Greenaway announces the death of cinema

[DB7]

Greenaway announces the death of cinema - and blames the remote-control zapper
By Clifford Coonan in Pusan, South Korea
Published: 10 October 2007

He has been among the most exciting arthouse film-makers of his generation. But the British film director Peter Greenaway caused a stir at Korea's Pusan film festival yesterday by launching an attack on modern cinema and claiming the medium's days are numbered.

"If you shoot a dinosaur in the brain on Monday, it's tail is still waggling on Friday. Cinema is brain dead," said Greenaway, who has shocked and delighted audiences, often simultaneously, with movies such as The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and Prospero's Books.

"Cinema's death date was 31 September 1983, when the remote-control zapper was introduced to the living room, because now cinema has to be interactive, multi-media art," he told a director's masterclass.

It should be noted that September has 30 days.

Known for his uncompromising views of art, the universe and everything in between, Greenaway said that new film-makers should look instead at new, interactive forms. He was in Pusan to promote his film Nightwatching, which is based on a period in Rembrandt's life.

There were gasps among film students when he took aim at some of the biggest names. "Here's a real provocation: [US video artist] Bill Viola is worth 10 Martin Scorseses. Scorsese is old-fashioned and is making the same films that [the pioneering director] DW Griffiths was making early last century," he said.

He added that cinema should not be "a playground for Sharon Stone". "Cinema is wasted on cinema – most cinema is bedtime stories for adults," he said.

Warning his audience that he liked a fight, Greenaway dismissed a comment by one Westerner in the audience, who said his films were proof that cinema was very much alive, describing her remarks as "not intelligent" and "humbug". Earlier, he said a line in Welsh, perplexing the Korean translators. "Every medium has to be redeveloped, otherwise we would still be looking at cave paintings... New electronic film-making means the potential for expanding the notions of cinema has become very rich indeed."

The generation "who grew up with laptops in their cots" wanted greater participation and "to do away with the elitism of Hollywood", replacing it with a cinema based on image rather than text. "We're still illustrating Jane Austen novels – what a waste of time," he said.

Greenaway trained as a painter, and considered cinema a "pathetic adjunct" to that medium. His visually rich, difficult movies, often based on paintings or visual images, have earned him accusations of intellectual snobbery but he said that he firmly believed the changes in how films were made would ultimately be acceptable to a wider audience. He pointed to controversy when the first Star Wars movie came out, how people felt it was too fast and too difficult to understand, but how the way it was made had entered the language of film.

"We're obliged to look at new media... it's exciting and stimulating, and I believe we will have an interactive cinema which will make Star Wars look like a 16th-century lantern lecture," Greenaway said.

He said the last film-makers were probably the Germans, including Volker Schloendorff, who is also attending the festival. "Thirty-five years of silent cinema is gone, no one looks at it anymore. This will happen to the rest of cinema. Cinema is dead."

[Steve Crook]

Compare this to his similar pronouncement in 2003

Steve


The last picture show

Peter Greenaway
Wednesday October 8, 2003
The Guardian

Cinema is dead. So said director Peter Greenaway at this year's Utrecht film festival. This is an extract from his Cinema Militans lecture.

Cinema died on September 31 1983, when the zapper or the remote control was introduced into the living rooms of the world. Cinema as our fathers and forefathers knew it was a passive, elitist medium, made expensively for the patronised many by the condescending few, with a distribution system that has made its own product virtually unviewable. Now we can break the monopolies, really start with an art of the moving image with viewer participation that can truly empower the imagination, diversify interminably, cater for all and not patronise audiences. What was cinema? Rows and rows of people sitting still (and who in any other human occupation sits still for 120 minutes?), all looking in one direction (the world is all around you - not just in front of us), in the dark (man is not a nocturnal animal). With a cinema with characteristics like this, perhaps the sooner it is dead, the better.

Let us rid cinema of the four tyrannies of text, the frame, actors and the camera. But what are we talking about, anyway? You haven't seen any cinema yet - all we have seen is 108 years of illustrated text, and, if you have been lucky, perhaps a little recorded theatre.

