a teacher mother and a builder's merchant father. [3] Greenaway's family had relocated to Wales prior to his birth to escape the Blitz. 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[ citation needed ] and later Forest School in nearby Walthamstow. [4]

At an early age Greenaway decided on becoming a painter. He became interested in European cinema, focusing first on the films of Ingmar Bergman, and then on the French nouvelle vague filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and, most especially, Alain Resnais. Greenaway has said that Resnais's 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). [5] He now lives in Amsterdam. [6]

Career

1962–1999

Greenaway at the 44th Venice Film Festival (1987) Greenaway 01.jpg
Greenaway at the 44th Venice Film Festival (1987)

In 1962, Greenaway began studies at Walthamstow College of Art, where a fellow student was musician Ian Dury (later cast in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover ). Greenaway trained as a muralist for three years; he made his first film, Death of Sentiment, a churchyard furniture essay filmed in four large London cemeteries. In 1965, he joined the Central Office of Information (COI), where he went on to work for fifteen years as a film editor and director. In that time he made a series of experimental films, starting with Train (1966), footage of the last steam trains 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. In the late 1970s, he made Vertical Features Remake and A Walk Through H. [7] The former is an examination of various arithmetical editing structures, and the latter is a journey through the maps of a fictitious country.[ citation needed ]

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. [8]

In 1989, Greenaway collaborated with artist Tom Phillips on a television serial A TV Dante , dramatising the first few cantos of Dante's 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).[ citation needed ]

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. [9]

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.[ citation needed ]

He also contributed to Visions of Europe , a short film collection by different European Union directors; his British entry is The European Showerbath . Nightwatching and Rembrandt's J'Accuse are two films on 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 . [10]

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.[ citation needed ]

On 12 October 2007, he created the multimedia installation Peopling the Palaces at Venaria Reale at the Royal Palace of Venaria, which animated the Palace with 100 videoprojectors. [11]

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?" [12]

On 3 May 2016, he received a Honoris Causa doctorate from the University of San Martín, Argentina. [13]

Nine Classical Paintings Revisited

In 2006, Greenaway began a series of digital video installations, Nine Classical Paintings Revisited, with his exploration of Rembrandt's Night Watch in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. On 30 June 2008, after much negotiation, Greenaway staged a one-night performance 'remixing' da Vinci's The Last Supper in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie [14] 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.[ citation needed ]

Greenaway exhibited his digital exploration of The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese as part of the 2009 Venice Biennial. An arts writer for The New York Times called it "possibly the best unmanned art history lecture you'll ever experience," while acknowledging that some viewers might respond to it as "mediocre art, Disneyfied kitsch or a flamboyant denigration of site-specific video installation." The 50-minute presentation, set to a soundtrack, incorporates closeup images of faces from the painting along with animated diagrams revealing compositional relations among the figures. These images are projected onto and around the replica of the painting that now stands at the original site, within the Palladian architecture of the Benedictine refectory on San Giorgio Maggiore. The soundtrack features music and imagined dialogue scripted by Greenaway for the 126 "wedding guests, servants, onlookers and wedding crashers" depicted in the painting, consisting of small talk and banal chatter that culminates in reaction to the miraculous transformation of water to wine, according to the Gospels the first miracle performed by Jesus. Picasso's Guernica , Seurat's Grande Jatte , works by Jackson Pollock and Claude Monet, Velázquez's Las Meninas and Michelangelo's The Last Judgment are possible series subjects. [15]

Films

Features

Shorts

Documentaries and mockumentaries

Television

Exhibitions

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ornella Muti</span> Italian actress (born 1955)

Francesca Romana Rivelli, professionally known as Ornella Muti, is an Italian actress.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jordi Mollà</span> Spanish actor and artist

Jordi Mollà Perales is a Spanish actor, artist, writer, and filmmaker. He has been nominated three times for the Goya Award for Best Actor for The Lucky Star (1997), Second Skin (1999), and El cónsul de Sodoma (1999).

Tulse Luper is a fictional character, created by film director Peter Greenaway.

