Peter Greenaway Films | Peter Greenaway Filmography | Peter Greenaway Biography | Peter Greenaway Career | Peter Greenaway Awards

An ancient Chinese encyclopedia, according to Borges, divides animals into ?(a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (0 fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they are mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (1) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.? One is tempted to add, (o) those featured in Peter Greenaway's films. The inclusion would seem appropriate for a filmmaker who has constantly displayed a fascination for the organic and the classificatory in a body of films that have themselves retained an art-house individuality within the broader criteria of popular success.

Greenaway's biography implies a deeper integration between life and his art than some critics might suggest. He grew up in post-war Essex, his father was an ornithologist?perhaps the quintessential English hobby?and the petit-bourgeois world of public respectability and private eccentricity seems to have left him with a taste for the contradictory that hallmarks his work ("The black humour, irony, distancing, a quality of being in control, an interest in landscape, treating the world as equal with an image, these are very English qualities. I can't imagine myself living abroad"). He trained as a painter rather than a filmmaker, but his first exhibition, ?Eisenstein at the Winter Palace,? indicated an interest that led him into film editing at the Central Office of Information, the government department responsible for informing the public in the unique ?home-counties? voice of domestic propaganda.

These years also saw Greenaway developing a crop of his own absurdist works?films, art, novels, illustrated books, drawings?with titles such as Goole by Numbers and Dear Phone, as well as directing (non-absurdist) Party Political Broadcasts for the Labour Party. They also saw the introduction of his fictional alter ego, Tulse Luper, archivist, cartographer, ornithologist extraordinaire ("He's me at about 65. A know-all, a Buckminster Fuller, a McLuhan, a John Cage, a pain"). Nomenclature means a lot to Greenaway in determining where one would be filed in the unfortunate event of a statistically (im) probable end. The Falls is a catalogue of victims of V.U. E. (Violent Unknown Event), with characters such as Mashanter Fallack, Carlos Fallanty, Raskado Fallcastle, and Hearty Fallparco. The epitome of absurdity was perhaps reached in Act of God, a film based around interviews with people who'd been struck by lightning in an attempt to find out what led to such an unpredictable event.

But perhaps the most tickling piece of absurdity for Greenaway came in the commercial success of The Draughtsman's Contract, his first film made on a reasonable budget. It made an uncharacteristic concession to plot, characterization, and scenic coherence. A stylish, lavish, and enigmatic puzzle revolving around murder in a stately seventeenth-century English home; it soon became the subject of a mythical French film conference that discussed its title for five days, and gained popular fame as everyone asked what was it all about. But it made Greenaway's name, and briefly contested box office ratings with the likes of E.T. and Gandhi, although Greenaway's intended length was four hours?"one suspects it was originally closer to Tristram Shandy than Murder at the Vicarage," as one critic remarked.

Greenaway's ideas tend to work in twos. A Zed and Two Noughts took Siamese twins separated at birth and saw them cope with their grief at the death of their wives in a study in the decomposition of zoo animals. Belly of an Architect silhouetted the visceral mortality of Stourley Kracklite against his plans for an exhibition on a visionary eighteenth-century architect, Eti?nne-Louis Boull?e. But the dialectic seems more important than the ideas themselves, as Greenaway hints: "The important thing about Boull?e?and this is where he's very like a filmmaker, who tends to spend much more time on uncompleted projects than completed ones?is that very few of his buildings were constructed. I've taken that up in Kracklite's fear of committal, being prepared to go half-way and no further, which is Kracklite's position and maybe my position as well."

In this position Greenaway has always been most successful when casting strong leading actors. He secured Brian Dennehy as Kracklite, for instance, and the cast of arguably his most successful film, The Cook, The Thief His Wife and Her Lover, included Michael Gambon (the Thief) and Helen Mirren (his Wife).

Greenaway's ideas are always sufficiently ambiguous to resist trivialisation, but invariably involve death: Death and Landscape, Death and Animals, Death and Architecture, Death and Sex, Death and Food (cannibalism). But there are factors which make them more palatable. One of them is a taste for sumptuous framing (helped by cinematographer Sacha Vierney), in which he envisages an aesthetic complexity similar to that of the golden age of Dutch art, ?where those amazing manifestations of the real world that we find in Vermeer and Rembrandt are enriched by a fantastic metaphorical language.? The other is his close collaboration with the composer Michael Nyman, whose insistent scores lend an inexorable quality to Greenaway's sometimes spatial fabric of ideas.

The films of Peter Greenaway continue to be consistently outrageous and challenging. Drowning by Numbers is a bizarre, erotic concoction about three generations of women, each named Cissie Colpitts (and played by Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson, and Joely Richardson). Each Cissie is saddled with a husband who is lecherous or inattentive. And each one decides to murder her mate by drowning him. Madgett the coroner (Bernard Hill), who lusts after these women, agrees to list the deaths as natural. But the heroines hold the upper hand in the story, and Madgett's fate proves to be beyond his control.

Prosperous Books is an original, daring adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest, with almost all of the dialogue spoken by 87-year-old Sir John Gielgud (cast as Prospero, a role he played many times on stage). The other actors are little more than extras and, as in many of Greenaway's works, there is a mind-boggling amount of nudity. Purist defenders of the Bard may find much to fault in Prospero's Books. But the film remains noteworthy both for Gielgud's splendid reading of the text and its exquisitely layered imagery and production design.

Finally, The Baby of Macon, which featured Julia Ormond and Ralph Fiennes prior to their ascension to stardom, is a demanding drama. It is set in the seventeenth century and presented as a play being performed on a vast stage. The play depicts the birth and life of a saint-like baby. In typical Greenaway fashion, there is luminous cinematography (by the filmmaker's frequent collaborator, Sacha Vierny) and production design. Some will find The Baby of Macon stimulating; others will think it overblown; and still others will be perplexed by it all.

There are contradictions in Greenaway's works, a fact that seems to openly provoke divided opinion. Some would suggest that the fecundity of his vision, his intellectual rigor, is the stuff of great cinema; others, while admitting his originality, would still look for evidence of a deeper engagement with film as a medium, rather than as a vehicle for ideas. Lauded in Europe, under-distributed in the United States, loved and reviled in his own country, Greenaway is, nevertheless, in an enviable position for a filmmaker.?SAUL FRAMPTON and ROB EDELMAN