Peter Greenaway is one of those "cinema-is-dead people," as Jonathan Rosenbaum calls them. In fact, Greenaway insists that he knows the exact day on which cinema died: "September 31, 1983, when the zapper, the remote control was introduced to the living rooms of the world."
Greenaway doesn't even consider himself a filmmaker anymore, though he was never really happy with that label in the first place. He set out to be a painter and considers himself a failure because that never worked out. But about ten years ago, he says, he became very disenchanted with cinema, a "very depleted medium." His latest project, The Tulse Luper Suitcases: a personal history of Uranium, isn't a film, either, though there are elements of the old dead media in it. Just what is it that Peter Greenaway is up to?
First, let's back up and sketch the context in which Greenaway gave his presentation on Wednesday, February 5, at the House of World Cultures in Berlin. The event taking place in that odd building, the transmediale, is a sort of sister festival to the Berlinale and runs about a week or so leading up to it, though its exhibition is viewable long afterwards.
Long before the arguments about whether shooting movies on digital video broke out, artists took to the new medium of analog video and, during the 80s, video was all the rage. Artists who'd worked with paint became fascinated by video's unreal colors and the opportunity it gave them to add the dimension of time to their compositions. Approaching from another angle, some journalists and some filmmakers believed that video would be a revolutionary medium that would bring about a new, more democratic society.
(Stick with me, because this gets relevant.)
Video would naturally become cheaper, everyone would have a camera and become a reporter, a filmmaker and/or an artist. Anyone who's seen Hearts of Darkness and heard Francis Ford Coppola talk about little fat girls making their own films on the cheap has sampled something of the spirit of the age.
It was around this time that the International Forum, part of the Berlinale, began including video art in its program. You can imagine the discussions that ensued about purity and impurity, celluloid and electronics and so on. So it was eventually decided that video would have its own festival aside from but running alongside the Berlinale. But by the time the Video Festival was set up, along came the Internet, or more precisely, since computer networks had been around, along came the popularity of the Internet.
By the mid-to-late 90s, it was the Internet that was going to bring about the utopian democracy video hadn't quite gotten around to yet. So the whole Video Festival was ditched and in its place, the transmediale was established, a festival for all new media, be they analog video or (and mostly) digital works, online or off, Web sites and CD-ROMs and all sorts of funky installations and so on.
Peter Greenaway has been following all this rather closely and has been something of a regular in Berlin every February. Some of his early films were shown in the International Forum, he's participated in Berlinale-related panel discussions, and now, he's presented The Tulse Luper Suitcases within the framework of the offshoot of the Forum he feels most appropriate.
Ok, so what's the idea. One big film, divided into three parts; a series of DVDs (we'll get to that); and then, the Web sites, CD-ROMs and so on, plus a TV series of 16 episodes, each 40 minutes long, all somehow related to an alter ego Greenaway has named Tulse Luper. The gist of all this: "Cinema is dead," he says, "Long live the cinema."
Well. We need to back up again. Just what is it that was ailing cinema before it supposedly died? According to Greenaway, for starters, it was all wrong in the first place. There you are, sitting in the dark staring straight ahead for two hours. This is just plain unnatural, he argues; we are not nocturnal beasts and, "as French philosophy has taught us for centuries, the world is all around us, not just in front of us."
Another problem: For 107 years, we've been looking at illustrated text. "We've never actually seen a film." Whether it's Godard or Spielberg, all movies begin with texts. Why have we modeled cinema on the idea of illustrating the 19th century novel? Lack of imagination, Greenaway argues, playing it safe. And ultimately, cinema (he pronounces it "cinemah" quite deliberately; it's like nails on a chalkboard) is an industry, not an art form.
Myself, I've got a zillion problems with all this, but Greenaway does get the brain churning. He offers an example that's rather compelling: If he approached potential financiers with paintings and drawings instead of a screenplay, no one would give him any money.
So Greenaway's "first tyranny of cinema" is that it's still text-bound. The second is the screen itself. The frame, the rectangle. Cinema has copied the proscenium arch of the theater. It's an old argument and he doesn't mention (nor is there time to ask him since he has to run to catch a train immediately after his presentation) that alternatives to rectangles have been tried in the past but have never really caught on. The third tyranny: "Cinema does not exist to be a playground for Sharon Stone." The infrastructure of the business, in other words, which includes the star-maker machinery, etc.
What Greenaway has set out to do is "disempower these tyrannies." His own films over the last ten years has been an attempt to do just that; and to reinvent cinema. He loves the fact that when The Baby of Macon was shown at the Berlinale, Coke bottles were thrown at the screen. "How can we arouse this sort of antagonism?" he asks.
Formally, that's what Greenaway is working on. Pissing us off. Not necessarily a bad thing. As for what Tulse Luper is about, well, keep in mind, he says, "there is no such thing as content anymore; there is only language. Content very rapidly atrophies." An example. Around 1643, Rembrandt painted Potiphar's wife 25 times. No one remembers who she is anymore, but everybody remembers Rembrandt. "How rapidly content loses its context and meaning."
Even so, Tulse Luper is "about" the idea that the 20th century was the century of uranium. "I'm old enough to have existed in the world when they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima." Like many who remember the Cold War, Greenaway spent much of his life worrying about the total annihilation of the world. "Not only in a sense of reality, but in a sense of metaphor as well."
And 92 is the atomic number of uranium. Since he's interested in structures as alternatives to narrative, an elaborate organizational system for this project is growing up around the number 92. Tulse Luper was born in 1911; this is 2003, so he's 92. "I believe cinema is a poor narrative form," he explains. "It's more about ambience, atmosphere, a sense of an event, not stories."
So within this system, which isn't entirely arbitrary since the atomic table "will provide the final veracity" - remember that elements here are believed to be the same on the other side of the galaxy and beyond - he will arbitrarily create 92 suitcases which will be introduced in these films. In every suitcase, there are either 92 ideas, objects, somethings. There are to be many entry points and many points at which you can leave.
He will keep inventing and adding until, in 2005, there'll be a big "pop caravan," a "portable cinema" with all this stuff. And then he presented a sampling of what some of it might look like, a ten-minute sample. It's basically ten minutes of the sort of thing we've seen in Greenaway's films recently, which he downplayed a bit, calling it a "showreel for the product," made to impress potential investors. "A great deal of eros and thanatos," he adds, but then, "What else is there to talk about?
For Greenaway, Eisenstein's Strike -- "he was the only filmmaker you could put up against artists like Michelangelo and Beethoven" -- was the first cinematic masterpiece. It was made in 1921; it took 26 years to find the first cinematic benchmark. If cinema died in '83, we're still looking for the first masterpiece that will revive it. "You've heard of Harry Potter," he says. "Now watch out for Tulse Luper."
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