peter greenaway
page three

This opera, Rosa, is subtitled "A Horse Drama." Did the opera spring from an earlier project I read you were preparing which was to concern itself with many aspects of the horse as symbol?

I think the project was called 55 Men on Horseback. I wanted to celebrate the horse. The horse, with language, is what is supposed to have made us civilized, both the horse and language coming together across the spaces of central Europe, eons ago. The project is still there, on the back burner. When I finished the script, it turned out to be eight hours long. Nobody's going to give me the money to make an eight hour film. There was some talk about making it for television, but that's not the way I want to do it. I want to concern myself with "the big screen," as a size phenomenon; I want to involve technologies which can utilize the film language as well as the television language. And, rather like the 92 stories that exist in The Falls, I want to demonstrate 55 ways of making films. We will make it, sometime, I am convinced.

If you think that Rosa: A Horse Drama is part of that project, I suppose it might be, although I think it probably came from a different direction. I'm a phony in a certain respect: I know nothing about horses. I rode a horse when I was about eight, I think, and never afterwards. I know very little about Westerns; I don't even like Westerns, but again, these are clothespegs, clotheshangers, upon which to hang clothing of different sorts, to talk about opera; to talk about cinema; to talk about possibilities of breaking the frame; to talk about the relationships that could be possible between the wide shot and the closeup; to talk about attitudes towards the classic operatic heroine who is normally always subjugated to all forms of humiliation, but always manages to be so sanitized and deoderized in conventional opera. The sexual-political activity of the humiliated central female figure, which is part of the operatic tradition, is reexamined here.

And to talk, again, about representation. A terribly fashionable word, but still one that holds a deep fascination for us all, I think: the business about introducing a real horse on stage to begin with, saying, "Look, this is what a real horse looks like." Now we take it on a journey. We make mechanical horses, we make fake horses. We play the phony game of mechanical representation. We do extraordinary things with, and to, this horse. We investigate taboo areas, possibly, like bestiality. We examine the sexual implications of the image of the horse in the Western world, et cetera, et cetera. So all these associations are, I hope, synthesized in some way, to produce dramatic entertainment, which not only passes one hour and forty-six minutes, but also stimulates debate, which is the prime, exciting function of most art.  

I've never found a lot of surrealism in your work, but here I found traces of associations, particularly with surrealistic film: dead carcasses; detached images of acts of violence; familiar objects found out of their usual context; an exaggerated, perverse eroticism. Does this reflect a new interest in surrealism?

It's not a word I feel very happy with. If "surrealism" is the free association of apparently unrelated objects, to me it is too vague a notion, too ephemeral, too ambiguous. I do think that most of my cinema is very rational, highly unmystical, highly unsurreal. Why should we allow surrealism to have tyranny over the imagination? There has, after all, been an awful lot of surrealism before surrealism. It has now become a convenient tag word, which doesn't help us very much.  

The production is quite extreme. Certainly the Netherlands Opera is one of the most adventursome opera houses in the world; to do this production in America would be a considerable challenge. Do you have plans to tour with the opera?  

I'm concerned about being able to find an opera house that can handle all this technology.

Just the very fact that we have this contradictory notion of two very large projectors firing at one another. We're interested in the maximum amount of relfexivity of these screens; they've got to act as jewels, as panes of glass, as solid walls. It will be difficult to find an equivocation for that. Cinema starts with darkness, after all, and works outwards; you've got to have darkness to produce good cinema, just in terms of technology. I suppose you could say the opposite applies to the stage; you've got to light it, in three-dimensional form. So we have these contradictions, these oppositions, which we've been trying to solve. I'm not convinced that we've solved them completely. I want people to enter the opera house and imagine that they're going to a big, professional cinema: we can't do that. There's no way that you can make an opera house into a professional cinema; but we're trying to find a way of synthesizing the two.

I can see, now, why a lot more people don't do this more frequently. You know the experiments in the 1920s and 1930s, in which Rene Clair did a lot of experiments combining theatre and the cinema?  

You’re thinking of Entr'acte? 

Well, I'm thinking also of various other products which had a very short life history in Paris. There was a product that Rene Clair did in about 1925, which is really doing exactly what I'm doing—or trying to do—which is trying to get people to walk off dead film, and appear on live stage. But the problems of synchronicity are immense! We're not just synchronizing the film with the stage; we have the orchestra to consider, and the singers. In a funny way, they're all moving at different times; although at times, the singers are supposed to be disciplined by the conductor. A good conductor, if the singer is slow, will change the pace of the orchestra, to fit the requirements. But the tyranny of film insists upon twenty-four frames a second, with no leeway and no tolerance.  

One finds the same problem in much electronic music of the fifties and sixties, in which live musicians must adhere to the fixed time of a prerecorded electronic tape.

Does one? The next opera I'm doing, in Strasbourg on May 1, will use a lot of taped music, and I'm going to feel a little more relaxed about it, because I know that taped music will be the same every night. This fifty-seven member orchestra can never guarantee the same performance every night. If the conductor is tired, for instance, he might lose a second every minute, which would make the end seriously out of synch. This problem is perhaps one of the reasons that associations between the cinema and the theatre have not been more seriously pursued. I think that it's extremely fertile and fascinating ground; maybe now, because the technology is improving. . . . I came back from Japan about six months ago hoping that we might be able to abandon the boring, old, sprocket-holed celluloid movie film and use video instead; but again, it proved to be incredibly expensive. We would like to continue to pursue that, however, because you can obviously change the speed of the video in a way which is very satisfactory.

Yes, but don't forget the contradiction: we have a screen, which also must be a pane of glass. You can't do that with a video tube, in the same way.