peter greenaway
page two

Getting back to Cage, for just a moment: for Cage, the disappearance of the frame meant nothing less than the disappearance of art itself, art being predicated upon the tension between an inside and an outside of a frame. That tension is exactly analogous to the tension between the artist and the audience, or, more generally, between subject and object. That tension is necessary for there to be a communication, a transference of a substance, from one form to another. Cage isolated and showed us that structure of transference, without the process of a transfer. He went past the need, or the desire, for such a process. In doing that he was revolutionary. In this respect it would seem impossible to follow in Cage's footsteps as a significant artist. To call oneself an artist and yet not produce would hardly, after Cage, have a revolutionary impact.

I want to link this problem with the use of technology, as you already have. Technology as a force that is continually driving to "improve" communication and the covering of distance would obviously appear to be moving towards the infinite limit of abolishing the frame, which here is understood, again, as the tension between subject and object.

Well there is post-Cageian music. Music goes on; the inventive spirit is still alive. You need not be frightened by endings. All this talk of the end of the novel, for example, or the end of painting…

Chronologically, it's true that there exist composers after Cage; but philosophically I'm not so sure.

Oh, I'm sure that it is. I'm sure that that's not so much a full stop as much as a comma, a very important comma. But the continuation of the desire for musical excitement in whatever sphere, for whatever simulus, is, I'm sure, going to be able to create new forms, new approaches.

You seem, by your question, to have a certain pessimism about technology. Why? The cinema it self is deeply pessimistic about technology. If you take Jurassic Park, for example. Why is it that every film that deals in technology is always so negative? You know, all aesthetic pursuits are deeply associated with technology. We should not delude ourselves that aesthetics comes narrowly out of the air, or purely out of the imagination of some great thinker; they're deeply associated with the current technology. With the cinema this is especially true, we can see that time after time after time. In the new technology, I'm sure that the words we're becoming very familiar with are at this very moment creating new aesthetics. Just a small example: I attended a symposium in Munich about six months ago which was talking about perspective in virtual reality. Perspective as an art form, or as a way, an approach, of seeing, of manifesting the world—I suppose "manifesting" might be a suitable word for people like Della Francesca—had really crystallized by about 1680, something like that, with the Dutch drawings of De Vries. So in a sense, by a point about halfway through the eighteenth century, there was nothing else to be said about the spectator. Perspective had been formulated, organized.

Now up comes virtual reality, which concerns itself with a multiple viewpoint, unlike the traditional Renaissance sense of perspective. Virtual reality, both on the part of its manufacturers and of the people who watch it, necessitates an understanding of how my eye is related to that point there, this point here, not seen from a static position, as painting would organize it, but from a moving position. Suddenly all these new possibilities of considering the art of perspective are opened up. Perspective has got to be reutilized. The aesthetic that was associated with so much formalistic painting over the last three hundred years can be revitalized, reexamined. This is one example of how the technology of virtual reality is going to affect our aesthetic thinking all over again. I think the malaise that exists in cinema today stems from the fact that the technological fascinations with film technology have disappeared; they've moved on to the electronic television area. In some senses, the technologies associated with a hundred years of cinema have either become sterile or have run themselves out into the ground. From the financial perspective, who's putting new money into filmic technology? Nobody.  

Maybe because the cinema has reaped its benefits from a technological base in the first place, it is extremely conservative: it holds tightly to its technology and is afraid to let it go, at the risk of its very identity. It was reluctant to move from silent film to sound; it is now reluctant to use video technology, even though the use of film equipment has by now been rendered outdated.  

Yes, it has to do with cultural snobbery, don't you think? Goddard suggested that we look up at cinema, but we look down at television. We have to get over those resistances. When I made Prospero's Books, a lot of my American critics said, "It's just Shakespeare on MTV"—which is underselling both Shakespeare and MTV.  

I wanted to ask you about music: the title of your opera series is The Death of Webern. When I learned of this title I was surprised; I wouldn't have associated you with a Romantic, expressionist, Germanic composer. I know you are fascinated with the story of Webern's death; how do you feel abou the music?  

Berg interests me more, musically. But Webern is incredibly fascinating as a man who had managed to "come through," despite all the Jewish, anti-Semetic problems; despite the fact of being so ignored as a composer. His life history is one of coming through the thirties into a time when he was beginning to earn money, to gain a reputation as a composer and as a teacher, and then having the whole Austrian situation cut him off. . . And then there is way he became involved in local politics; he became Christianized; there was the anti-Zionist phenomenon and his involvement in Israel, and so on; all this background was fascinating. But the core of it is simply this man, who was essentially just on the point of making the essential breakthrough for himself, and maybe for music too, was apparently just cut off, chopped off, clipped off, as if with a pair of scissors: a life thrown away so motivelessly. I couldn't believe the official reports: the idea, which sometimes rings so strange, of a man called Bell—a sonorous name, of course, for the assassin of a composer—who happened to be, one drunken, trigger-happy night, catching the end of Webern's lit cigar, which was breaking the curfew… Three shots. The hat, the spectacles, and all the other clues which are part and parcel with this. I wasn't convinced. Still not convinced. That's not the truth. Can't be. There must be other things.

I had been thinking, and worrying, about this project for a long time; and suddenly, with the death of John Lennon, it all began to crystallize. And thus developed this deeply preposterous notion of there being a conspiracy (which, of course, not one of us for a moment ever believes) behind the deaths of composers. It's an ironic opportunity to examine all these sorts of phenomenologies; but again, it's an excuse, like all the other projects I get myself involved in, to play with the language. The language is, in the end, so much more interesting than the content. Content atrophies so very rapidly, and all we're left with is the language—but that's more than enough. By far, more than enough.