Peter Greenaway

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Jump to: navigation, searchNot to be confused with Peter Van Greenaway.

Peter Greenaway, CBE

Peter Greenaway

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, searchNot to be confused with Peter Van Greenaway.

Peter Greenaway, CBE

Born5 April 1942 (age 67)Newport, Wales

OccupationFilm director, Painter

Peter Greenaway, CBE (born 5 April 1942, Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales [1] ) is a British film director. He is currently professor of cinema studies at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Contents

[hide] 1 Early life 2 Work in film and the arts 3 Later work in film and the arts

o 3.1 'Nine Classical Paintings Revisited'

4 Films 5 Shorts 6 Documentaries and mockumentaries 7 Television 8 Exhibitions 9 References

10 External links

[edit] Early life

Peter Greenaway's family left South Wales when he was three years old (they had moved there to begin with to avoid the Blitz) and settled in Essex, England. He attended Forest School in North-East London. At an early age Greenaway decided on becoming a painter. He became

interested in European cinema, focusing first on the films of Bergman, and then on the French nouvelle vague film-makers such as Godard, and most especially, Resnais.

[edit] Work in film and the arts

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), working there fifteen years as a film editor and director. In that time he created a filmography of experimental films, starting with Train (1966), footage of the last steam trains at Waterloo station, (situated behind the COI), edited to a musique concrete composition. Tree (1966), is an homage to the embattled tree growing in concrete outside the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank in London. By the 1970s he was confident and ambitious and made Vertical Features Remake and A Walk Through H. The former is an examination of variations of arithmetical editing structure, and the latter is a journey through the maps of a fictitious country.

The visual hallmark of Greenaway's cinema is the heavy influence of Renaissance painting, and Flemish painting in particular, notably in scenic composition and illumination and the concomitant contrasts of costume and nudity, nature and architecture, furniture and people, sexual pleasure and painful death. His most familiar musical collaborator is composer Michael Nyman, who has scored several of Greenaway's films.

In 1980, Greenaway delivered The Falls (his first feature-length film) – a mammoth, fantastical, absurdist encyclopedia of flight-associated material all relating to ninety-two victims of what is referred to as the Violent Unknown Event (VUE). In the 1980s, Greenaway's 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 (and controversial) film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989).

In 1989, he 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 the visually spectacular Prospero's Books (1991), the controversial The Baby of Mâcon (1993), The Pillow Book (1996),

and 8½ Women (1999).

[edit] Later work in film and the arts

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.

Greenaway has completed the artistically ambitious, The Tulse Luper Suitcases, a multimedia project with innovative film techniques that resulted in five films. He also contributed to Visions of Europe, a short film collection by different European Union directors; his British entry, is The European Showerbath. Nightwatching, a film on Rembrandt was released in 2007. Nightwatching is the first feature in the series "Dutch Masters", with the next project titled as "Goltzius".[2]

On 17 June 2005, Greenaway appeared for his first VJ performance during an art club evening in Amsterdam, the 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 Peopling the Palaces at the Royal Palace of Venaria that will remain open for 3 year and that animate the Palace with 100 videoprojectors.

[edit] 'Nine Classical Paintings Revisited'

In 2006, Greenaway began an ambitious 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 [3] 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.

The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese (mid-16th century)

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.[4]

[edit] Films

The Falls (1980, 185 min) The Draughtsman's Contract (1982, 103

min) A Zed & Two Noughts (1985, 115 min) The Belly of an Architect (1987, 120 min) Drowning by Numbers (1988, 118 min) The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover

(1989, 124 min) Prospero's Books (1991, 129 min) The Baby of Mâcon (1993, 122 min) The Pillow Book (1996, 126 min) 8½ Women (1999, 118 min) The Tulse Luper Suitcases , Part 1: The

Moab Story (2003, 127 min) The Tulse Luper Suitcases , Part 2: Vaux to

the Sea (2003, 108 min) The Tulse Luper Suitcases , Part 3: From

Sark to the Finish (2003, 120 min) Nightwatching (2007) Tales from the Nursery (2009/TBC) Untitled Old Testament Project (2010/TBC) Untitled Japanese Ghost Story Project

