Peter Greenaway

The peak of Peter Greenaway's popularity among trained viewers craving a complex movie came in the 1990s. The end of the twentieth century can generally be considered the heyday of this intellectual director, prone to experimentation, rebuses and brutal shocking of an elite and even snobbish audience. Greenway is particularly addicted to large screen forms - large in many ways. They claim the extraordinary scale of the aesthetic design, the complexity of the form, a kind of internal infinite expansion of the meaning. The works of Peter Greenaway are characterized by total transmediaism, a complete “set” of postmodern instruments, a multi-layer (including split-screen) form of visual narration, and, of course, an unstoppable intention to overcome any boundaries, whether it be a frame of a frame or the limits of the real and the fictional.
Пик популярности Питера Гринуэя среди подготовлен-ных зрителей, жаждущих сложного кино, пришелся на 1990-е годы. Конец ХХ века вообще можно считать временем рас-цвета этого интеллектуального режиссера, склонного к экс-периментаторству, ребусам и брутальному эпатированию элитарного и даже снобистски настроенного зрителя. Гринуэй отличается особым пристрастием к большим экранным формам - большим во многих смыслах. Они претендуют на экстраординарную масштабность эстетического замысла, усложненность формы, некое внутреннее бесконечное рас-ширение объема смыслов. Для произведений Питера Гринуэя характерна тоталь-наятрансмедийность, полный «набор» постмодернистских инструментов, многослойная (в том числе-полиэкранная) форма визуального повествования и, конечно, неудержимая интенция преодоления любых границ, идет ли речь о рамке кадра или пределах реального и вымышленного.

At the beginning of the 80s, Channel 4 proposed to British artist Tom Phillips to create a television adaptation of Dante’s Inferno. The project resulted in one of the most unique experiments in the history of television: A TV Dante, a fourteen-episode mini-series aired between 1990 and 1991. The first eight episodes were directed by Phillips himself in collaboration with director Peter Greenaway, who had achieved worldwide recognition in the late ‘80s with his baroque filmmaking style. The remaining six episodes were commissioned to Chilean director Raoul Ruiz, whose experimental works had been innovating the language of cinema since the ‘70s.
This paper aims to analyse A TV Dante as an early attempt to explore the aesthetic potential of television seriality by proposing an avant-garde approach to a fundamental work of the Western canon.
More specifically, we will compare Phillips-Greenaway and Ruiz’s approaches to the Inferno in order to highlight the complementarity between the strategies that guide their adaptations. Drawing on Phillips’ previous illustrations for the Inferno, the British duo creates an abstract video-otherworld through the use of collage and a rich visual symbology, while constant commentary guides the viewer through Dante and Virgil’s journey. On the other hand, Ruiz chooses a thoroughly contemporary re-reading of the cantica by setting the action in Santiago de Chile while alternating between realistic representation, political commentary and surreal, hauntingly mysterious scenes.

Εκκινώντας από την αρχιτεκτονική παρακειμενικότητα του τίτλου "The Belly of an Architect" ταινίας του Peter Greenaway, η παρούσα μελέτη ενδιαφέρεται για τον τρόπο με τον οποίο ο κινηματογράφος αναφέρεται σε έργα άλλων τεχνών, εντάσσοντάς τα στα συμφραζόμενά του.  Ο τρόπος και η ποσότητα της επαφής και της διαπλοκής των έργων τέχνης στο σώμα του κινηματογραφικού έργου, είναι ο βασικός άξονας που θα απασχολήσει την παρούσα μελέτη. Εν αρχή, επιχειρείται μια κατηγοριοποίηση των περιπτώσεων διακαλλιτεχνικής «επαφής». Από τον Bahktin και την Kristeva, που εισάγουν τις έννοιες της διαλογικότητας και της διακειμενικότητας (Λαγόπουλος & Boklund-Λαγοπούλου,2016:237), στο Jakobson που αναφέρεται στον όρο διασημειωτική μετάφραση (Jakobson, 1959:233) και τέλος, στην έννοια της διακαλλιτεχνικότητας ή διαμεσικότητας, όπως την ορίζουν οι σύγχρονες θεωρίες (Rajewsky,2002:15). Έπειτα, εξετάζονται δύο ταινίες του Peter Greenaway, "The Belly of an Architect" (1987) και το "The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover" (1989), προκειμένω να εντοπισθούν σε αυτές παραδείγματα χρήσης των παραπάνω εννοιών.

