Peter Greenaway

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Cronenfly
Joined: Thu Jul 19, 2007 12:04 pm

Re: Peter Greenaway

#201 Post by Cronenfly » Thu Jul 14, 2016 12:53 am

In case anyone's wondering, I bit the bullet on the new British Cook blu and it looked pretty good on a cursory glance. Unrestored, with no subs or bonus features of any kind, but otherwise pretty solid.

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knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: Peter Greenaway

#202 Post by knives » Sun Sep 04, 2016 2:39 pm

His newest Esienstein in Guanajuato seems so much like late Ken Russell both in the good and bad of that. Not just the borderline slapstick humour artificial to death CGI, but also the use of high speed technique and visual aplomb almost as a distraction to the fact that the pool is rather shallow. Eisenstein the refugee is merely Greenaway the pariah and once you've figured out that you've got everything there is to the film. It is not the intelligent and complex piece of the best of Greenaway, but the spectacle like the best of Hollywood distracts from this fact and leaves an intense satisfaction through laughter. The film only breathes rarely such as the list of the dead functioning as a mini-The Falls and this is where the genius of Greenaway returns over his spectacle. It's sad that this return to the story of The Belly of the Architect is a one note joke, though at least it is a fun one.

This is a minor detail, but given the importance of the shaft in this film I find it peculiar that Greenaway left Eisenstein uncut, but his Mexican guide left like a Jew! It just doesn't seem thematically appropriate let alone historically.

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dda1996a
Joined: Tue Oct 27, 2015 6:14 am

Re: Peter Greenaway

#203 Post by dda1996a » Mon Sep 05, 2016 12:16 am

I found this the most interesting film he made since the pillow book, which as much as I can tolerate Tulsa Lauper, Goltzius and Nighwatching says a lot about everything he made 8 1/2 Women onward. It's a shame he'll never be able to reach the heights of his 80s-mid 90s Era with Vienna and Nyman.
It doesn't seem like has a problem of raising funds, so I wonder why his recent films have looked so ugly, especially the pointless CGI. He obviously can still get sets and stages, so why use that ugly and awful CGI for one or two scenes here and there? It saddens me as I love everything he made from his early shorts until The Pillow Book

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knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: Peter Greenaway

#204 Post by knives » Mon Sep 05, 2016 12:30 am

He's been pretty public about how near impossible it has been to get funding since his main producer moved on from him. These films are made relatively cheaply and he's run all over Europe, particularly The Netherlands, in an attempt to get funding for anything. It's a bit absurd to say he hasn't had a problem raising funds. As to the CGI, I like it. The cartoony nature fits into his overall aesthetic which has never really tried for strict realism and it also allows him to play around with architecture in a fashion unlike anything else he has been able to do before. Here at least Greenaway only uses CGI for exterior sequences which could never be fulfilled by sets. It seems like a practical way to achieve certain shots.

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dda1996a
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Re: Peter Greenaway

#205 Post by dda1996a » Mon Sep 05, 2016 4:25 am

Kees Kasander was also responsible for Tuls Luper and they still didn't look that great. We'll I'm not going to criticize the CGI here as much as a Hollywood production but I remember three instances, one where there was basically an image from Google being shown (the orchestra part) while another was them having dinner on a rooftop. I just found them blatantly obvious and distracting. I kind of wish he would go back to making shorts if he can't afford it.

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MichaelB
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Re: Peter Greenaway

#206 Post by MichaelB » Mon Sep 05, 2016 4:29 am

It's very very obvious that the Tulse Luper trilogy suffered from decreasing budgets as it progressed, presumably because of the lack of success of the first two episodes.

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dda1996a
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Re: Peter Greenaway

#207 Post by dda1996a » Mon Sep 05, 2016 6:11 am

Did anyone expect it to succeed? As a big fan of Greenaway I found them increasingly harder to enjoy, and I still rather think they're fine. Add to that the novels that you can barely find online, the online game and I think unreleased cds, plus that you have to be familiar with Greenaway's entire oeuvre, including his shorts to even sort of tolerate the films.

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MichaelB
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Re: Peter Greenaway

#208 Post by MichaelB » Mon Sep 05, 2016 6:13 am

I imagine they expected it to get more widespread distribution than it did.

As it was, it wasn't even picked up in Greenaway's native country in any medium bar very occasional one-off theatrical screenings.

