Peter Greenaway Holds Court: An Interview at the Venice Film Festival (Interview) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Peter Greenway, by some accounts, represents outmoded filmmaking, and yet he holds forth, to all who will listen, much in the style of Gloria Swanson's famous line--"Im big, it's the pictures which have gotten small"--that cinema today is outmoded: it has become, he argues, mere illustration of text and does not explore its visual potential as a peculiar seventh art. Digital filmmaking, as exemplified by his own most recent film, The Tulse Luper Staircases (2004), however, allows for experiments in time, sequence, and action, and calls into question "storytelling" as only the variegated technology of contemporary cinema can. Since the beginning of his career in the 1960s, Greenaway has been obsessed with storytelling. All of his films, from his experimental meditation Intervals (1969) to the celebrated The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) to the video-glitz Pillowbook (1996), have summoned viewers' attention to the artifice of the story; using tricks such as numbers, maps, and taxonomy to order sequences arbitrarily. Lately, however, the erstwhile painter has taken this directive to the nth degree. The Tulse Luper Suitcases, the third and final episode of a three-part "story," seems to overthrow master narrative altogether, at the risk of alienating those audiences who may long for a modicum of narrative convention. The Tulse Luper Suitcases ix the open narrative of one matt from the 1920s onward, as he examines the contents of 92 suitcases. A tour-de-force of superimposed images, split screens, and frame-in-frames, it literally leaves the story up for grabs.