Great lecture. Thanks for making it available. He was getting at some interesting things about experimenting with cinema in the first half. And it was great for me to catch up with what he’s been doing for the past decade. Post part 2 when it’s released!
Just finished watching this a little while ago myself. Unfortunately I haven’t seen any of his films yet, so I might’ve been more in the dark, but still found it very interesting. Gonna try to watch the Nine Classical Paintings Revisited presentation that’s also been posted on YouTube soon.
Thanks for the link. :)
There are quite a lot of great lectures here from the European Graduate School. I do feel there is a lot of truth to what he says about the Visual-Illiteracy of most cinema and how an awful large proportion of Films are utterly text based. That Cinema as an Art form has barely achieved it’s independence from the other forms, especially literature. Though I feel he is clearly being provocative and over the top in this assumption to hammer home the point and make one actually consider what Cinema is, what one expects from it, what it is capable of and where it might be going. I feel Greenaway is probably the greatest and most unique living film-maker today, it is an awful shame he is so under-appreciated, that so few people have seen any of his work and that it’s so difficult to actually get a hold of.
Also he has such a wonderfully bombastic public speaking voice, I could listen to him reading the phone book.
^Few directors can compete with his knowledge of culture and art, that’s for sure, but i feel part of the reason he is less known now is because, well, he kind of stopped making films in the conventional sense.
Keep in mind that Greenaway was all the rage in the 80’s, perhaps not in America, but in the U.K, Australia, and various parts of continental Europe(esp Italy and France), he was one of the most popular new auteurs from around 1985 right up until The Pillow Book.
I look forward to his next lecture on the NBA. I hear he wants to liberate the NBA from
1) The hoop
2) The basketball
3) the referee
4) the spectator
(he wants to keep the sneakers and the baggy shorts, which were its only advancements)
Thanks for that link Allan! I never even heard of the European Graduate School before. That’s a treasure trove of video lectures that I’ll be watching immediately.
I think Greenaway is maybe being a bit redundant. Is he really talking about anything that hasn’t been done before (non-narrative, multi-screen projections, installation art, etc.)? I enjoyed the samples of recent work he showed, but they didn’t strike me as anything much more than overpriced experimental video work commissioned by rich cultural institutions with millions of euros to burn. Interesting, but not groundbreaking and maybe not quite even memorable.
Yes, Greenaway was all the rage up to “Pillow Book”, which I liked. After that it seemed like he dropped off the map. I see now it was just that he sort of abandoned cinema and started working as an installation artist. I don’t blame him. He must be making a killing.
“I enjoyed the samples of recent work he showed, but they didn’t strike me as anything much more than overpriced experimental video work commissioned by rich cultural institutions with millions of euros to burn”
This.
He talks about the death of cinema and the future of the medium here briefly. starts around 3.20
^^Greenaway needs to be taken with a grain of salt, and tends to get carried away with making sweeping statements, which is ultimately part of his appeal, but i think he is right that the future of media is interactivity, and cinema will have to change and adapt. the question is how and when.
" I look forward to his next lecture on the NBA. I hear he wants to liberate the NBA from
1) The hoop
2) The basketball
3) the referee
4) the spectator
(he wants to keep the sneakers and the baggy shorts, which were its only advancements)"
—Lol! That’s a hilarious image. A bunch of baggy shorts and sneakers thrown randomly on the court, with no one to look at them. Hmmmm…. Oh yes, I am picturing that he eliminated the players as well.
He’s definitely right about that. Not so much a sweeping statement because everyone has been saying that for the last decade or so.
^^he was one of the first people to say it from memory, and to some extent, put some of those ideas into practice. just think of the media elements in films like Pillow Book and 8 1/2 women, for example. Even back in 1996 he was talking about all the changes that were going to happen.
There are some wonderful Slavoj Zizek lectures on there too, among hundreds of others. It’s a really great resource! Also I loved Greenaway’s Nightwatching from 2007, and the related J’accuse…! documentary, he’s currently doing another film about another Dutch master Goltzius and the Pelican Company about Hendrik Goltzius, which should be fun. And I really want to see Tulse luper suitcase films and am yet to see both the pillow book and Prospero’s books, which are unavailable. I had to download both Drowning by Numbers and Baby of Macon it’s a crime that they haven’t had a decent dvd release at all, after The Cook, The Thief… I think they’re his best films.
