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Screening: Peter Greenaway in Conversation
| Where: | When: | 08-Jul-08 10:00 PM until 08-Jul-08 11:00 PM |
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An interview with filmmaker Peter Greenaway, conducted during the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) in Fremantle in February, will air on ABC-TV's Artscape program on Tuesday July 8.
Mr Greenaway was the keynote speaker at the Conference, an annual gathering attended by the ‘who's who' of Australian and international factual film and television professionals. He also delivered a Masterclass for Western Australian artists, hosted by ScreenWest and the Department of Culture and the Arts.
During his visit to Australia, Greenaway spoke to Artscape's Virginia Trioli about his body of work, and also what he's been up to since his last major feature film release.
The Welsh-born director is best known for his filmmaking during the 1980's and 90's, directing visually sumptuous films such as The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover, Belly of an Architect and A Zed and Two Noughts. His films have polarised viewers, garnering international accolades and audience walk-outs. A fearless visionary and provocateur, he rejected narrative storytelling in favour of his trademark exploration of sex and death.
"I think that by now cinema should have separated itself from the bookshop. I don't think it does cinema much good, and I'm sure it doesn't do literature much good," Mr Greenaway tells Artscape.
In 2002 he declared cinema dead. "Well, I'll give you a date, it's the 31st of September 1983, which is the date now that most people reckon that the zapper or remote control was introduced into living rooms of the world..."
Since declaring cinema dead, his focus has increasingly turned to multifaceted projects. His series of films involving The Tulse Luper Suitcases feeds into a highly evolved online interactive game that then forms the visual palette for his Vjing gigs at events across Europe.
"I wanted to make a very contemporary phenomenon. I wanted to make a film for the information age, I wanted to use the notion of everything we represent by the world wide web as the aesthetic tool and not just a data tool," he said.
His most recent film release Nightwatching (2007) delves into the story behind Rembrandt's famous painting "The Night Watch", but is only part of a wider juggernaut that includes an opera, a documentary and an art installation. The later involved a complex, hi-tech series of projections onto the original masterpiece insitu at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Next stop is to do the same to Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper".
‘Peter Greenaway in Conversation' airs on the Artscape program on ABC1 at 10pm on Tuesday July 8, and on ABC2 at 7pm on Sunday July 13.
You can also view online or download the transcripts of Mr Greenaway's artists' masterclass, delivered at the Maritime Museum in Fremantle on February 22.
