Peter Greenaway

Born in Newport (Wales), on April 5, 1942, Peter Greenaway was one of those repellent children, because while his classmates enjoyed American adventure movies, such as Robin from the woods , he already had a taste for it at the age of 12. exquisite’ for European cinema, especially that of Pier Paolo Pasolini , Alain Resnais and of course, Jean-Luc Godard . At an early age he decided that he wanted to become a painter, for which he enrolled at Walthamstow College of Art, north-east London. In the classroom he shot Death of Sentiment , his first short, around the elements of a church yard.

When he finished his studies, he found a permanent job at the Central Office of Information (COI), a British government agency. There he worked as editor of different documents, at the same time that he launched his own short films, such as Tree , around a tree surrounded by cement.

He made his feature film debut late, when he was almost 40 years old, with The Falls , a mockumentary in which he was already showing off his postmodernity. In a strange future, the camera collects the testimonies of survivors of a violent event where there have been numerous deaths, and which has caused mutations in people. Its duration, about three hours and fifteen minutes, is clearly exaggerated. It was already clear that his was not going to be conventional cinema. ” Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings are not movies, they are picture books,” he declared.

After the dramatic comedy A Zed & Two Noughts , success came to Peter Greenaway with The Architect’s Belly , from 1987, where Stourley Kracklite ( Brian Dennehy ), an American architect, visits Rome with Louise, his wife, to participate in the organization of an exhibition dedicated to his illustrious 18th century French colleague Étienne-Louis Boullée. Critical of the capitalist system, it has brilliant moments, such as a tracking shot that shows the photographs taken by the protagonist, and other desperate ones such as images of bellies. “If I ever get reincarnated, I would like it to be an architect because you can avoid movies, stop listening to music, ignore painting… but never architecture”, comments the director.

It marks the beginning of the ‘golden’ era of Peter Greenaway, also composed of Conspiracy of Women , about three protagonists with marital problems, and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Mistress , with Richard Bohringer , Michael Gambon , Helen Mirren , about the sadistic owner of a restaurant.

In the 1990s, he began to lose followers, with very overloaded but empty works, such as The Books of Próspero and El niño de Mâcon . He ends up being desperate with the strange multimedia experiment formed by The Suitcases of Tulse Luper: The Moab Story , from 2003 and The Suitcases of Tulse Luper: From vaux to the sea . It was followed by two debatable tributes to two of their teachers in different disciplines, The Night Watch, which recreates a tragic period in the life of the painter Rembrandt, when the artist lost his wife and three children, and Eisenstein in Guanajuato , which speculates with which the Russian filmmaker SW Eisenstein was able to maintain a homosexual relationship.