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dda1996a
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Re: Peter Greenaway

#209 Post by dda1996a » Mon Sep 05, 2016 7:19 am

Which doesn't surprise me the least. It's the least audience friendly films he made, which I think says a lot.

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Tommaso
Joined: Fri May 19, 2006 10:09 am

Re: Peter Greenaway

#210 Post by Tommaso » Tue Sep 06, 2016 3:13 pm

dda1996a wrote:Did anyone expect it to succeed? As a big fan of Greenaway I found them increasingly harder to enjoy, and I still rather think they're fine. Add to that the novels that you can barely find online, the online game and I think unreleased cds, plus that you have to be familiar with Greenaway's entire oeuvre, including his shorts to even sort of tolerate the films.
This is certainly true, but over the years I've gotten the impression that many of Greenaway's 'extended' projects were conceived as largely 'imaginary', after the first stages had been realised. Look at his installation projects, for instance. Of the ten-part "The Stairs" (from the 1990s), only the Geneva and Munich installations were realised if I remember correctly. There is also the "Ten Maps to Paradise" project, of which I think only the Ljubljana part (1999) was realised. Once he expressed his general idea in one or two examples, it seems he almost wanted to leave it to the viewer (or reader, if you only know the books accompanying these projects) to imagine further exemplifications of these serial ideas.

The "Tulse Luper Suitcases" may be a slightly different case, and it seems he desperately wanted to complete at least the feature film-trilogy, so much so that he somehow managed to make the third film on what must have been a shoestring budget, leading to all the shortcomings in terms of a seriously reduced number of characters, truly awful CGI, and a generally rushed feeling to the third part in general. And of course that's disappointing after the complexities of the first two parts and the visual enticements they offer (especially Part 2, which is still among my favourite Greenaway films if only for the jaw-dropping visuals). As to the other components of the TLS project: the TV series was realised and seems to offer some extended and previously unseen scenes mostly for Pt.2. I haven't seen it, and I'm not sure whether it was ever shown anywhere, but a copy of the series is floating around where you expect it. As to the TLS online projects, I think he was basically looking for participation from the audience, which unfortunately was not forthcoming, and so probably a chance was wasted. Of the 92 DVDs - each pertaining to one of the suitcases - I think exactly one was realised, by some artists at a German university, IIRC. But here again I believe that this was a largely imaginary part of the project.

As to "Eisenstein": yes, the CGI is somewhat unconvincing, but in its artificiality it might indeed be completely fitting to the Greenaway universe. What annoyed me much more was how Greenaway could make a film about his alledgedly favourite director and then represent him as a largely hysterical buffoon. Someone compared it to Forman's "Amadeus" in this respect, and I even agree. But Greenaway's portrayal of Eisenstein is much more shallow, and surprisingly we learn next to nothing about either Eisenstein's Mexican project nor about the other films that came before it. Sure, there are some nice re-creations of the Mexican carnival scenes that we know from Aleksandrov's reconstruction of Eisenstein's unfinished film, and that regularly appearing trio of Mexican thugs is really funny (not least because they forcibly reminded me of the wanna-be bandits in Mamoulian's "The Gay Desperado"), but all in all I think the film is a misfire, not at all on the level of "The Belly of an Architect" to which it may have some resemblances.

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knives
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Re: Peter Greenaway

#211 Post by knives » Tue Sep 06, 2016 7:05 pm

I was thinking exactly that last sentence (without seeing it brought up before). There's this quite reminiscent to Belly which is my favorite of Greenaway's features but that only highlights how shallow this film's approach to the artist and inspiration is. Not to mention the sense of foreign breathing from the architecture which Mexico could do especially if the film was allowed to breath.

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zedz
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Re: Peter Greenaway

#212 Post by zedz » Tue Sep 06, 2016 11:35 pm

knives wrote:I was thinking exactly that last sentence (without seeing it brought up before). There's this quite reminiscent to Belly which is my favorite of Greenaway's features but that only highlights how shallow this film's approach to the artist and inspiration is. Not to mention the sense of foreign breathing from the architecture which Mexico could do especially if the film was allowed to breath.
Interesting metaphor, because I was thinking about what went wrong with Greenaway's work, and the adjective I settled on was 'airless'. For me, they've just become closed systems, echo chambers of Greenaway's obsessions, with potentially interesting ideas closing in on themselves rather than opening up. In the 1970s and 80s, 'air' was brought into Greenaway's world in the form of the real world (he used to be great with landscapes before he started trying to control every pixel of his mise-en-scene) and strong actors bringing nuance and inflection to the characters. Dennehy in Belly of an Architect is a convenient emblem of that, but there are plenty of other examples in his early features. Greenaway also used to (particularly with his shorts) build films around one or two strong, provocative ideas and allow them to develop over the course of the film and in the brain of the viewer in the days before he began oppressively overdetermining every detail of his productions. In short: Greenaway's films used to be exciting and fun.