"Born in Newport in 1911, Luper was, according to Greenaway's introduction to the exhibition catalogue, in Moab, Utah in 1928 when "Uranium was 'discovered' there. He was in Antwerp in 1939 when the Germans invaded Belgium. He was in Rome when the Americans arrived in 1944. He met Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest in 1945 and followed him to Moscow in the 1950s. He was at an East-West German checkpoint in 1963". The 92 suitcases thus tell Luper's story from 1928 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, sketching not so much the biography of one man as the story of a century related through some of its key events."

<i>The Draughtsmans Contract</i> 1982 British film

The Draughtsman's Contract is a 1982 British period comedy-drama film written and directed by Peter Greenaway – his first conventional feature film. Originally produced for Channel 4, the film is a form of murder mystery, set in rural Wiltshire, England in 1694. The period setting is reflected in Michael Nyman's score, which borrows widely from Henry Purcell, and in the extensive and elaborate costume designs. The action was shot on location in the house and formal gardens of Groombridge Place. The film received the Grand Prix of the Belgian Film Critics Association.

The Tulse Luper Suitcases is a multimedia project by film maker and artist Peter Greenaway, initially intended to comprise four films, a 16-episode TV series, and 92 DVDs, as well as websites, CD-ROMs and books. The project documented the imagined life of a fictional character called Tulse Luper.

<i>Nightwatching</i> 2007 film by Peter Greenaway

Nightwatching is a 2007 film about the artist Rembrandt and the creation of his 1642 painting The Night Watch. The film is directed by Peter Greenaway and stars Martin Freeman as Rembrandt, with Eva Birthistle as his wife Saskia van Uylenburg, Jodhi May as his lover Geertje Dircx, and Emily Holmes as his other lover Hendrickje Stoffels. Reinier van Brummelen is the director of photography. James Willcock, known for his esoteric sets, is the art director.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen</span> Art museum in Rotterdam, Netherlands

Municipal Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is an art museum in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The name of the museum is derived from its two most important donors, Frans Jacob Otto Boijmans and Daniël George van Beuningen. The museum is located at the Museumpark in the district Rotterdam Centrum, close to the Kunsthal and the Natural History Museum.

Patrick Kennedy is an English actor and director.

<i>La Traversée de Paris</i> (album) 1989 studio album by Michael Nyman

La Traversée de Paris(The Crossing of Paris) is an album by the Michael Nyman Band featuring music composed by Michael Nyman for an audio-visual exhibition of the same name which took place at the Grande Arche de la Défense from July to December 1989 to celebrate the bicentennial of the French Revolution.

Wouter Barendrecht was a film producer. With Michael J. Werner, Barendrecht was the co-chairman of Fortissimo Films, a company he founded in 1991 in Amsterdam.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Benjamin Davies (actor)</span> Scottish actor

Benjamin John Gareth Davies is a Scottish actor.

Vertical Features Remake (1978) is a film by Peter Greenaway. It portrays the work of a fictional Institute of Reclamation and Restoration as they attempt to assemble raw footage taken by ornithologist Tulse Luper into a short film, in accordance with his notes and structuralist film theory. The footage consists mostly of vertical landscape features, such as trees and posts, shot in the English landscape. It contains four restoration attempts, each with a documentary-like introduction.

<i>The Essential Michael Nyman Band</i> 1992 studio album by Michael Nyman

The Essential Michael Nyman Band is a studio album featuring a collection of music by Michael Nyman written for the films of Peter Greenaway and newly performed by the Michael Nyman Band. It is the seventeenth album release by Nyman. The album features liner notes by Annette Morreau, who describes the album as "a summation and digest of ten years of progress in the performance of music by a composer -- a composer with whom, so evidently, a group of friends and expert musicians intimately identify their total commitment, virtuosity, and joyous enthusiasm."

<i>The Composers Cut Series Vol. II: Nyman/Greenaway Revisited</i> 2006 studio album by Michael Nyman

The Composer's Cut Series Vol. II: Nyman/Greenaway Revisited is the second in a series of albums, all released on the same day, by Michael Nyman to feature concert versions of film scores, in this case, films of Peter Greenaway, and his 52nd release overall. The album is similar to The Essential Michael Nyman Band, although a number of tracks are on only one album or the other. In spite of being recorded in 1992, with the same lineup, Memorial is not the same performance as the one that appears on The Essential Michael Nyman Band or After Extra Time, which was recorded in Tokyo. This performance was recorded in London and is slightly less aggressively performed.

