Peter Greenaway

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
Not to be confused with Peter Van Greenaway.
Peter Greenaway, CBE
Peter Greenaway
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Not to be confused with Peter Van Greenaway.
Peter Greenaway, CBE

5 April 1942
Born (age 67)
Newport, Wales
Film director,
Occupation
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"

5 April 1942 (age 67)

Born
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"