Peter Greenaway Quotes
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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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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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Nagiko, I am waiting for you. Meet me at the library. Any library. Every library. Yours, Jerome.
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A series of ever-decreasing splashes drip and plop into black water... thus the beginning of the film is reprised.
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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.
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Cinema: An illusion that can only satisfactorily happen in the dark.
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'You could spend a lifetime reading in here.'
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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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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.
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Words reproduce themselves pleasurably too.
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I'm an excuse for medical experiments and art theory. You must get me out of here and out of the hospital.
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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.
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I am certain that there are two things in life which are dependable - the delights of the flesh and the delights of literature. I have had the good fortune to bring them together and enjoy them together in full quantity.
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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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... I would certainly like to work with Dennehy again. When he was presented with the script he didn't know me from Adam, and why should he, small-time eccentric, esoteric Englishman that I am?
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Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.
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The world is in his cloak - figures peer out of its folds - mythological figures and snakes and pigs and flowers, naked fauns and heavy-breasted sirens and horses' heads - they sprawl on the flagstones at his feet and peep out from under his arms...
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In practically every film you experience, you can see the director following the text. Illustrating the words first, making the pictures after, and, alas, so often not making pictures at all, but holding up the camera to do its mimetic worst.
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Grief: An emotional experience often brought about by a great sense of loss. The subject of this loss is completely immaterial.
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It seems to me that dominant cinema seems to require an empathy or a sympathy between the film and the audience which is basically to do with the manipulation of the emotions and it seems to me again - and this is a very subjective position - that most cinema seems to trivialise the emotions, sentimentalising or romanticising them.
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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.
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As you probably know, I'm often accused of intellectual exhibitionism and all forms of elitism. Although I can understand this point of view, it's a rather wasted argument because, if we regard areas of information as being elite and therefore somehow not usable, it means our centre-ground of activity becomes very, very impoverished.
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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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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.