It has been said that director Peter Greenaway is a filmmaker as one might be a modern painter or an experimental novelist.
Born in London in 1942, he was initially drawn to painting and attended the Walthamstow College of Art. He later attempted to enroll at the Royal College of Art Film School, after undergoing the “Road to Damascus” experience of seeing Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal,” but was turned down. Undaunted, he landed a job as an editor with the British Film Institute, where he was able to screen their impressive collection of classic experimental films. Inspired, he purchased a 16 mm Bolex camera and commenced making his own short movies.
His move to features came in 1982 with the remarkable “The Draughtsman’s Contract,” and since then, he has turned out an eclectic assortment of unique efforts, most of them praised and reviled with equal fervor by critics. They include “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), “Prospero’s Books” (1991) and “The Baby of Macon” (1993).
Greenaway was in Chicago recently to promote his latest effort, the strange and beautiful “The Pillow Book,” which is currently playing at the Music Box Theatre.
It is a visually challenging cinematic experience, inspired by a 10th Century erotic journal, or Pillow Book, which is also the inspiration for the film’s main character, a beautiful Japanese woman named Nagiko, who searches out lovers to draw on her body, (just as her father drew on her face when she was a girl), before becoming the artist herself, using her lovers as canvases.
Though Greenaway is considered to be one of the most brilliant and innovative contemporary filmmakers, no less a director than fellow countryman John Boorman has attacked Greenaway’s “cruelty, coldness and awesome sterile certainty.”
Q–You are one of the few filmmakers working today who has been called blasphemous. Is there a place for blasphemy in cinema?
Greenaway–I’m sure there is. Because it indicates the alternative position, the question of dogma, the opposition to rhetoric, the concern that pyramids of construction of human intent must be examined and reconsidered in order to break up the power blocks. Blasphemy’s got nothing to do with God. It’s got to do with the church, who feel threatened by outsiders or by critics.
Q–You’ve been quoted as saying that “it is very arrogant to suppose that you can make a film for anybody but yourself.” What is your take on modern cinema?
Greenaway–I feel that the cinema we’ve got after 100 years is in some cases not a cinema at all, but a history of illustrated text. “The English Patient,” for example. Why do people bother? Why do they spend money, patience, time and activity perverting one work of art into another? We know cinema is very hybrid, very mongrel, and still hasn’t found an autonomy for itself. But I don’t think it should be used simply to illustrate literature.
I sincerely believe that cinema desperately needs revitalizing. It hasn’t done anything interesting, as far as I’m concerned, since the Germans way back in the 1970s. The last radical investigation. Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders.
Q–Tell me about “The Pillow Book.”
Greenaway–It’s a story about a woman who wants her lovers to write on her body. Every time you see sex or flesh, you see text. Every time you see text, more or less, you see sex and flesh. So in a sense, it’s a dissertation on sex and text, my two favorite subjects.
Q–Your films are filled with lists, numbers, architecture and games. How does the text in “The Pillow Book” follow suit?
Greenaway: Many years ago, during my art studies, I came across Oriental calligraphy. I was fascinated by the notion that the calligraph, the hieroglyph, the character, was both an image and a text. When you read it as an image, it is a text. The history of Japanese painting is almost entirely synonymous with the history of Japanese literature. So here was the possibility of metaphor for a new sort of cinema.
Q–Why do we need a new cinema?
Greenaway: Because I don’t think cinema is a good narrative medium. If you want to tell a story, become a writer. Don’t get involved in cinema. Cinema is about other things. I know we excuse cinema because it’s not very old, but one of the great things about the 20th Century was the taking away what for many years had been regarded as the main props. So, melody’s been taken away from music, figuration’s been taken away from painting. And there’s a way, I feel, that narrative should be taken out of cinema, so it can get on with what I believe it can really do.
Q–Which is?
Greenaway–I’m looking all the time for alternatives to storytelling. My films are very much based on horizontals and verticals. It’s a grid situation. Also lists, number counts and alphabetical counts. Not that I believe intrinsically in any particular magic in these systems, but they are well-defined, well-wrought systems of organization. Go back to Petrarch or the paintings of Giovanni Bellini in Venice, where all the world is structured according to a series of ceremonies and processions.
Q–It seems that the structure of your films is just as important as the substance. Sort of a marriage between style and content.
Greenaway: You know how French philosophers have deliberately told us that the world’s not just in front of us, it’s all around us? There are experiments we can play that will pick up ideas of cubism, for example, which cinema’s never really entertained, in order to create a fragmentation of experience, which I would argue is much more like the way we live in the world.
Take “Casablanca,” for example. It is the ideal, coherent, narrative structure, with beginning, middle and end. Preordained characters. Systems of representation. It is extraordinarily artificial. There’s no such thing as a narrative in real life, because we all live in the present tense. But our minds and our memories are working overtime to make sense of that present tense. I would be fascinated to see if we could find an equivalent for that fragmentation in terms of cinema. One way to possibly do it is with this multiple use of different sorts of images. I mean, if a painter wants to emphasize the narrowness of a giraffe’s neck, he uses a long narrow frame.
Q–Does all this begin to suggest television more than film?
Greenaway–In some senses, it is a television language, but I would like to think it’s going further. Antagonistic French intellectuals might regard “The Pillow Book” as a CD-ROM and not as art at all. But three cheers for that.
Q–Despite all the technological advances, however, you still use traditional narrative devices. The childhood story takes place in black and white, and you make it clear when we are hearing excerpts from the original Pillow Book.
Greenaway–A remark like that is so pleasing to me, because so many people are jumping onto new technologies with total abandonment of all we’ve learned. I constantly look over my shoulder to find old strategies to try and make them work again, so there’s a continuity. But as John Cage once said, “If you introduce even 20 percent of novelty to an art work, you immediately lose 80 percent of your audience.”
