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Peter Greenaway, (born 5 April 1942 (2026). 9781844035731, Cassell Illustrated. ISBN 9781844035731) is a British filmmaker and visual artist.
Greenaway's notable feature films include The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), The Belly of an Architect (1987), The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), Prospero's Books (1991), and Nightwatching (2007). He has also created works in other mediums, notably the multimedia Tulse Luper Suitcases, documentaries, and several video installations. In 2014, he received the BAFTA Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema Award.
Greenaway's films are noted for the distinct influence of Renaissance and Baroque painting painting, and Mannerism in particular. Common traits in his films are the scenic composition and illumination and the contrasts of costume and nudity, nature and architecture, furniture and people, sexual pleasure and painful death. The BFI's Screenonline describes him as "a philosopher of cinema," and "an artist who is a believer in the subversive power of the image."
At an early age Greenaway decided on becoming a painter. He became interested in European cinema, focusing first on the films of Ingmar Bergman, and then on the French nouvelle vague filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and, most especially, Alain Resnais. Greenaway has said that Resnais's Last Year in Marienbad (1961) had been the most important influence upon his own filmmaking (and he himself established a close working relationship with that film's cinematographer Sacha Vierny). Film-makers on film: Peter Greenaway: an interview with John Whitley in The Daily Telegraph, 14 June 2004. Retrieved He now lives in Amsterdam. In the beginning was the image: an interview with Peter Greenaway: an interview with Lillian Crawford for the British Film Institute, 17 November 2022. Retrieved
In 1980, Greenaway delivered The Falls (his first feature-length film) – a mammoth, fantastical, absurdist encyclopaedia of flight-associated material all relating to ninety-two victims of what is referred to as the Violent Unknown Event (VUE). In the 1980s his cinema flowered in his best-known films, The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), The Belly of an Architect (1987), Drowning by Numbers (1988), and his most successful film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). Greenaway's most familiar musical collaborator during this period is composer Michael Nyman, who has scored several films. Close your eyes and listen: Michael Nyman has a problem, and it's nothing to do with turning 50. It's Peter Greenaway and all those movies.: interview with Michael Nyman by Mark Pappenheim The Independent, 1 December 1993.
In 1989, Greenaway collaborated with artist Tom Phillips on a television serial A TV Dante, dramatising the first few cantos of Dante Alighieri's Inferno. In the 1990s he presented Prospero's Books (1991), the controversial The Baby of Mâcon (1993), The Pillow Book (1996), and 8½ Women (1999).
In the early 1990s Greenaway wrote ten opera libretti known as the Death of a Composer series, dealing with the commonalities of the deaths of ten composers from Anton Webern to John Lennon; however, the other composers are fictitious, and one is a character from The Falls. In 1995, Louis Andriessen completed the sixth libretto, Rosa – A Horse Drama. He is currently professor of cinema studies at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Peter Greenaway: Professor of Film at The European Graduate School . Retrieved 20 May 2024.
He also contributed to Visions of Europe, a short film collection by different European Union directors; his British entry is The European Showerbath. Nightwatching and Rembrandt's J'Accuse are two films on Rembrandt, released respectively in 2007 and 2008. Nightwatching is the first feature in the series "Dutch Masters", with the second project titled as Goltzius and the Pelican Company.
On 17 June 2005, Greenaway appeared for his first VJing performance during an art club evening in Amsterdam, Netherlands, with music by DJ Serge Dodwell (aka Radar), as a backdrop, 'VJ' Greenaway used for his set a special system consisting of a large plasma screen with laser controlled touchscreen to project the ninety-two Tulse Luper stories on the twelve screens of "Club 11", mixing the images live. This was later reprised at the Optronica festival, London.
On 12 October 2007, he created the multimedia installation Peopling the Palaces at Venaria Reale at the Royal Palace of Venaria, which animated the Palace with 100 videoprojectors.
Greenaway was interviewed for Clive Meyer's Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice (2011), and voiced strong criticisms of film theory as distinct from discussions of other media: "Are you sufficiently happy with cinema as a thinking medium if you are only talking to one person?"
On 3 May 2016, he received a Honoris Causa doctorate from the University of San Martín, Argentina.
Greenaway exhibited his digital exploration of The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese as part of the 2009 Venice Biennial. An arts writer for The New York Times called it "possibly the best unmanned art history lecture you'll ever experience," while acknowledging that some viewers might respond to it as "mediocre art, Disneyfication kitsch or a flamboyant denigration of site-specific video installation." The 50-minute presentation, set to a soundtrack, incorporates closeup images of faces from the painting along with animated diagrams revealing compositional relations among the figures. These images are projected onto and around the replica of the painting that now stands at the original site, within the Palladian architecture of the Benedictine refectory on San Giorgio Maggiore. The soundtrack features music and imagined dialogue scripted by Greenaway for the 126 "wedding guests, servants, onlookers and wedding crashers" depicted in the painting, consisting of small talk and banal chatter that culminates in reaction to the miraculous transformation of water to wine, according to the Gospels the first miracle performed by Jesus. Picasso's Guernica, Seurat's Grande Jatte, works by Jackson Pollock and Claude Monet, Velázquez's Las Meninas and Michelangelo's The Last Judgment are possible series subjects.Roberta Smith, "In Venice, Peter Greenaway Takes Veronese's Figures Out to Play", The New York Times 21 June 2009 online.
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target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Peter Greenaway. Faculty website at European Graduate School (Biography, filmography, articles and photos)
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