peter greenaway
in conversation with joshua cody

Peter Greenaway's first short films, Intervals and H is for House, were produced in 1972. Since then he has created more than twenty short or full-length projects for film or television, among them A Zed and Two Noughts (1986), The Belly of an Architect (1987), Drowning by Numbers (1988), The Cook, the Thief, his Wife, and her Lover (1989), and Prospero's Books (1991), a version of Shakespeare's The Tempest. The Baby of Macon has been released in Europe but still awaits distribution in America; recent films include The Pillow Book— his most advanced step yet in the combination of film and video technology—and Eight and a Half Women.  Rosa, his 1994 collaboration with Louis Andriessen, is his first work in opera.  Joshua Cody, artistic director of the Ensemble Sospeso, spoke with Mr. Greenaway in 1995 in Amsterdam.

I read a statement that you made once. In comparing film and literature, you said that literature was "totally interior," and was thus a purer art form than film. We were just talking with Pierre Audi [Director of the Netherlands Opera] about the imperfections of opera as an art form, as an attempt to bring together drama and music. Do you ever regret that you became a filmmaker, rejecting the "purer" vocations of writer or painter?

I was trained as a painter. And although it often sounds very "wet," I still consider myself a painter, but one who happens to be working in cinema. There are all sorts of contradictions going on there, of course. I also had a classic English literary education, and although many people consider me a visualist—someone capable of putting together a picture—I would like to think also that the dialogue and the soundtracks in my films are of eminent importance. Was it Truffaut who suggested that "English cinema" was a contradictory term? There is almost a way in which "English painting" is a contradiction in terms; I suppose our contribution to the world of painting is very, very small, compared, indeed, with this country, and certainly with France and Italy. The average painting which was hung in the Royal Academy in the seventeenth century was probably accompanied by about seventeen pages of text. Questions regarding text and the image are endemic to the English culture, and they are certainly my big concerns, as well. One of my great disappointments was to realize that 95% of all images are illustrations of text. And even after the revolutions in painting in the nineteenth century, you still have to use words to describe paintings. Paintings are still given titles, which are basically textural, and which entirely colour the way in which the painting is viewed. So if you want to be a "prime visual creator," it's a great frustration.

I would say there has been no cinema yet. Nobody has yet made a film. I think the best we can manage is a version of illustrated literature or recorded theatre. Alain Resnais [the French filmmaker, creator of Hiroshima, mon amour and L'annee derniere a Marienbad], for me, has probably come the closest of any filmmaker to make a film which cannot be manifested in any other art form. I also think that the dominant commercial cinema is extremely conventional, very orthodox, very non-investigative; Scorsese, basically, is still making the same movies as Griffith. But I'm not down-hearted about this, because just around the corner, after a hundred years of this prologue to cinema which we've had, is the possibility of at last being able to make pure cinema, with all the new technologies. Virtual reality, the IMAX screen, the whole digital revolution is going to allow us to make actual cinema. You might recall that occasion when Eisenstein, of all people, said to Walt Disney that Disney was the only man that really made films, because the entire filmic universe was created completely within his imagination, and not with reference to the real world.

Most of my cinema, I suppose, has been, again, agonizing about this difference that's existed in the West—this division between text and image, and the hopeful ability of cinema to unite them. Again, I don't think it ever has successfully. As an addendum to that, the next product which I hope will filmically extend this idea is a movie that we're about to make in Japan, which is essentially about calligraphy: how calligraphy, an Oriental tradition—possibly an Islamic tradition—has been able to avoid the divorce between text and image, and in a very unified way. Little essays in this direction were already made in Prospero's Books, with its concern for the art of calligraphy, for what it meant and stood for. Sadly, calligraphy no longer exists in the Western world, not to any appreciable extent, anyway.

Here again, in this opera, we have the divisions between various forms of representation, using the four hundred-year-old suspension of disbelief which is part and parcel of opera, in association with the suspension of disbelief which is part of the cinematic tradition. So there's a way in which I'd like to describe this project not as an "opera," but as a. . . There's a searching, a groping, for new words here—not just by me, but by all of us, I think, as a community—for notions of "mega-cinema," the complete artwork, which of course has potentially been on the scene for perhaps thirty or forty years, but which still hasn't reached any useful synthesis. Wagner's notion as opera as being a complete artwork has long been a hovering image of what might, possibly, be possible. Cinema, at the beginnings, certainly with the French in the 1920s, was supposed to be the total artwork: but it's failed, dismally, to produce the goods.

