Peter Greenaway Quotes
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You can play lacrosse all over the world provided you know where the goalposts are.
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It's very difficult to understand, but I'm looking for a nonnarrative, multiscreen, present-tense cinema. Narrative is an artifact created by us. It does not exist at all in nature; it is a construct made by us, and I wonder whether we need the narrative anymore.
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This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper.
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Dots ...: Small marks variously made to indicate infinity, hesitation, duplication, or lack of imagination.
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There have been innumerable films about film-making, but Otto e Mezzo was a film about the processes of thinking about making a film - certainly the most enjoyable part of any cinema creation.
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It is a most unexpected Earthquake in Geneva.
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The whole of this studio is bonded; that is to say, we are not officially in Japan per se, but rather, in what is considered for these purposes an adjunct of the customs shed at Narita airport. Officially, we are not here because we are pornographic. It's a rather curious situation.
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Twenty-four pulleys, one hundred counterweights / two lenses, dark shadows...
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I can't think of anyone who has done anything remotely useful after the age of 80.
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'Money's not interesting - too easy to get hold of.'
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Esmerelda, the grieving widow, continues to burn and scream. In our minds we rush to save her from the consuming flames. But cannot.
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The floorboards point in parallel lines to a vanishing point that does not concern us - somewhere beyond the opera house, across the streets, across the houses of the suburbs, all the way to a hypothetical single dot... on the sea's horizon. Far from this sour drama.
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Nagiko, I am waiting for you. Meet me at the library. Any library. Every library. Yours, Jerome.
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There are basically only two subject matters in all Western culture: sex and death. We do have some ability to manipulate sex nowadays. We have no ability, and never will have, to manipulate death.
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'You could spend a lifetime reading in here.'
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My biggest critical success was 'The Draughtsman's Contract,' but then it wasn't the English who particularly thought so; it was the French, who are much more interested in Cartesian logic: in finding your way through more cerebral puzzle-making, if you wish.
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Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the storytellers.
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... flaunting their erudition and relishing overt staginess, Peter Greenaway's films divide audiences. There are those who are prepared to entertain his conceits and play the game, and others for whom a Greenaway film is about as exciting as a guided tour through an ancient museum where the catalogue has been lost.
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Americans don't understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They're extremely good at making straightforward, linear narrative movies, which entertain superbly. But they very rarely do anything else.
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It is Vesalius' Anatomy of Birth - a book of drawings and diagrams of human anatomy. Beautiful drawings but - as the pages turn - terrible in their frankness...
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It is an awesome sight, repeatedly drawn and painted. How long did it last, this Fall of Angels? Was it all over in an hour? Or did it take days, weeks, years? Is it still going on?
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The book to end all books. The final book. After this, there is no more writing, no more publishing.
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The film begins with a visual list of eight and a half Japanese Pachinko Parlours filmed in several Japanese cities - Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto.
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I think there is no future whatsoever in 3D. It does nothing to the grammar and syntax or vocabulary of cinema. And you get fed up with it in exactly 3 minutes.