Peter Greenaway Quotes
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'Imagine a world without a fixed point.'
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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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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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The penis - if you think about it - is the most enterprising engineering feat imaginable - a cantilevered structure, hydraulics, propulsion, pistons, compression, inflation, heat sensitive - practically every engineering characteristic - towers, draw-bridges, rocket-ships - no man-made engineering structure to match it.
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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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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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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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Life is full of a thousand red herrings, and it takes the history of a civilisation to work out which are the red herrings and which aren't.
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Twenty-four pulleys, one hundred counterweights / two lenses, dark shadows...
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'You could spend a lifetime reading in here.'
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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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I can't think of anyone who has done anything remotely useful after the age of 80.
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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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Dots ...: Small marks variously made to indicate infinity, hesitation, duplication, or lack of imagination.
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Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the storytellers.
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'Money's not interesting - too easy to get hold of.'
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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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You should be allowed to rub out and start again, it means that you are human. The purists are tedious, they tell you a mistake is like an enduring black mark. Nonsense - better to be human than some infernal machine never going wrong.
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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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The book to end all books. The final book. After this, there is no more writing, no more publishing.
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We all know that we're going to die, but we don't know when. That's not a blessing, that's a curse.
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All really worthwhile artists, creators, use the technology of their time, and anybody who doesn't becomes immediately a fossil.
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It is a most unexpected Earthquake in Geneva.
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Benedictus bene dicap bene asian christian dominum nostrum amen.