Rad objavljen/Published as:
Film je mrtav! Živio film! Peter Greenaway o budućnosti medija, In Medias Res. Časopis za filozofiju medija, Centar za filozofiju medija, Zagreb 2015, 1060-1074. 

Sažetak
Peter Greenaway, čuveni reditelj i umetnik promišlja ideju o filmu u odnosu na druge medije i tehnologije, poput TV-a, slikarstva, pozorišta. "Film je mrtav! Živeo film!" je interpretacija poznate istorijske fraze koja implicira opstanak institucije (vlasti) uprkos personalnih promena. U kratkoj istoriji filma kao "estetske tehnologije", ili "tehnološke estetike", Greenaway prepoznaje tri (stilska) perioda, koji odgovaraju Winckelmannovoj biološkoj periodizaciji umetnosti: rođenje, zrelost i starost. Na ovom temelju reditelj gradi svoj tezu o zrelom, najplodonosnijem do sada, dobu filma koji nije poništen, već podstaknut tehnološkim dostignućima koja ga obogaćuju, kao i naše estetsko iskustvo. Film, kao umetnost, za Greenawaya ima slavnu budućnost.

Abstract
Peter Greenaway, director and artist is rethinking the notion of cinema in relation to other media and technologies, such as TV, painting, theater. "The Cinema is Dead! Long Live the Cinema!" is an interpretation of the known phrase that implies the continuation of the institution in spite of changes in personell. During the short history of cinema as an "aesthetic technology", or "technological aesthetics", Greenaway recognizes three periods of style which correspond to Winckelmann's periodization of art: birth, maturity and decline. The director builds his thesis on the maturity of cinema of today in this premise, claiming that the cinema not annihilated, but invogorated by new technologies, which enrich both the cinema and our aesthetic experience. According to Greenaway, cinema has a glorious future.

Rad objavljen/Published as:
Brisanje tradicionalnih umetničkih formi: barokna pozornica u filmovima Pitera Grinaveja (Peter Greenaway)", Zbornik radova sa Međunarodne konferencije U potrazi za umetničkom formom: između književnosti, pozorišta, filma i drugih medija, Fakultet dramskih umetnosti, Beograd 2012, 145-148.

Apstrakt
Kranji vid barokne težnje da se izbrišu granice između pojedinačnih umetničkih formi dobio je svog predstavnika u filmovima Pitera Grinaveja. U svojim fimovima on koristi citate iz starije umetnosti, baroknu pozornicu i naturalizam. Slikar po obrazovanju, reditelj je u filmu pronašao medij koji mu omogućava da ostvari sinesteziju, što nedostaje klasičnim likovnim medijima. Savremeni pojam denaturalizacije vidimo u svetlu baroknog pojma rappresentatio koji je okosnica njegovog pozorišnog izraza, i oslanjamo se na sumu ideja postmoderne estetike teoretičara Gija Skarpete.
Ključne reči: Piter Grinavej, film, slikarstvo, barok, naturalizam


Abstract
The Baroque tendency to transgress the limits of individual art forms got its representative in Peter Greenaway. He employs the Baroque stage and naturalism, and other Baroque features, such as loss of focus, intertextuality and intermedia. Painter by education, the director found that film allows sinesthetic experience like no other traditional medium. We suggest that his art project, interpreted mainly as Baroque, is in essence Mannerist, due to his direct quotations from various art sources, and that the contemporary notion of denaturalisation equals the Early Modern notion of rappresentatio which serves as starting point for his theatrical expression.

Key words: Peter Greenaway, film, painting, Baroque, naturalism

Severin Ingrid Leonie_  Presentation / Werkstattgespräch 30.11.1994
Venue: IFK, Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Wien 1994
Künstler als Ausstellungsmacher - Einführung in ein Forschungsvorhaben,  eine Projektskizze:
The Artist as Curator – Traces of a phenomenon/ Künstler als Kuratoren (1941-1985)
Duchamp,  Cornell, Distel, Broodhaers, Kosuth,
Caro, Hodgkin, Hamilton, Kitaj, Chuck Close, Baldessari, Kelly, Scott, Murry, Greenaway. Spurensuche.

Greenaway'in Tulse Luper Projesi üzerine bir değerlendirme yazısı:

20 yy. 92 valize sığar mı?