(2011/TBC) Goltzius (TBA) The Love Child (TBA)

Untitled Science-Fiction Project (TBA) Augsbergenfeld (TBA) 55 Men on Horseback (TBA)

[edit] Shorts

Death of Sentiment (1962, 8 min) Tree (1966, 16 min) Train (1966, 5 min) Revolution (1967, 8 min) 5 Postcards From Capital Cities (1967, 35

min) Intervals (1969, 7 min) Erosion (1971, 27 min) H Is for House (1973, 10 min) Windows (1975, 4 min) Water Wrackets (1975, 12 min) Water (1975, 5 min) Goole by Numbers (1976, 40 min) Dear Phone (1978, 17 min) Vertical Features Remake (1978, 45 min) A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of

an Ornithologist (1978, 41 min) 1-100 (1978, 4 min) Making a Splash (1984, 25 min) Inside Rooms: 26 Bathrooms, London &

Oxfordshire (1985, 26 min) Hubert Bals Handshake (1989, 5 min) Rosa (1992, 15 min) Lumière et compagnie (fragment "Peter

Greenaway", 1996, 55 sec)

The Bridge (1997, 12 min) The Man in the Bath (2001, 7 min) Visions of Europe (fragment "European

Showerbath", 2004, 5 min)

[edit] Documentaries and mockumentaries

Eddie Kid (1978, 5 min) Cut Above the Rest (1978, 5 min) Zandra Rhodes (1979, 13 min) Women Artists (1979, 5 min) Leeds Castle (1979, 5 min) Lacock Village (1980, 5 min) Country Diary (1980, 5 min) Terence Conran (1981, 15 min) Four American Composers (1983, 220 min) The Coastline (1983, 26 min) Fear of Drowning (1988) Rembrandt's J'accuse (2008, 80 and 100

min)

[edit] Television

Act of God (1980) [5] Death in the Seine (French TV, 1988) [6] A TV Dante (mini-series, 1989) [7] M Is for Man, Music, Mozart (1991)[8] A Walk Through Prospero's Library (1992)

[9] Darwin (French TV, 1993) [10] The Death of a Composer: Rosa, a Horse

Drama (1999, 90 mins)

[edit] Exhibitions

1991 The Physical Self, museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam

100 Objects to represent the World (1992) at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Hofburg Imperial Palace Vienna.

Stairs 1 Geneva (1995) "Peopling the Palaces", Royal Palace of

Venaria (2007)

[edit] References

1. ̂ Abbott, Spencer H. (1997-06-06). "Interview with Peter Greenaway". http://users.skynet.be/chrisrenson-makemovies/Greenaw3.htm. Retrieved 2008-02-15.

2. ̂ Morgan, Nesta. "nightwatching". film&festivals (United Kingdom: Wallflower Press, Film Culture Ltd.) 2 (2): 5. ISSN 1755-5485.

3. ̂ "Leonardo's Last Supper", Peter Greenaway's official site.

4. ̂ Roberta Smith, ”In Venice, Peter Greenaway Takes Veronese's Figures Out to Play,” New York Times 21 June 21 2009 online.

5. ̂ Act of God at the Internet Movie Database 6. ̂ Death in the Seine at the Internet Movie

Database 7. ̂ A TV Dante at the Internet Movie

Database 8. ̂ M Is for Man, Music, Mozart at the

Internet Movie Database 9. ̂ A Walk Through Prospero's Library at the

Internet Movie Database 10. ̂ Darwin at the Internet Movie

Database

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Peter Greenaway

The Official Peter Greenaway Site The Cinematic Endeavours of Peter

Greenaway The Early Films of Peter Greenaway (BFI

site) Peter Greenaway biography and credits at

the British Film Institute's Screenonline Greenaway Fan Site Peter Greenaway at the Internet Movie

Database "Inside Peter Greenaway’s Kitchen" by

Manuela Gherghel (master's thesis in English)

"Greenaway & Food" by Danilo Jon Scotta (in Revue EDIT   : )

Peter Greenaway Graphis interview March 2000

Interview with Peter Greenaway on 'Pillow Book'

