14 August 2008 Written by Margherita Laera Print This Post  Email This Post

It might sound surprising to hear the visionary filmmaker and multi-media artist Peter Greenaway claiming the death of cinema, given that he is working on three new films to be shot next year, and that his last work Nightwatching (2007) received three nominations and two awards at the last Venice Biennale Film Festival. Trained as a painter in the ’60s, he began his film career as an editor, only achieving success as a director two decades later with The Draughtman’s contract (1982) and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989). In the past twenty years, Greenaway has worked as a painter, writer, opera librettist, theatre director, art curator, visual artist, and fantasist, merging genres and crossing boundaries in all possible ways, while directing a dozen feature films.

ML: Cinema may be dead, but it seems that you are determined to revive it.

PG: The English say: “The King is dead. Long live the King”. In this case it seems more appropriate to say “Cinema is dead. Long live cinema”. If cinema was born in 1895, you realize that it has been the same for a hundred-and-twelve years: films are mere illustrations of a script and film-makers yield to the supremacy of the text. If you think of other forms of art and their dramatic evolution in the past century, for example painting from Impressionism to Fontana, or music from Strauss to John Cage, you can understand what I mean by “death of cinema”. It is time to move on! Every art form needs to reinvent itself in order to survive throughout time. Statistics state it clearly: every year there are less people going to the cinema while more people are watching DVDs, comfortably sitting on their sofas. In the age of multimedia and interactivity, cinema still insists on forcing millions of hapless viewers to sit uncomfortably and passively in an architecturally horrible environment. Going to the cinema today, like a hundred-and-twelve years ago, involves looking in the same direction for two hours, and you can always expect a sequence of images based on narrative, realism and psychologically constructed characters. No smell, no touch, no taste, no real relationship with the audience, and the presence of the screen itself is never acknowledged. It is only a matter of restricted audio-visual stimulation. Which I find extremely boring.

ML: If cinema is dead, how is theatre doing? And what about visual arts? Are they in good shape?

PG: Theatre is perfectly healthy. In theatre, the performance changes every night and the relationship to the audience can be much more exciting and bidirectional. In fact, all other art forms are in perfect shape, they are lively and engaging, always changing and exploring new ways of communication. Cinema is a slave to the market place and to the standards dictated by distribution companies. Cinema, unlike painting or theatre, is imprisoned by fast-aging technologies and large-scale economic interests preventing its aesthetic evolution. But this might only be a prologue to what’s coming next. What I want to do is a present tense cinema.

ML: What do you mean by that?

PG: A cinema which is always different from itself. Ideally, I would like to create a 360-degree event, an experience without closures, an ever-changing work stimulating all five senses, exploring all possibilities offered by new cutting-edge technologies. I think that films like those we see today will become archaic some day, they will be forgotten like silent movies, nobody will watch them anymore.

ML: To refashion cinema, one has to disrupt it. Is that why you became interested in mixing visuals at live events?

PG: My films are based on the superiority of the image. Narrative is overthrown by ideas and themes. Picasso used to say: “I don’t paint what I see, I paint what I think”. For my Tulse Luper VJ Performance (for more info on the upcoming world tour see www.notv.com), I perform a live cinematic event, improvising and mixing hundreds of pre-selected sequences from my latest film trilogy, The Tulse Luper Suitcases, on three different screens surrounding the audience, while DJ Radar plays electronic music. Can I call myself a VJ? I don’t think so, but every show is completely different in every venue, and that is what makes it interesting. Another example of present tense cinema can be found in my recent multi-media project Peopling the Palaces, which recently opened at the Venaria Reale palace near Turin, the newly refurbished “Italian Versailles” (www.lavenaria.it). We filmed a hundred-and-fifty vignettes of everyday seventeenth century life at court and then projected them on the palace walls, so that the wandering viewer can have a playful sense of “historic reality”, meeting up with dukes and scullery maids, marquises and cooks, grooms and hunters, almoners and maids-of-honour, who used to people the palace before Napoleon swept it all away. However, I believe there is no such thing as History, there are only historians.

ML: Your last film, Nightwatching, is strictly connected to an extraordinary multi-media event as well.

PG: It all started with my fascination for Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch“. It is by no means one of my favourite artworks, but I find the mysteries behind it very exciting. In 2005 I created a short film in order to give the painting a life and a voice of its own, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam allowed me to project this video on the actual canvas. The viewers would sit in front of it like they would sit in front of a cinema screen, but only for a few minutes. The result was a completely new way to experience a painting. Then, I decided I would write an original script for a feature film, investigating the background of Rembrandt’s theatrical and intriguing “J’accuse”, which covertly posits a deadly conspiracy within the Dutch regiment commissioning the work. This painting ultimately caused the artist’s own death.

ML: What should we expect from you in the near future?

PG: I am working on three new films, a ghost story filmed in Wales, a pornography set in Brazil and a horse story set in the ancient Chinese Empire. My partner Saskia Boddeke and I are working together on more operatic projects. Moreover, I am curating the new Design Museum at the Milan Triennale with Italo Rota, opening 6 December 2007 (www.triennale.it). We are designing an exhibition of objects without objects, inspired by André Malraux’s idea of ‘musée imaginaire’. I often find museums boring, unimaginative and uninteresting places, but I promise you a wholly unconventional museum experience.

ML: We shall look forward to that.

The top photo is by Daniel Malva and is reproduced here under a Creative Commons license.

The bottom gallery photos are courtesy of Change Performing Arts