"To properly acquaint oneself with the work of English auteur Peter Greenaway is to become a student of the neo-baroque, postmodernism, art history, and religious allegory. Trained as a painter, Greenaway’s passion for the films of Bergman, Fellini, Godard, Pasolini, and Resnais led him to begin a career in experimental film in the early 1960’s. His first film, The Death of Sentiment (1965) was a pastiche of several elements that he would later explore throughout his oeuvre: architecture, religion, death and words as images.
Few filmmakers have spoken as extensively on their work or submitted to so much academic analysis as Greenaway; throughout his discussions of his own work runs a thread of dissatisfaction with cinema. People today, Greenaway opines, suffer from visual illiteracy.
To paraphrase his many lectures, interviews and discussions: we live in a text-based world, an “age of the screen” in which cinema is the illustration of text rather than a method of autonomous creation. To best understand Greenaway’s films (and especially the “essential” ones that follow), we first have to understand his position as a skeptic of the boundaries of cinema and hi
Read more: http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2014/10-ess...z42jxyJKX1
I've been a fan of Greenaway ever since I was shocked by his study in post-monarchal brutality in 2001: "The Cook, the Thief, his Wife, and her Lover". Every foray into Greenaway land is to find oneself simultaneously assaulted and seduced by a wildly inventive bricolage of the sacred and the perverse. You feel you are watching the visual deconstruction of Western values and the restoration of cinema as a pure artform all at once. Here's many of his films that I've seen. Remember thru all of these films Greenaway's underlying theme of non-narrative forms of meaning. It may actually help you get thru most of them!
Few filmmakers have spoken as extensively on their work or submitted to so much academic analysis as Greenaway; throughout his discussions of his own work runs a thread of dissatisfaction with cinema. People today, Greenaway opines, suffer from visual illiteracy.
To paraphrase his many lectures, interviews and discussions: we live in a text-based world, an “age of the screen” in which cinema is the illustration of text rather than a method of autonomous creation. To best understand Greenaway’s films (and especially the “essential” ones that follow), we first have to understand his position as a skeptic of the boundaries of cinema and hi
Read more: http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2014/10-ess...z42jxyJKX1
I've been a fan of Greenaway ever since I was shocked by his study in post-monarchal brutality in 2001: "The Cook, the Thief, his Wife, and her Lover". Every foray into Greenaway land is to find oneself simultaneously assaulted and seduced by a wildly inventive bricolage of the sacred and the perverse. You feel you are watching the visual deconstruction of Western values and the restoration of cinema as a pure artform all at once. Here's many of his films that I've seen. Remember thru all of these films Greenaway's underlying theme of non-narrative forms of meaning. It may actually help you get thru most of them!