FW: [kino] Peter Greenaway report

[Dmitry Karpeev]

-----Original Message-----
From: Dmitry Karpeev [mailto:karpeev at mcs.anl.gov] 
Sent: Saturday, November 13, 2004 9:06 PM
To: 'Dmitri Krioukov'
Subject: RE: [kino] Peter Greenaway report

Greenaway also gave a lecture at Northwestern University, which I missed.
Apparently, he talked for about 1.5 hours, didn't take questions, but showed
his latest 6-minute short.  It was made at Lars Von Trier's request as a
contribution to a collection of shorts by European directors on the theme of
the European Union.   According to a witness that I interrogated,
Greenaway's short depicts naked people (surprise, surprise) with national
flags (UK, the Netherlands etc) painted on their naked bodies one by one
crowding into a single shower and fighting for the water, which slowly
washes away the painted flags.  In the end, the water runs out and they are
left with a dirty mess of mixed paint at their feet.  Very optimistic.

-----Original Message-----
From: Dmitri Krioukov [mailto:dima at caida.org] 
Sent: Saturday, November 13, 2004 8:50 PM
To: Dmitry Karpeev
Cc: kino at caida.org
Subject: RE: [kino] Peter Greenaway report

dimas,

92 dvds with luper's suitcases arrest
me with surprise. on imdb, i can find
only three. can you clarify? how many
did you see? one? also, which one was
made in russia?

i understand greenaway's obsession with
numbers, but 92 dvds... how much each?
--
dima.
http://www.caida.org/~dima/

-----Original Message-----
From: kino-bounces at caida.org [mailto:kino-bounces at caida.org]On Behalf Of
Dmitry Karpeev
Sent: Saturday, November 13, 2004 6:13 PM
To: kino at caida.org
Subject: [kino] Peter Greenaway report


Last Wed. Peter Greenaway himself made an appearance at Chicago’s Facets
Multimedia to introduce one of his latest movies “Tulse Luper’s Suitcases”.
He struck me as extremely gracious and sharp.  He said a few words before
and answered questions after the movie.
In his opinion, there is a revolution afoot in the cinema – the digital
revolution.  It has the potential to reinvent the cinema, which, in Mr.
Greenaway’s view, has been stuck in the “animated novel” paradigm nearly
since its invention.  He himself thinks that the two cliché words,
“interactive” and “multimedia”, encode the future of the cinema, although it
is hard, if at all possible, to implement them in the setting of a
traditional movie cinema.   For now, his movies seem to seek to explode the
linear narrative structure of a movie, which ordinarily makes it akin to a
text, and bring forward the image.  Many images.  Multiple images.  At once.
And music.  Et cetera.
It makes for difficult watching in some instances.  But extremely beautiful
too.  His favorite director is S. Esenstein, followed by Godard at some
distance.  Of the contemporary there are Lynch and Cronenberg that he feels
conceptual closeness to.  Here’s something interesting, I think: Peter
Greenaway use of nudes in his movies is both a reflection of his esthetic
origins as a painter, and a challenge, to some extent, to the puritan
sentiment as well as the stereotype that only attractive women in their 20s
and 30s appear naked on film, primarily before a sex scene.  He gives a
chance for all kinds of people to be naked on the screen and for all sorts
of reasons.

It turns out that Mr. Greenaway has had 2 painting exhibits, has written
several books, directed (?) an opera (with more in the works) and is
planning to put out 92 DVDs, one for each of Tulse Luper’s suitcases,
apparently.
There is a dude in Montreal that has constructed an interactive trailer, in
which all or part of “Tulse Luper’s Suitcases” can be experience
interactively, in any order: any scene (or scene inside a scene, of which
there are many), any piece of music (mostly electronically recycled
Prokofiev), any subtle political, geographical, literary or historic
reference examined (he’s worse than Godard in this respect, his ideal
audience requiring many years of rigorous schooling, it seems), et cetera.
Now, this is both interactive and multimedia!  But is it cinema?

Dima.

Guy Muddin is visiting Facets next Wed., so stay tuned.