<i>Goltzius and the Pelican Company</i> 2012 film

Goltzius and the Pelican Company is a 2012 historical film by writer-director Peter Greenaway.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roberto Citran</span> Italian actor (born 1955)

Roberto Citran is an Italian actor.

Daniël (Daan) van Golden was a Dutch artist, who has been active as a painter, photographer, collagist, installation artist, wall painter and graphic artist. He is known for his meticulous paintings of motives and details of everyday life and every day images.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kees Timmer</span> Dutch artist (1903–1978)

Cornelis Timmer was a Dutch artist, who worked as sculptor, graphic artist, monumental artist, wall painter, painter, draftsman, jeweler, and mosaicist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann</span> American art historian

Egbert Haverkamp-BegemannOON was a Dutch American art historian and professor.

Borut Kržišnik is a Slovenian composer.

References

  1. ↑ Schneider, Steven Jay, ed. (2007). 501 Movie Directors. London: Cassell Illustrated. p. 458. ISBN   9781844035731. OCLC   1347156402.
  2. ↑ Abbott, Spencer H. (6 June 1997). "Interview with Peter Greenaway". Archived from the original on 26 February 2008. Retrieved 15 February 2008.
  3. ↑ "Peter Greenaway Biography (1942–)". Filmreference.Com. 2011. Retrieved 12 January 2011.
  4. ↑ BAFTA A Life in Pictures: Peter Greenaway: an interview with Ian Haydn Smith for the British Academy Film Awards, 16 April 2014. [Retrieved 20 May 2024]
  5. ↑ Film-makers on film: Peter Greenaway: an interview with John Whitley in The Daily Telegraph, 14 June 2004. [Retrieved 27 February 2022]
  6. ↑ In the beginning was the image: an interview with Peter Greenaway: an interview with Lillian Crawford for the British Film Institute, 17 November 2022. [Retrieved 20 May 2024]
  7. ↑ Walk Through H, A (1978) BFI Screenonline
  8. ↑ Close your eyes and listen: Michael Nyman has a problem, and it's nothing to do with turning 50. It's Peter Greenaway and all those movies.: interview with Michael Nyman by Mark Pappenheim The Independent, 1 December 1993.
  9. ↑ Peter Greenaway: Professor of Film at The European Graduate School . Retrieved 20 May 2024.
  10. ↑ Morgan, Nesta. "nightwatching". Film&festivals . 2 (2). United Kingdom: Wallflower Press / Film Culture Ltd.: 5. ISSN   1755-5485.
  11. ↑ "Peopling The Palaces at Venaria Reale – Enciclopedia del cinema in Piemonte" . Retrieved 12 February 2011.[ dead link ]
  12. ↑ Laurie, Timothy (2013), "Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice", Media International Australia, 147: 171, doi:10.1177/1329878X1314700134, S2CID   149797284
  13. ↑ "Peter Greenaway llega a la UNSAM » Noticias UNSAM". Archived from the original on 10 January 2017. Retrieved 9 January 2017.
  14. ↑ "Leonardo's Last Supper" Archived 21 February 2009 at the Wayback Machine , Peter Greenaway's official site.
  15. ↑ Roberta Smith, "In Venice, Peter Greenaway Takes Veronese's Figures Out to Play", The New York Times 21 June 2009 online.
  16. ↑ "TULSE LUPER 'A LIFE IN SUITCASES' BY PETER GREENAWAY". Luperpedia Foundation. 2011. Archived from the original on 13 February 2016. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  17. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Peter Greenaway". Luperpedia Foundation. 2011. Archived from the original on 29 January 2016. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  18. ↑ "3x3D". imdb. 2013. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  19. ↑ "The Sea in Their Blood (1983)". imdb. 2016. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  20. ↑ Greenaway, Peter. "Act of God". Archived from the original on 19 January 2016. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  21. ↑ Aitken, Ian (18 October 2013). Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film 3-Volume Set. Routledge. pp. 2–3. ISBN   9781135206208.
  22. ↑ Greenaway, Peter (1991). The physical self : a selection by Peter Greenaway from the collections of the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam = De keuze van Peter Greenaway uit de collecties van Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 27/10/91-12/1/92. Rotterdam: Het Museum. ISBN   90-6918-088-X.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.