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Counting is the most simple and primitive of narratives - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 - a tale with a beginning, a middle and an end and a sense of progression - arriving at a finish of two digits - a goal attained, a dénouement reached.
Peter Greenaway -
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.
Peter Greenaway
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A series of ever-decreasing splashes drip and plop into black water... thus the beginning of the film is reprised.
Peter Greenaway -
Why illustrate a great piece of writing whose very advocacy and evocation and efficacy lies within its very existence as writing?
Peter Greenaway -
One film is based on the Medea myth about a woman who kills her own child - The Love of Ruins. It is almost a technical exercise to see if I can convince an audience or make an audience sympathetic to a woman who kills her own child.
Peter Greenaway -
Cinema: An illusion that can only satisfactorily happen in the dark.
Peter Greenaway -
Two children die. An accident and a suicide amongst so many murders. A chance death and a death of self-recrimination. Smut and the Skipping Girl have been aping their parents and elders - perhaps they could now teach them a lesson - all the machinations and game-playing and adjusting for sexual and emotional positioning is not worth the effort.
Peter Greenaway -
Farewells can be both beautiful and despicable. Saying farewell to one who is loved is very complicated.
Peter Greenaway
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'You could spend a lifetime reading in here.'
Peter Greenaway -
It is the trajectory of a thrown stone. It follows the hump of a humped-back whale from nose to tail. It's bounded like a smooth, sheep-cropped, grassy hill. It is a graph-line through a grey, blue, and then a grey again, sky.
Peter Greenaway -
I like a lot of glasses about - it highers the tone.
Peter Greenaway -
In the game of Dawn Card-Castles, fifty-two playing cards are stacked up into a castle in a draught-free space: the player can determine the dreams of the next night if he awakes before the castle collapses. Those players who wish to dream of Romance build their castle with the seven of hearts.
Peter Greenaway -
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.
Peter Greenaway -
It's a big criticism of Greenaway films that they are far too interested in formalism and not enough interested in notions of emotional content. It's a criticism I can fully understand from a public that has been brought up by Hollywood movies that demand intense emotional rapport.
Peter Greenaway
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As for the girl - the child of a prostitute - what of her future? A life of prostitution in a gaudy dress - pretending to be Nell Gwynne, the Protestant whore? No - out of her mother's earnings she will go to University and study to become an astronomer. Charles II made his mistress Nell Gwynne an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1674.
Peter Greenaway -
Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.
Peter Greenaway -
For so many filmmakers, cinema is a means to an end.
Peter Greenaway -
Everything I try to do wants to be able to push communication through the notion of the visual image.
Peter Greenaway -
Dots ...: Small marks variously made to indicate infinity, hesitation, duplication, or lack of imagination.
Peter Greenaway -
We have more than enough deodorised, over-the-top, sentimental cinema. Let's try to bring a little human intelligence into things. It can be very rewarding.
Peter Greenaway
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My brother works for a forestry commission. He writes only in green ink to persuade his bossess to make it a standard ecological colour for all forestry business. I asked him what colour ink he would use if he gave up eating whale meat and worked for a whaling company. He said whales were colour blind.
Peter Greenaway -
And I've also written a play called Miranda, about what happens afterwards on the ship on the way home. It's about what happens to innocence and how it has to be destroyed.
Peter Greenaway -
The game of Bees in the Trees is a variant of musical chairs and is best played with funeral music and in the open air. The object of the game is to sit down on a vacant chair when the music stops. If the chair sat in is occupied by bees, it is permissible to arrange a professional foul.
Peter Greenaway -
The book to end all books. The final book. After this, there is no more writing, no more publishing.
Peter Greenaway