I personally haven’t much time for avant-garde cinema, instillation art and whatnot (as it is at the moment anyway) but I don’t think Greenaway’s point is necessarily that what he alone is in the process of creating the future of Cinema. I think he is just going back to his film essay roots of questioning what it is we perceive as Cinema (which is asked in all his films – they all have an element of Critique of Cinema within them, they’re almost anti-films) what we have actually come to expect from it (he is I think not wrong in claiming that Scorsese for example – and I like Scorsese – is basically still making the same films as Griffith), the mundanity of your typical narrative film and addressing the point that Cinema can’t persist to behave like this forever.
I mean I do disagree with many of the things he says here but I find them fascinating nonetheless, it really does make you consider what Cinema as an art form is, what it is capable of, how secondary the actual Image is to so many film-makers (secondary to narrative, characters, plot etc so often the image is only there as a point of emphasis, rather than the point itself), that as Cinema is such a visual medium it is such a shame that so few film-makers have any knowledge of Art history whatsoever and I feel that that is essentially his point. Which I feel somewhat indisputable really. You can make fun of how bombastic and over the top his claims are, but he is purposely being provocative, if you stop to think what he is suggesting it is incredibly revolutionary and thought provoking, more than providing any answer he is asking the question.
“Meet the new boss, same as the old .”
Greenaway likes to think about the dimensions of the medium. What he doesn’t remember is that the films he made were so belligerently unique that it proved that there was plenty of room within the existing dimensions and constraints of cinema, even if only 20 or 30 people chose to see it.
He also seems to overstate the importance of interactivity. It’s fun to play interactively with others, but the benefits of carefully constructed works of art extend far beyond the spontaneous capabilities of non-professional peers. This is why even in areas like video games it is most often not simply enough to provide a platform where other equals can roam, people also congregate in large numbers in the places with what they perceive to be the most skilled artists. Most video games these days outdo the blockbuster films on many levels.
Prospero’s Books was recently made available:
http://forum.dvdtalk.com/international-dvd-talk/578455-prosperos-books-baby-macon-atlantic-films-sweden.html
In Sweden.
despite my joke, I do enjoy his stridency, and find it both interesting (and absurd). I never liked his films unfortunately. A side note: I think it is refreshing that he likes Fellini and Almodovar- directors who are not cut from the same dogmatic intellectual cloth as say Godard, Von Trier or PG himself, but who were/are more in the category of instinctual/ emotional visual artists.
“You can make fun of how bombastic and over the top his claims are, but he is purposely being provocative”
Of course! his personality is like his films ;-)
“if you stop to think what he is suggesting it is incredibly revolutionary and thought provoking, more than providing any answer he is asking the question.”
definitely, wouldn’t even bother questioning that. it’s true, it is fascinating, but if cinema is full of these these amazing possibilities, why was his last film ‘Nightwatching’ so damn conventional? esp compared to the films he made in the 80s’ and 90’s? It just seems strange on one hand to go on about how cinema needs to move forward, then take a few steps back as far as output is concerned.
TWO PLUS TWO: Greenaway loves Fellini, and used 8 1/2 as part of the basis for 8 1/2 Women. of course the two films aren’t really anything alike, but the references are amusing when they occur.
Greenaway makes me laugh in this video:
interesting.
In his lecture he mentioned that the three major poles of cinema history, the “creator, perfector and destroyer”, so to speak are Eisenstein, Fellini and Godard. I don’t know if I agree with him on the first two.
To say nothing of the veracity of his allegations, I’m just glad he’s there, asking the questions. There don’t seem to be many people as capable of speaking so proficiently on the subject. Watching his VJ performances is very intriguing… but I won’t deny that I wonder if I have much interest in them… at all. But then, I’m not one of those types who gives much of a damn about seeing “shows” (live band performances), only seen a few in my life (Mars Volta, Radiohead, Stereolab twice, Nick Cave (now that was special). I won’t pretend that I like the experimental possibilities of the medium of film more than narrative and storytelling. I may be part of a long dead generation, or I may simply be childish in my caprices. It’s my beef to embrace or evolve from… But again. Hell yes, Greenaway, for never, ever settling. But then I suppose when you have such intellect at your disposal, one can’t but help it.
