He defines himself as a philosopher and an artist: As the unconventional British filmmaker Peter Greenaway turns 80, here's a look back at his career.
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Peter Greenaway's most important films
British filmmaker, artist and media philosopher Peter Greenaway loves to oscillate between different genres — and even more so, to provoke. In the 1990s, he was a star director.
"A film must separate itself from the camera if it wants to liberate itself from slavery," Greenaway once said in a statement that was as bewildering as it was typical for him. After all, he did accomplish some unusual things in his artistic career — except one thing, and that was a particular film with which the masses could have identified on a permanent basis.
After starting out with several experimental short films and the three-hour avant-garde film "The Fall" (1980), Peter Greenaway achieved his breakthrough with "The Draughtsman's Contract" (1982). The movie that became an immediate box office hit established Greenaway as an unconventional director who was courageous enough to distance himself from the mainstream.
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Playing around with numbers and riddles
Greenaway's second movie also received a lot of attention. In "A Zed & Two Noughts" (1985), he confronted viewers with a story that appeared conventional — but only on the surface. After their wives get killed in an accident, two brothers explore the course of the world. Hidden behind the plot of the movie is a game with numbers, figures and letters.
One year later, the director amazed his audiences with a film that was more amenable to viewers than they would have expected from him. In "The Belly of an Architect," Brian Dennehy stars as an architect whose attempts to organize an exhibition in Rome are hampered by cancer. The movie was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, where viewers were surprised to discover a deeply emotional story.
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Three women and an enigma
The world's most important film festival also saw the premiere of Greenaway's "Drowning by Numbers" (1988). The movie, both ironic and serene, tells the story of three women — a mother, her daughter and her granddaughter — who conspire with a coroner in order to assassinate their husbands. The film comes across as a game with absurd, comical and enigmatic motives.
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A scandalous and sensational success
With his fifth movie, "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover," Peter Greenaway hit the peak of his career. Helen Mirren plays the wife of a criminal restaurant owner in the film that intermingles sexuality and cannibalism in beautifully constructed images. Not surprisingly, it was considered a scandal by quite a few viewers.
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Greenaway & Shakespeare
Sooner or later, British filmmakers can be expected to turn to Shakespeare — and not even Peter Greenaway was an exception to this unwritten rule. In 1991, he produced "Prospero's Books," a film adaptation of the Shakespeare drama "The Tempest" — a very free adaptation. At the same time, Greenaway started to experiment with new film techniques.
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Giving audiences a run for their money
Greenaway's films were never easy to grasp for mainstream audiences. But in the 1990s, they became even more intellectualized and sophomoric. "The Baby of Macon" (1993) gives proof of Greenaway's tendency to see film mainly as a playground for his technical experiments, and as a platform for expressing his world views.
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Speaking in sign language
Peter Greenaway's films of those years certainly posed difficult challenges to the viewers. That also holds true for "The Pillow Book" (1996) focusing on a significant work of classical Japanese literature with the same title. It was written by Sei Shonagon approximately one thousand years ago.
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Proceeding from film towards art
Greenaway increasingly lost interest in film. "Film is dying, both in a social and technical sense," he stated, prognosticating the very end of the medium. As a trained artist, he turned to multimedia projects like "The Tulse Luper Suitcases" (2002) which combined film and television, video and art installation.
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All the world's a stage
From then on, Greenaway busied himself with other art genres. The 45-minute film installation "Leonardo's Last Supper" (2011) was intended as an homage to the Italian Renaissance and Leonardo da Vinci. Although some film elements came into play, the work was predominantly a complete work of art produced by a globally active artist.
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Late film comeback
It turned out that Greenaway wasn't capable of living without film. In 2015, he presented "Eisenstein in Guanajuato" at the Berlin Film Festival competition. The movie tells the story of Russian film pioneer Sergei M. Eisenstein, who made Mexico his home in the early 1930s. Greenaway did, however, remain true to his principles in that the film is anything but conventional.
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The 1980s were Peter Greenaway's golden era. Between 1982 and 1989, he directed five films which received a lot of attention and acclaim and established him as a star director. Cinephiles were fascinated by the audacious and unconventional ideas of the British filmmaker.
It all seemed to be over quite suddenly. During the following decade, he appeared to leave the international stage just as quickly as he had made it to the top.
It wasn't that Greenaway stopped directing films, but rather that they suddenly ceased to be en vogue. The same critics who had once hailed him suddenly rejected his works for being too intellectual. And subsequently, his audiences drastically shrank.
Hardly any other film director in the post-war era has enjoyed such a high degree of popularity within a particular time frame, only to then lose it so quickly.
Greenaway himself might see things differently.
After all, he very consciously turned his back to what he termed "conventional cinema." But what precisely did he define as "conventional"? After all, even his hits including "The Draughtsman's Contract," "The Belly of an Architect," and "The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover" were anything but conventional. The highly original British filmmaker never even tried to please mainstream audiences.
Curious about the versatility of film
Born on April 5, 1942, in Newport, Wales, Peter Greenaway was always interested in the versatility of film, its vocabulary and its future, taking into account technical developments and the older techniques that would become outdated as a result.
After predicting the end of film as a medium, the director went on to present his own ideas on art, where film only played a minor role. Through his elaborate installations, combining art and film, painting and music, traditional culture and modern techniques, the conceptual artist Greenaway created some total works of art.
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Film comeback
At that point, most film fans took for granted that the highly philosophical artist wouldn't be returning to film, having found a new niche international audience through his art.
He nevertheless surprised the film world in 2015, by presenting his movie "Eisenstein in Guanajuato" at the Berlin Film Festival, an homage to Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, best known for his 1925 film "Battleship Potemkin."
Because Greenaway addressed Eisenstein's alleged homosexuality in his film, the Russian State Film Archive withdrew its support. Greenaway then criticized President Vladimir Putin at the Berlinale for promoting homophobia.
Despite this dispute, Greenaway worked that same year on a project about Russia's past and future under the working title "Volga" — financed by the Russian oligarch and Putin confidante Gennady Timchenko, who was already on the US sanctions lists at the time. In the end, the film didn't materialize.
In 2017, Greenaway, who lives in the Netherlands, released the documentary "Luther and His Legacy," which draws parallels between pictorial representations of Martin Luther and the profusion of digital image production today.
Now, as he turns 80, a new trailer for his upcoming drama "Walking To Paris" has been released. The biopic centers on modernist Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi.
According to trade magazine Variety, Greenaway is working on three more projects: "Lucca Mortis," scheduled to be filmed late winter 2022; as well as "Bosch" and "The Food of Love," planned for 2023.
Update: This article was updated on April 5, 2022, for the 80th birthday of Peter Greenaway