Now a cinema of what you think and not what you lazily see is truly possible. Let us seize that nettle and begin the art of the moving image all over again. Every medium needs constant reinvention.

Let us now reinvent that cinema. We can. We have the most amazing new tools to do so. Now we need the desire and the courage. And this new medium of the moving image will almost certainly not be experienced in those strange high-street pieces of architecture called cinemas.

So-called cinema was invented in 1895. It took 29 years, with Eisenstein's Strike in 1924, to make the first benchmark masterpiece of this new aesthetic-technology of film. If a New Moving Image aesthetic-technology was baptised on September 31 1983, then we still have a few years' grace to invent its first benchmark masterpiece.

[christoph404]

I share a similar view to Alan Parker on the films and ramblings of Mr Peter Greenaway.....pretentious crap! I loathe Greenaway and his rubbish films, I for one wouldn't take too much notice of what he has to say about anything, especially cinema!....

[Edward G]

What a right load of old cobblers

[batman]

Come on guys ... how can you ignore the man who brought us such 'classics' as The Baby of Macon, Prospero's Books and The Pillow Book.

Bats.

[Edward G]

Hi Bats,
Enjoyed "The Draughtman's Contract" alright (some years back) but it was probably more down to the rather posh music and the odd flash of a corseted and heavy laced boob. Greenaway's films can be tedious and flimsy. The half-decent ones are usually rescued by his smart choice of composer like Michael Nyman et all. I don't think we take his "high art" movies as seriously as he thinks we do....

[batman]

The Draughtsman's Contract and Belly of An Architect are the only Greenaway fims I have found tolerable, the latter purely for a great performance by Brian Dennehy. Some of Nyman's music is excellent (I do like sparse music) and IMHO is usually the only redeeming feature of a Greenaway film.

Bats.

[dogstar]

Its entirely possible that Greenaway may be as big a twat as he appears from his pronouncements ( though I happen to like his films ) but maybe he's just following in a long line of mischief-makers who delight in stirring it.

[Mark O]

I don't think I've seen any Peter Greenaway Films (and from what I've read I don't think I'm missing much)
Cinema may have been at a low point in 1983, but two years later in 1985 the first multiplex Cinema (in Britain) opened in the City of Milton Keynes, and it's been onwards and upwards for Cinema ever since!

I mean, how can you beat something like 'Titanic' or 'Independence day' being shown on anything less than the Silver screen!

[DB7]

Originally Posted by batman The Draughtsman's Contract and Belly of An Architect are the only Greenaway fims I have found tolerable, the latter purely for a great performance by Brian Dennehy. Some of Nyman's music is excellent (I do like sparse music) and IMHO is usually the only redeeming feature of a Greenaway film. Bats.

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is a marvellous piece of Grand Guignol and one indebted to Michael Gambon and Helen Mirren as much as anything. It washed over me when I first saw it but with repeated viewings its grown on me.

[batman]

Originally Posted by DB7 The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is a marvellous piece of Grand Guignol and one indebted to Michael Gambon and Helen Mirren as much as anything. It washed over me when I first saw it but with repeated viewings its grown on me.

Gambon, Mirren and Alan Howard are all excellent in this, but I found the film to be utterly repellant. Admittedly I have only seen (most of) it once. Belly of An Architect was a grower for me. I saw it on TV and didn't warm to it, but I was given the dvd and watched it again and began to find Dennehy's performance compelling.

Bats

[Flatliner_____]

Greenaway's films aren't what cinema should be about for me. Something Prospero's Books requires you to sit down and analysis it frame by frame to get anything out of it. And what you get definitely isn't entertainment. Isn't that really what we're after at the end of the day? Sure we want to be evoking into thinking and philosophising sometimes, but his films are just treatises on intelligencia. That's not cinema. His cinema was never born, let alone dead.

[sippog]

My immediate reaction to this topic was a variation on the old chestnut about Nietzche and God:

"Cinema announces the death of Greenaway"

Go back to painting, Pete. You wanted to anyway.

[rskershaw]

I'm looking forward to his next Korean film in Welsh.