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Spatulater bro!
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Re: Peter Greenaway

#213 Post by Spatulater bro! » Sun Dec 04, 2016 3:45 pm

Is the Fabulous Films release of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover the best Blu-ray release? Or should I look elsewhere?

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colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
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Re: Peter Greenaway

#214 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Apr 09, 2017 5:53 am

I have been meaning to do this for a while, but only yesterday had the opportunity to pass by one of the last remaining red telephone boxes in my small town. I couldn't let it go without taking some pictures in case Peter Greenaway ever wanted to make a sequel to Dear Phone (sorry about artfully managing to capture the overflowing bin next to it too!). Maybe a film where the phone box's original use has long passed and like this one, now is filled with pictures of the local area for people to look at instead, where with time the old phone box has become a kind of historial artifact/library/encyclopaedia in itself?
Image
Image

And so this is not a completely empty post, here's a great 2016 BFI interview with Greenaway ( I particularly like his comment that "history is only a branch of literature" that seems even more apropos in these Wolf Hall times!)

criterion10

Re: Peter Greenaway

#215 Post by criterion10 » Wed Jun 14, 2017 5:28 pm

I've been retrospecting Greenaway's feature films for the first time recently and have really fallen in love with his 80s works (The Draughtsman's Contract through The Cook...). Nonetheless, I hit a brick wall when attempting Prospero's Books this morning and wound up turning it off after the first twenty minutes. The endless frames upon frames and disjointed structure -- which, as I understand it, has become a common trademark of Greenaway's later films -- really turned me off and left me struggling to comprehend the film even at the most basic level. Though I was wondering for its fans how a greater degree of familiarity with Shakespeare's source material (I literally know nothing about The Tempest beyond the glimpse that the opening title cards provide) might affect a second attempt.

I ended up moving forward with The Baby of Macon instead, which strangely is not nearly as dramatically engaging as Greenaway's other works, but is as visually stunning and disturbing as anything he's directed.

beamish13
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Re: Peter Greenaway

#216 Post by beamish13 » Wed Jun 14, 2017 6:03 pm

I adore Greenaway, and I had a difficult time the first time I saw Prospero as well. My challenges were probably exacerbated by the fact that I watched it on VHS with a small kitchenette-sized television ! His goal with that film was to create a hypertext out of its source material rather than adapt it, and he used then-state of the art high definition and digital tools to try to achieve it. I think it features what may be Michael Nyman's single strongest score. Give it a rewatch after digging into the massively entertaining The Falls and the underrated 8 1/2 Women

Glad to hear that you enjoyed Baby of Macon. It really stuns me that it never received any theatrical distribution in North America. Its producer, Kees Kasandar, owns it outright, and I wish Oscilloscope or Janus would give it a much-belated debut here.

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DeprongMori
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Re: Peter Greenaway

#217 Post by DeprongMori » Wed Jun 14, 2017 6:11 pm

colinr0380 wrote:Nonetheless, I hit a brick wall when attempting Prospero's Books this morning and wound up turning it off after the first twenty minutes. The endless frames upon frames and disjointed structure -- which, as I understand it, has become a common trademark of Greenaway's later films -- really turned me off and left me struggling to comprehend the film even at the most basic level. Though I was wondering for its fans how a greater degree of familiarity with Shakespeare's source material (I literally know nothing about The Tempest beyond the glimpse that the opening title cards provide) might affect a second attempt.
Despite Prospero's Books being a strange and unwieldy beast, I have a great fondness for it. Then again, I am enamored of the source material. It is probably essential to have read (or seen) The Tempest to get much more than frustration out of Greenaway's film. To make an odd analogy, the film is somewhat akin to a jazz musician's exploration off the basic chord structure of a musical standard that provides someone without familiarity with the original song very little to grab onto. You might want to read the play, watch a BBC adaptation, or even see Julie Taymor's disappointing film before revisiting it. I find it one of his most beautiful films (in contrast to The Baby of Macon, which I found to be his ugliest and the film I'm least likely to revisit.)

