The Pillow Book – an old interview with Peter Greenaway

Lawrence Chua said this in the lede to an interview with filmmaker Peter Greenaway back in 1997:

A few years ago at the Toronto Film Festival, a press screening of Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books had been scheduled first thing in the morning. It was the kind of festival planning that almost guaranteed an intensely grumpy, sleep-deprived hangover for the rest of the day. Fueled by coffee fumes, shielded by sunglasses, we dutiful critics nonetheless filled the tiny theater in seconds and rolled our heads back as the lights dimmed. The flood of images pushed some of us into sleepy reveries; others into alert antagonism. After the screening, I ran into a Taiwanese critic, one of the most important opinion makers in world cinema today. “I liked it,” she said, then added confidentially, “I fell asleep. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good film.”

Years ago, when I saw Greenaway’s  “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover,” a title that is practically a complete poem and has been copied ever since, I didn’t get it.  I found the images and ideas so appalling that I couldn’t stand watching it.  One of my cagier friends, who lives in France and has that oh-so-European way of being amused, said, “My dear, it’s opera.”  And then an entire new world of film as opera opened up before my eyes.  Opera with its repetitions and grandiosity and emotional lunacy.  Only Greenaway happens to also make gorgeous shots.  So opera in which the music is — visual.

Always fun to hear about a critic falling asleep, but in this case, it’s part of the power of this filmmaker.  He’s so over the top, and yet so not loud.  Unusual combination.  Just as every film student has to watch the eye get slit in “Andalucian Dog” and visit the slaughter house in “Blood of the Beast” and watch a kid ride his bike in Bertolucci’s “Bicycle Thief,”  they nowadays get a chance to consider if Greenaway is, in fact,  an American who knows how to out-bid Europe on how to make European art cinema.  What he has is visual humor.  Real humor.  Humor that gets into trouble.  Not that amused thing my friend has down.

Greenaway makes me think odd new thoughts.  Example:  imagine if major film directors presented the news each night.   How would they present the wars?  The obits?  The crime?  The economy?  The weather?

I was talking to a friend who is a painter today– the artist Bascove, who has a new exhibit of her paintings of bridges on display at the Arsenal in Central Park.  And we found ourselves talking about maps.  Imagine if artists made the maps.   She told me that in her view,  every one of us has a personal map — where we live, where we work, where our dry cleaners is, where we eat out.  It’s how we see the world.  She suggested this in a lecture she did on Saul Steinberg, whose art includes that famous view of the world from NYC.

A Greenaway film is just such a map, but his neighborhood is the neighborhood of human behavior in all its haunts.   Its a map of the body and a map of words, and one just sits on the other curvaceously, without a lot of interplay.

Reading this interview, twelve years after it originally appeared in Bomb, I’m taken by the way in which Greenaway pre-saged the transformation of communication:  “My cinema has been trying very hard to invest a lot of energy and imagination into the notions of strong and effective pictorial communication, and The Pillow Book, I hope, is another example of that. The story is very reductive, very simple. It can be summed up very quickly in the suggestion that it is a fable about a young woman who wants her lovers to write on her body. The origins for me don’t rely in any particular desire to make a storytelling activity….”

When did we first ask news reporters to be storytellers?  When did we stop asking filmmakers to be storytellers?  What’s twelve years down the line?  And will word or image dominate?

via BOMB Magazine: Peter Greenaway by Lawrence Chua.