So, here, maybe, within this view of music theatre in association with the other ways of manufacturing images, might, possibly, be the beginnings of an association which might flower into something "rich and strange," to quote Caliban [sic.]. Having seen a hundred years of cinema—and a hundred years is far long enough for a prologue—it must get out of its diapers now and do something really interesting.

I find it difficult to place you within the film history textbook that I read as a child. It's clear from your technique that you value a certain artificiality in your films. Your filmmaking style seems to have been hardly influenced at all by either Germanic expressionism, which largely decided Western cinema's principles of cinematography and decor, or the Russian school, which largely decided film grammar in the combining of successive images. Yet there are some filmmakers who use some of the same techniques you favor—the stationary camera, a consciousness of the frame, and long takes. I am thinking, for example, of three very different filmmakers: Kubrick, Ozu, and Tarkovskij. When you made the transition into film, were you influenced by any of these filmmakers, or any others?

Probably not. I was much more influenced by the aesthetics of painting than by direct associations with filmmaking products. I think that's probably manifested in most of my movies. All the early movies were very, very static. In The Draughtman's Contract, I think the camera moves once, in the dining table sequence—and that in a deliberately "anti-movement" fashion, because it takes no cognizance at all of the activity around it, almost ignores it; the camera is moved almost just for the sake of moving the camera, to say "Look, I can move the camera! It can be moved!" It doesn't necessarily have to be in total synchronous accord with the drama. My camera has, of course, moved much more in the recent films. I've become interested in notions of a choreographed, almost balletic sense of space, although the camera still retains a diffidence. It doesn't swoop across the floor and go up Robert Redford's nose, it doesn't follow the actor into the lavatory in that peculiar, St. Vitus' dance of contemporary cinema. If the camera moves, it must do so for a very good reason indeed.

And when my camera does move, it moves with a static frame. So it literally is a tracking shot, as seen through a very apparent, self-reflective frame. Prospero's Books is full of that notion of drawing your attention to the edges of the phenemenon. Of course some people feel that I'm stuck in the seventeenth century. But the concern for the frame is very much a twentieth-century concern: the whole notion—I suppose a post-cubist notion—of acknowledging where the painting stops and starts, its physicality, its relationship to the edges. The nineteenth-century illusion of the painting as a window on the world is not, I think, operating in my cinema. It's a cinema which does concern itself with the edges, all the time.

Here we are in a theatre. The theatre uses a proscenium; but there are attempts, literally, to break the hymen, through the looking-glass, that way [gestures forward from the stage to the audience]; and also, peripherally, attempts to acknowledge the apron [gestures towards the wings]. I've been fascinated by this breakage of the frame because I think, again, after a hundred years—or should we say, after four hundred years—of the dominance of the frame, we're about to see it exploded. As a filmmaker, I have a choice of maybe six or seven different aspect ratios (if we forget, for the moment, high defintion television coming up from Japan). The way most people see reconstructed drama right now is in a box with a ratio of 1 to 1.33. In a sense, all the freedoms of a chosen ratio have been denied the artist: he's fixed in this little, tiny straightjacket. And, I suppose, it's indicative of the way nature works that there would be a suppression, and then an explosion. I think it's happening already. Ever since American Expressionism, post-American expressionism, the frame has begun to disappear in painting. And I suppose with virtual reality you don't need a frame anymore; with IMAX and Omnimax, the edge is beyond the periphery of vision. So after a hundred years of cinema, it's about time that those explosions, those resurrections, those reorganizations of filmic space in terms of the frame, are going to have to disappear. There's every evidence that other people, too, are concerned about that.

Was this what attracted you to John Cage? It was your interest in Cage that led you to meet Pierre Audi, the director of the Netherlands Opera, a meeting that eventually led to your four short television documentaries on American composers [Four American Composers, 1983].

Well amongst many, many other things, yes. His personal aesthetic; an artistic guru, not necessarily because of what he actually made in terms of music, much of which is deeply unlistenable to, but as a man who had thousands of ideas, who was interested in the cross-referencing, all the time, between the visual world and the aural world.

Do you watch a lot of movies now?

No, hardly ever. I find cinema extremely boring. The exciting, investigative things are not happening in cinema, although they continue to be happening in painting. Certainly in literature, and in still photography, too; but it's very, very rare indeed to find an exciting film.