Regarding the "frames upon frames" I had little patience, for comparison, with The Pillow Book.

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DeprongMori
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Re: Peter Greenaway

#218 Post by DeprongMori » Wed Jun 14, 2017 6:18 pm

BTW, which release of Prospero's Books are you watching? There are lots of editions out there in the wrong aspect ratio, or with a poor transfer. I found the 2013 German DVD from FilmConfect to be a pretty acceptable presentation until such a time as someone does a proper remastering and Blu-ray release.

criterion10

Re: Peter Greenaway

#219 Post by criterion10 » Wed Jun 14, 2017 8:40 pm

beamish13 wrote:Glad to hear that you enjoyed Baby of Macon. It really stuns me that it never received any theatrical distribution in North America. Its producer, Kees Kasandar, owns it outright, and I wish Oscilloscope or Janus would give it a much-belated debut here.
Well, I don't know that enjoyed is the best word to use describing my experience with Macon, but it's certainly far better than its maligned reputation suggests. I'd arguably consider it Greenaway's most elaborate use of staging and choreography, certainly a necessity for the film's key conceit. Many of the tracking shots floored me on the basis of their sheer length and scope (the film's disturbing climax being one of the most notable).

Speaking of Janus, I'm very surprised Criterion hasn't released any of Greenaway's films yet. I know there were rumblings of The Cook many years ago, though that release seems to have strangely vanished. Has there been any further word? Would be great to see Criterion go after just about everything through Macon (I'll probably import what the BFI has given us for the time being).
DeprongMori wrote:Despite Prospero's Books being a strange and unwieldy beast, I have a great fondness for it. Then again, I am enamored of the source material. It is probably essential to have read (or seen) The Tempest to get much more than frustration out of Greenaway's film.
This was the impression I got from the first twenty minutes. I'll likely hold off on Prospero's Books until I've had a chance to properly engage with The Tempest. And I believe the version I have is the Japanese Blu-Ray from 2015, so the quality is more than suitable.

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colinr0380
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Re: Peter Greenaway

#220 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Jun 15, 2017 12:41 pm

criterion10, if you liked The Baby of Macon I'd recommend Goltzius and the Pelican Company as that's very much in a similar vein of theatricalised performances for patrons backfiring spectacularly, turning from monetised commission into coercion and embodiment!

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Adam X
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Re: Peter Greenaway

#221 Post by Adam X » Tue Aug 08, 2017 1:06 pm

I was trying to find the answer to this, but there seems to be no mention of it online.

Can anyone tell me if the Park Circus BD of The Pillow Book retains the original calligraphic subtitles or has it replaced them with a standard font like the Film Movement disc? (See the first set of screen caps here for a comparison of the two presentations)

_shadow_
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Re: Peter Greenaway

#222 Post by _shadow_ » Wed Aug 09, 2017 1:27 am

The Park City Blu-ray displays standard white subtitles for spoken dialogue and onscreen text (i.e., these are overlaid on the image and not embedded), with the exception of the montage sequence during which the lyrics of Guesch Patti's "Blonde" appear. These appear in the calligraphic font as they did theatrically and are embedded in the image (as they scroll horizontally across the screen, perhaps they were composited into the image at a different stage than the other calligraphic titles).

I find this a fair compromise (that sequence is the most prominent in the use of the subtitles as an interactive element with the image), particularly if it allows for an earlier-generation element to be used - I'm not sure if that's the case, but even theatrically this was extremely soft in appearance, and the Blu-ray seems about as sharp as is possible, with significantly more image information at all edges of the screen than the Sony DVD release, which did preserve all the calligraphic subtitles.

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MichaelB
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Re: Peter Greenaway

#223 Post by MichaelB » Wed Aug 09, 2017 2:16 am

I suspect the nature of the original production, which used a then pioneering HD video system that technically falls far short of what we'd expect from high definition today, means that a soft picture is unavoidable.

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Adam X
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Re: Peter Greenaway

#224 Post by Adam X » Thu Aug 10, 2017 2:24 am

Thanks _shadow_.

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Swift
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Re: Peter Greenaway

#225 Post by Swift » Sat Nov 27, 2021 11:38 pm

Greenaway's commercial for Raffles Hotels, a beautiful piece if not incredibly elitist.

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