I am similar I don’t see live music often but now I am sad Stereolab split up before I could! And I also have no interest in this ‘VJing’ thing, it looks absurd to me but as a provocative statement on Cinema I find it interesting nonetheless.
I just find it refreshing that Peter Greenaway legitimately has an opinion on these things, has an interpretation he wants to express, that he approaches Cinema with perspective. After all, creating a Film is creating a separate independent universe with it’s own rules and laws based on ones own perspective of the world, so few film-makers have any interpretations and the confidence to share them. I wish more Directors would approach Cinema with some sort of attempt at a general theory of what it is they’re trying to achieve, I read Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time not long ago and I adored it, I may have disagreed with elements of it but the ambition I couldn’t help but greatly admire it again I found it so refreshing. I don’t want to see film-makers merely try to reproduce the real, I want to see the expression of their perspective of the real.
all this talk about how cinema is dead…
i remember that there was that soderbergh thread about how he was leaving to go paint.
both peter greenaway and soderbergh are interested in painting. so maybe filmmaking for them is kind of like a detour to what they should actually be doing— which is to paint.
greenaway’s presentation of his various pieces looks like new media installation art.
Well that’s pretty funny because for the longest people have been proclaiming that PAINTING is dead.
How the hell that could be makes no sense at all (thinking of the Husker Du song right now). That’s like saying ceramics and sculpture and drawing and all other ancient and still available art forms are dead. Nonsense. As long as the technology exists, the art form exists. All you need to paint is a surface, an instrument to paint with and paints. These things will be around FOREVER. Cinema is not going to die unless cameras are destroyed.
YES – BUT… painting is LIBERATED.
Cinema is not.
@Odilonvert:
Did you watch the video? By making that statement, he’s basically just saying that nobody has evolved the medium since Godard/Fellini/60’s. Evolution takes place in three steps: the first generation who makes the first strides with a new medium, to which Eisenstein was master/founder, the 20’s – the second generation who… something, something, next step… Welles, 40’s – and the post-generation, slices it up, regurgitates the whole history, highest innovation, Mozart-ish, and those 60’s guys. That’s my utterly sloppy paraphrase. Greenaway is calling for the medium’s evolution, hence “Cinema is dead, long live the cinema.”
This reminds of a project that Paul Schrader had for a magazine (Film Comment?) Anyway, Schrader was supposed to be write about the film canon, but somewhere a long the way he lost interest, partly because he felt like there was no future in film. He felt that some other medium was going to replace cinema, but he never really explained why he thought cinema was dead. Does Greenaway make a case for this?
@Jazz:
Greenaway explicitly makes a case for it. I recommend watching the lecture :)
OK, thanks Miasma. I will make it a point to do so.
Miasma
In my attempt to be forward-thinking.
“New Possibilities: Cinema Is Dead, Long Live Cinema” is the first of two lectures presented by filmmaker Peter Greenaway as the 2010-2011 Avenali Chair in the Humanities at the Townsend Center for the Humanities. Best known for such films as The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & her Lover (1989), The Pillow Book (1996), The Tulse Luper Suitcases (2003-2004), and Nightwatching (2007), Greenaway has worked more recently on numerous exhibitions and installations in Europe, from Venice’s Palazzo Fortuny and Barcelona’s Joan Miró Gallery to Rotterdam’s Boymans van Beuningen Gallery and Paris’ Louvre. Regularly nominated for the film festival competitions of Cannes, Venice, and Berlin, Greenaway has also published books, written opera librettos, and collaborated with composers Michael Nyman, Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, Borut Krzisnik, and David Lang, among others."
And we’ll see how long this is able to be embedded…
How fortunate we are to have this lecture accessible at our fingertips, as Greenaway no doubt applauds.