A leading figure in the so-called “renaissance” of English cinema, Peter Greenaway is a prolific director who, in over twenty-five years of activity, sixteen feature films and an endless number of short films, has traced an exemplary artistic path in which not only his extraordinary eclecticism and interests but also a natural predisposition to venture towards new frontiers have converged.
A lover and expert in painting, he conceives cinema as a figurative art. His gaze turns backwards, to his favorite painters – Tiepolo, Veronese, Bronzino and more generally all of Baroque and Mannerism – but his creativity manages to give new life to those masterpieces, transforming them into natural settings or references for the stories told by his cinema.
It is enough to briefly review his great production to grasp, alongside the centrality of the iconographic element, also a continuous comparison with the concept of experimentation. From The Mysteries of Compton House (1982) to A Zed (1985), from The Belly of an Architect (1987) to The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) passing through The Tempest (1991), The Pillow Book (1995), The Tulse Luper Cases (2003) or Nightwatching (2007) and Rembrandt's J'accuse (2008), Greenaway tries to overcome the limits of traditional cinema. A tension, this, that also pushes him to resort to digital technology with the intention of giving shape to a genre of cinematographic work not tied to a single point of view, but usable in a multidimensional way. These are the new horizons of the seventh art and the English director speaks about them in the meeting entitled Cinema is dead, long live the screen – at the end of which the short film Rosa made together with the choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker of the Belgian company Rosas is also screened - and he also provides a concrete example in the VJ performance Tulse Luper.
A multimedia project, the latter, staged for the first time in 2005 during an evening at the Club 11 in Amsterdam, dedicated to the visual arts. Thanks to a particular system composed of a touchscreen, Greenaway selects and mixes live the images taken from the 92 stories of Tulse Luper that are projected on giant screens accompanied by the music of DJ Serge Dodwell, better known by his stage name of Radar.
It is the new cinema - or at least one of its declinations - capable of creating and telling stories in real time, of continuously probing and following new trajectories, of freeing itself from the predefined narration.
Peter Greenaway VJ
Radar (a.k.a. Serge Dodwell) DJ