Tulse Luper, Greenaway’in yarattığı kurgusal bir kahraman. Greenaway’in izleyicisine ‘alter egosu’ olarak tanıttığı Luper, 29 Ekim 1911 yılında ve Greenaway gibi Newport’da doğar. Tulse Luper’in Çantaları’nın amacı varlığına dair kanıt olabilecek her şeyi yaşadığı süre boyunca elinden geldiğince yok eden Luper’in hayatının, özellikle 1928 - 1989 yılları arasında kalan dönemini aydınlatmak. Luper’in hayat hikayesinin özellikle bu iki tarih arasına sıkıştırılmış olmasının özel bir nedeni var. 1928 Colorado’da uranyum çıkarılmaya başlanmasının, 1989 ise Berlin Duvarı’nın yıkıldığı tarih. Yukarıda saydığımız farklı medyalar kullanan farklı eserlerin toplamından oluşan hikaye bu iki önemli tarih arasında Tulse Luper’in yaşadıklarını 92 adet valiz üzerinden anlatıyor.

n 1964, shortly after his first solo exhibition at John Kasmin Gallery, David Hockney relocated to the United States. He moved first to New York and then to Los Angeles, where he started a series of paintings that represented a typically Californian theme, a swimming pool. He continued to paint this subject over the following decades, constantly reinterpreting it in different media and forms. In this essay, I will focus on the paintings of swimming pools that were created between 1964 and 1972 in Los Angeles and Southern France, and examine three films that represent very different cases of intermedial transcriptions of this work into cinema.

Californian scenery fascinated Hockney long before his first visit: ‘California in my mind was a sunny land of movie studios and beautiful semi-naked people’.1 His idea of the American Dream was strongly influenced by Bob Mizer’s beefcake photographs from the Physique Pictorial magazine. In the early 1960s Hockney began using images of nude or semi-naked men as a source of inspiration for his works. One of the best examples of Mizer’s influence is the 1963 painting that represents two men in a shower entitled Domestic Scene – Los Angeles. The picture was conceived before he moved to California and was based on a picture from Mizer’s magazine.

The moving image provides many memorable instances of the allure of food, often reminding us of the proximity of carne and carnality, as in Itami's Tampopo, or the pivotal social function of eating that pervades every episode of The Sopranas. Peter Greenaway's The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover engages with both these aspects of food but, though the site of consumption is a visual feast, a dining hall of deep red, the eye tracks back and forth from the place of production,a green kitchen, and that of excretion, the blindingly white restrooms.

Regarded by many as an allegory of Thatcher's Britain, Greenaway's film can also be considered as a sustained exploration of the ways in which the totality of the process of food consumption has been  harvested selectively to produce aesthetic objects and experiences. Greenaway does not allow the physical and ethical dregs of gastronomy to slip from view but instead serves them up as palate cleansers, resulting in a gustation that at times threatens to provoke regurgitation.

This paper considers Greenaway's juxtaposition of the refined and the abject as a commentary on the way in which a vital biological function has been refined, and the residue discarded.

Taking the animal and the machine as two ontological others of the human, this paper looks into how they “are added to” and “replace” the humanist others based on race, gender, class, etc. in contemporary cinema. This “supplement” urges us to reframe identity politics and cultural studies in a larger “polis” emerging between and encompassing both the human world, which becomes ever more globally homogenized, and its radical environment, natural or technological. The topic is a global cinematic phenomenon that even local films directly embody. The animal is captured on the boundaries between “the symbolic” and “the real,” between “the actual” and “the virtual” in the artistic works of Werner Herzog, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Peter Greenaway. The machine convolutes the issues of informatics, embodiment, and cyborgism, often through SF fantasy that pervades Hollywood blockbusters and Japanimation. The rare amalgam of animal–machine receives further attention in David Cronenberg's films, and becoming-animal/-machine in Avatar empowers the human in the posthuman sense of biopower that transforms the body and registers it on a larger network. From this perspective, discourses on the animal (zooesis) and technology (technesis) work together to bring a new political potential. Animality and technology no longer form a naïve dichotomy of nature vs. civilization but combine in ways of making more visible the new condition of life. It unfolds in a cinematic “zone,” an ephemeral “clearing” for “bare life” within the globalized world. This zone exists in the exceptional state of temporary potential to de-/repoliticize any humanistic politics.