Interview with Peter Greenaway on 'The Medium is the Message

Peter Greenaway VJ performance Video interview with Peter Greenaway

(May 2006) Audio interview with Peter Greenaway

about the Nightwatch project for Electric Sheep Magazine and Resonance FM

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Greenaway"

Born5 April 1942 (age 67)Newport, Wales

Occupation Film director, Painter

Peter Greenaway, CBE (born 5 April 1942, Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales [1] ) is a British film director. He is currently professor of cinema studies at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Contents

[hide] 1 Early life 2 Work in film and the arts 3 Later work in film and the

arts o 3.1 'Nine Classical

Paintings Revisited' 4 Films 5 Shorts 6 Documentaries and

mockumentaries 7 Television 8 Exhibitions 9 References

10 External links

[edit] Early life

Peter Greenaway's family left South Wales when he was three years old (they had moved there to begin with to avoid the Blitz) and settled in Essex, England. He attended Forest School in North-East London. At an early age Greenaway decided on becoming a painter. He became interested in European cinema, focusing first on the films of Bergman, and then on the French nouvelle vague film-makers such as Godard, and most especially, Resnais.

[edit] Work in film and the arts

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), working there fifteen years as a film editor and director. In that time

he created a filmography of experimental films, starting with Train (1966), footage of the last steam trains at Waterloo station, (situated behind the COI), edited to a musique concrete composition. Tree (1966), is an homage to the embattled tree growing in concrete outside the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank in London. By the 1970s he was confident and ambitious and made Vertical Features Remake and A Walk Through H. The former is an examination of variations of arithmetical editing structure, and the latter is a journey through the maps of a fictitious country.

The visual hallmark of Greenaway's cinema is the heavy influence of Renaissance painting, and Flemish painting in particular, notably in scenic composition and illumination and the concomitant contrasts of costume and nudity, nature and architecture, furniture and people, sexual pleasure and painful death. His most familiar musical collaborator is composer Michael Nyman, who has scored several of Greenaway's films.

In 1980, Greenaway delivered The Falls (his first feature-length film) – a mammoth, fantastical, absurdist encyclopedia of flight-associated material all relating to ninety-two victims of what is referred to as the Violent Unknown Event (VUE). In the 1980s, Greenaway's 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 (and controversial) film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989).

In 1989, he 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 the visually spectacular Prospero's Books (1991), the controversial The Baby of Mâcon (1993), The Pillow Book (1996), and 8½ Women (1999).

[edit] Later work in film and the arts

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.

Greenaway has completed the artistically ambitious, The Tulse Luper Suitcases, a multimedia project with innovative film techniques that resulted in five films. He also contributed to Visions of Europe, a short film collection by different European Union directors; his British entry, is The European Showerbath. Nightwatching, a film on Rembrandt was released in 2007. Nightwatching is the first feature in the series "Dutch Masters", with the next project titled as "Goltzius".[2]

On 17 June 2005, Greenaway appeared for his first VJ performance during an art club evening in Amsterdam, the 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 Peopling the Palaces at the Royal Palace of Venaria that will remain open for 3 year and that animate the Palace with 100 videoprojectors.

[edit] 'Nine Classical Paintings Revisited'

In 2006, Greenaway began an ambitious 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 [3] 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.

The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese (mid-16th century)

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.[4]

[edit] Films

The Falls (1980, 185 min) The Draughtsman's Contract (1982, 103 min) A Zed & Two Noughts (1985, 115 min) The Belly of an Architect (1987, 120 min)

Drowning by Numbers (1988, 118 min) The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989, 124

min) Prospero's Books (1991, 129 min) The Baby of Mâcon (1993, 122 min) The Pillow Book (1996, 126 min) 8½ Women (1999, 118 min) The Tulse Luper Suitcases , Part 1: The Moab Story

(2003, 127 min) The Tulse Luper Suitcases , Part 2: Vaux to the Sea

(2003, 108 min) The Tulse Luper Suitcases , Part 3: From Sark to the

Finish (2003, 120 min) Nightwatching (2007) Tales from the Nursery (2009/TBC) Untitled Old Testament Project (2010/TBC) Untitled Japanese Ghost Story Project (2011/TBC) Goltzius (TBA) The Love Child (TBA) Untitled Science-Fiction Project (TBA) Augsbergenfeld (TBA) 55 Men on Horseback (TBA)

