The 92 Tulse Luper Suitcases
Here it is: the official website for Greenaway's epic trilogy.
Feast on the multi-media!!!
www.tulselupernetwork.com
another perspective on PG
Man, this new book I picked up is an excellent read.
It's by Alexander Walker, and he talks about the British film scene in great length, putting top British directors in a 16-year perspective.
Here's his views on Greenaway:
"Peter Greenaway had already followed the unexpected success of his feature debut The Draughtsman's Contract with A Zed and Two Noughts; in The Belly of an Architect he had drawn even closer to the mental geography and arcane hideouts of Continental Europe- this distancing himself with deliberateness from Anglo-Saxon tolerance and understanding.
That he was travelling alone obviously did not worry him in the slightest: he probably found himself more at home, in his own sensibility, when not having to deal with his countrymen's aesthetic blindness and parochial deafness.
Set in Rome, the new film recorded with precise prognosis the steps to calamity and then extinction of an eminent architect, whose belly is the first image in the film, mimicing the rotundity of St. Peter's, a fleshy landmark amid the religious fantasies of Roman Catholicism- and, in Greenaway's diagnosis, just as infected. With what, though it was hard to say: perhaps the view of life as a self-fufilling conspiracy that claims body & soul eventually.
here Walker gets pure:
In The Draughtsman's Contract, his hero painted himself into a corner where his murderers were waiting, alarmed by the clues to their guilt that his sketches disclosed; in The Belly of an Architect, his hero is also illuminated by a foredoomed mortality as his days of grace expire and he loses his health (to a malignant tumor), his wife (to a philandering colleague), his self-respect (to the city's dolce vita), his work (to a beaurocratic cabal) and his life (to all the aforementioned inflictions).
Once the autopsy was over, The Belly of an Archtect was seen- by some- to have the macabre beauty of a tomb with a view. Greenaway's imagery deployed architecture in a Kubrickian fashion, relishing symmetry that shed beauty but also engendered apprehension; while his photographer, Sacha Vierny, deployed his own art in such sympathy with the masters' eye that it was hard not to think of him and Greenaway in terms of the twin couple in A Zed and Two Noughts.
Mortality was close to his heart (as well as belly): he had once made a 4-minute film entirely about 37 people who had fallen out of upper-story windows. His films had become more and more directly allusive, teeming with details and metaphors taken from painters that he combined with this Jacobean fascination with death, with whole heaps of it, dispatched with a swagger and chronicled with an actuary's pendantry.
Greenaway operates in relatively relaxed financial parameters, and can afford himself the luxury of critical hostility.
(At least for the generation to whom he still appears subversive).
