Peter Greenaway’s aesthetic is famously innovative and often contentious. The internationally acclaimed artist, curator, composer, publisher and filmmaker believes cinema is dead, thinks artists should be arrogant, and doubts that anything is truly new these days. In conversation, Peter is utterly intriguing and infectiously passionate about the potential of film to captivate audiences when matched with whiz-bang technologies and contemporary sensibilities. Brisbane audiences will experience his true genius when he presents his famed Tulse Luper VJ Performance and Rembrandt Fascination Lecture at GoMA as part of Brisbane Festival in September. Expect a state-of-the-art interplay of images, lighting, music, voices and sound.Welsh-born, Amsterdam-based filmmaker Peter Greenaway is part of a niche group of creatives who lament that their artform has failed the masses. Within seconds of our phone interview, Peter declares, “Cinema is dead!” with a decisiveness that signals the case is closed and the jury left long ago. For Peter, the true spirit of cinema isn’t embedded in the salty kernels of buttered-up popcorn or in the intermittent darkness of air-conditioned theatres. Instead, he believes cinema harks back to the days of floppy, oversized shoes and cherry-red noses, comedic juggling acts, and outrageous contortionist stunts.
He explains, “… I think in the early days, when cinema came out of the circus and the variety show and the fairground, it was a phenomenon that associated itself with the entire body and certainly with all five senses …”
Peter says his VJ performances are similarly designed to rouse the full gamut of senses and even inspire sweaty dance moves; it’s a sharp deviation from what he describes as traditional cinema’s lacklustre attempt to only reach two of our intelligences – the audio and the visual.
Peter’s outbursts against traditional, literary-based cinema are not newly formed. At 67, he has worked in film for more than 40 years, starting out as a painter and creating his first feature film at age 24, much to his parents’ chagrin (he knew from age 13 he would be an artist and essentially “ran away” to art school). It was his first narrative feature film, The Draughtsman’s Contract, completed in 1982, that established him internationally as an original filmmaker.
He has since made 12 feature films and more than 50 short-films and documentaries, with regular nominations for film festivals in Cannes, Venice and Berlin. He has also written opera librettos, published books and collaborated with composers of the calibre of Michael Nyman, Glenn Branca, Wim Mertens, Jean-Baptiste Barriere and Philip Glass.
Peter personally regards visual art as his most rewarding focus, which of course influences his painterly film aesthetic. “I certainly was trained as a painter. I was never very interested in narrative in the cinema. I think cinema is a very poor storyteller and cinema knows this, that’s why it is always going back to the bookshop to find its stories. So I’ve always been fascinated in trying to make the most phenomenological form of cinema I could ever imagine.” Peter says that people still go to the cinema to be told a story, so if he didn’t feed them some tale he’d have lost his audience long ago. “I have to move slowly on this, so I guess for about 20 years I’ve been edging the stories away and trying to convince people that just because you’ve got eyes doesn’t mean you can see and, I suppose, without too much apology to say, ‘Look – visual properties are the main excitement, so let’s really exploit them’.”
He sees the image as far more durable and capable of intense contemplation and reconsideration than the fleeting ephemerality of cinema. His constant search to invent the future of cinema and weave images, lighting, music, voices and sound into film has inspired his current avant-garde project. It involves “visiting” nine classic paintings in Western art history, from the Renaissance up to Picasso and Pollock, to re-tell their stories through a modern, high-tech lens.
In 2008, as part of this audacious and often controversial project, Peter wowed an intimate audience in Santa Maria delle Grazie church in Milan when he bounced live projections (think holograms, streaming rays of light and X-rays) off Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper fresco with an accompaniment of voices, music and noises. His similarly innovative take on the Wedding at Cana piece was described by The New York Times as “The best unmanned art history lecture you’ll ever experience”.
Peter says he remains motivated to continue creating new work because he is naturally ambitious (although, being an Aries, he confesses to leaving many unfinished projects littered in his wake). But there have been many challenges along the way, such as sourcing money to fund the next project and facing scorching criticism for contentious work. In these circumstances, Peter heeds advice from one of his heroes:
“John Cage, American composer and guru, suggested if you introduce more than 20% of novelty into artwork then watch out – you’re going to lose 80% of your audience. And I feel that in some curious way if you are pushing against the envelope and experimenting and trying out new combinations of things, you’re inevitably going to create shock waves of irritation, indignation and often outright hostility.
“So in some ways my career has been a ‘hit-and-miss/success and failure’ thing that is part of the responsibility of an artist. An artist has to be incredibly arrogant. An artist has to imagine that he or she indeed has something valuable to say and to continue to pursue it come whatever.”
Interview by Frances Frangenheim
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