[edit] Shorts

Death of Sentiment (1962, 8 min) Tree (1966, 16 min) Train (1966, 5 min) Revolution (1967, 8 min) 5 Postcards From Capital Cities (1967, 35 min) Intervals (1969, 7 min)

Erosion (1971, 27 min) H Is for House (1973, 10 min) Windows (1975, 4 min) Water Wrackets (1975, 12 min) Water (1975, 5 min) Goole by Numbers (1976, 40 min) Dear Phone (1978, 17 min) Vertical Features Remake (1978, 45 min) A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an

Ornithologist (1978, 41 min) 1-100 (1978, 4 min) Making a Splash (1984, 25 min) Inside Rooms: 26 Bathrooms, London & Oxfordshire

(1985, 26 min) Hubert Bals Handshake (1989, 5 min) Rosa (1992, 15 min) Lumière et compagnie (fragment "Peter Greenaway",

1996, 55 sec) The Bridge (1997, 12 min) The Man in the Bath (2001, 7 min) Visions of Europe (fragment "European Showerbath",

2004, 5 min)

[edit] Documentaries and mockumentaries

Eddie Kid (1978, 5 min) Cut Above the Rest (1978, 5 min) Zandra Rhodes (1979, 13 min) Women Artists (1979, 5 min) Leeds Castle (1979, 5 min) Lacock Village (1980, 5 min)

Country Diary (1980, 5 min) Terence Conran (1981, 15 min) Four American Composers (1983, 220 min) The Coastline (1983, 26 min) Fear of Drowning (1988) Rembrandt's J'accuse (2008, 80 and 100 min)

[edit] Television

Act of God (1980) [5] Death in the Seine (French TV, 1988) [6] A TV Dante (mini-series, 1989) [7] M Is for Man, Music, Mozart (1991)[8] A Walk Through Prospero's Library (1992) [9] Darwin (French TV, 1993) [10] The Death of a Composer: Rosa, a Horse Drama

(1999, 90 mins)

[edit] Exhibitions

1991 The Physical Self, museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam

100 Objects to represent the World (1992) at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Hofburg Imperial Palace Vienna.

Stairs 1 Geneva (1995) "Peopling the Palaces", Royal Palace of Venaria

(2007)

[edit] References

1. ̂ Abbott, Spencer H. (1997-06-06). "Interview with Peter Greenaway". http://users.skynet.be/chrisrenson-makemovies/Greenaw3.htm. Retrieved 2008-02-15.

2. ̂ Morgan, Nesta. "nightwatching". film&festivals (United Kingdom: Wallflower Press, Film Culture Ltd.) 2 (2): 5. ISSN 1755-5485.

3. ̂ "Leonardo's Last Supper", Peter Greenaway's official site.

4. ̂ Roberta Smith, ”In Venice, Peter Greenaway Takes Veronese's Figures Out to Play,” New York Times 21 June 21 2009 online.

5. ̂ Act of God at the Internet Movie Database 6. ̂ Death in the Seine at the Internet Movie Database 7. ̂ A TV Dante at the Internet Movie Database 8. ̂ M Is for Man, Music, Mozart at the Internet Movie

Database 9. ̂ A Walk Through Prospero's Library at the Internet

Movie Database 10. ̂ Darwin at the Internet Movie Database

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Peter Greenaway

The Official Peter Greenaway Site The Cinematic Endeavours of Peter Greenaway The Early Films of Peter Greenaway (BFI site) Peter Greenaway biography and credits at the British

Film Institute's Screenonline Greenaway Fan Site Peter Greenaway at the Internet Movie Database

"Inside Peter Greenaway’s Kitchen" by Manuela Gherghel (master's thesis in English)

"Greenaway & Food" by Danilo Jon Scotta (in Revue EDIT   : )

Peter Greenaway Graphis interview March 2000 Interview with Peter Greenaway on 'Pillow Book' Interview with Peter Greenaway on 'The Medium is

the Message Peter Greenaway VJ performance Video interview with Peter Greenaway (May 2006) Audio interview with Peter Greenaway about the

Nightwatch project for Electric Sheep Magazine and Resonance FM

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Greenaway"