Vernon Gras and Gras, Marguerite (eds.),
Peter Greenaway: Interviews.
ackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.
ISBN: I 57806 255 I
200pp
US$18

(Review copy supplied by University Press of Mississippi)

Uploaded 1 December 2001

Between the popcorn and the ivory tower: eccentric Englishmen, brick wallpaper and plastic caravans.

Greenaway himself sees his films as part of a “living cinema… that deals with really important things”, somewhere between the “popcorn entertainment” of mainstream cinema and “ivory tower observation” (61). These interviews go a long way to identifying those important things and how he sees “living cinema”. They also reveal the little eccentricities of this Englishman and the extent of his prejudices against a popular culture that puts “brick wallpaper up in plastic caravans” (81). The editors have done a fine job in collecting together most of these interviews, particularly in making available those that they have translated from Zoom and Die Zeit.

The overall impression of the chronological structure of the collection lends itself to a narrative of Greenaway, his aesthetic practice and his intellectual influences. Narrative is of course anathema to Greenaway, as anyone who is familiar with his main gripe against what he calls “Hollywood cinema” could testify. This gripe surfaces again and again over the years in the course of the interviews. Yet this is one of the least interesting aspects of what Greenaway has to say, as he is as ignorant of mainstream film production as mainstream film production (can) be of Greenaway. In this sense the strategy of the publishers in foregrounding Greenaway’s “combat with the dominant Hollywood style” and his work “against the main current of cinematic practice” (backcover) is particularly misleading and uninteresting. [Apart from a bitchy remark about Stephen Frears being a “hypocrite and opportunist” (61)]. Ultimately, this structuring opposition tells us little about either Hollywood or Greenaway in the same way that auteur theory tells us less about particular directors than it does about auteur theorists. Where this collection of interviews is most fascinating is in what it reveals about the processes and ideas in Greenaway’s work. It does not tell us whether Greenaway is an auteur or not. And this is where we return to the narrative of the collection, for it traces a move from the 1970s dominated by structuralism to the 1990s/2000 dominated by postmodernism and the technological possibilities of postmodernity. My point is that rather like Greenaway, [who is fascinated with how things happen rather than with what happened next, “what matters is not what happens but how things happen” (61)]. I am interested in how he is the director that he is, rather than what sort of director he is.

These interviews are mixed in the extent to which they fulfil that curiosity. For example, the first two are not interviews at all. The third, “Breaking the contract” is irritating because Morgan attempts to compete with Greenaway. The interview with Tran is superfluous, “Blasphemy in Cinema” with Petrakis is boring and it is hard to see the point of “It’s So hard to Be Humble” with Jones. In “Anatomy of a Wizard” Rodman tries to account for the technical processes involved in the overlaying of images for Prospero’s Books (France/Japan/Italy/Netherlands/UK 1991) but unfortunately reveals very little. (How do you effect a transfer from 35mm to video and back again?). Leaving these to one side, the remainder of the collection is fascinating for what it reveals of the production process and the influences in Greenaway’s films.

There are a number of aspects here that compliment existing critical work on Greenaway’s films. For example, Amy Lawrence, The Films of Peter Greenaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Alan Woods, Being Naked Playing Dead: The Art of Peter Greenaway (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). Perhaps the most useful and interesting are the insights into exhibition difficulties and processes of production that arise out of the interviewer’s access to the director’s working practice. These range from the gossipy revelations about US distribution and exhibition problems with The Cook, His Wife and Her Lover (UK/France 1989) in conversation with Joel Siegel. After the controversy over the dog shit eating and the cuts for the US, Greenaway recalls that Miramax called to ask, “what was I going to do about America? I wasn’t sure whether they were referring to the nation or the film. I told them…I wanted CTW&L to be seen in America exactly as it was in Europe.” (84) (It was, with an X rating).

However, there are more substantial accounts of how Greenaway’s ideas and influences end up on the screen, and this is where the interviews can be most rewarding. Although I criticised Rodman above, his observations of Greenaway at work reveal a little of this director’s approach to film making:

at every turn, Greenaway seems preternaturally certain about what he wants to see – as if the film already existed inside his head, the task now being but to coax out those images from the bank of switches and devices (124).

In her interview, Marcia Pally extracts an explanation of the use of colour in The Cook… which extends to cover the film’s religious references, Greenaway’s emphasis on artifice over realism in the cinema, and his complaints that Hollywood “is based on the nineteenth century novel” (111). It is though the points about colour and painting that could be most helpful in an appreciation and understanding of the films. Greenaway states: 

I wanted to use color as an organizing principal in addition to cooking because color has become so divorced from meaning in the twentieth century painting. We no longer have to paint the sky blue simply because we observe it to be blue, so color has become decorative, even cute. I wanted to make a film where each color had a meaning within the language of the movie (109).

Although there is a brief account of the colour coding in each room, the most fulsome explanation of colour in The Cook can be found in Siegel’s interview. To take just one example:

the uses of white in the toilet are a bit different. It’s the place where the lovers fuck for the first time – it’s heaven. Also, all colors combine to make white so it’s the focal point. A strange retinal activity happens in the lavatory scenes which I hadn’t counted on. … When the white comes on-screen, the audience is lit up…You can see who’s sitting beside you, so it’s self-reflexive (77).

This illustrates one of the difficulties for readers wishing to explore particular issues in Greenaway’s work, as a topic such as colour coding can be found in a number of different locations. This is where a book’s index can be measured, and thankfully the editors have done a comprehensive job here.

Given the aim of the publishers/editors to locate this collection in controversy and conflict, it is not surprising that the index is most useful to those wishing to pursue Greenaway’s diatribes against Hollywood and narrative. However, one of the most controversial and provocative issues, the death by rape sequence in The Baby of Macon (UK/Netherlands/France/Germany 1993) is dealt with briefly and in a facile manner. On the two occasions that Greenaway mentions the rape, it is disappointing that neither interviewer pursues the point. This would have allowed a thorough examination of Greenaway’s theoretical and political position on feminine sexuality, violence and representation (he has been called a feminist and a misogynist). Ciment allows him to make a sneering remark about Jodie Foster and the crew crying during the rape in The Accused, (US 1988). He says “This was nothing but bluff…” (162) but fails to question him on his claim that he is breaking a taboo with the rape in Baby. Likewise, Danek and Beyer simply allow him to mention his use of artifice in this sequence (the actress steps out of character, the use of shadow figures and sound effects) without exploring what he means when he says that for him this is “the most disturbing moment of the film…” (170).

The blurb on the back cover is also misleading in the way that it claims the book encompasses Greenaway’s move into new technologies. It is misleading because only the last interview deals with Tulse Luper’s Suitcase, and then very cursorily. Suitcase is Greenaway’s move into combining film with the Internet and CD-ROM. Because this project is still in process there is little we can learn about it. You might wish to visit the sites below, www.kasanderfilm.nl/tulse/synopsis.htm and www.tulseluper.net but they are disappointing even with flash plug-ins and can hardly be mentioned, as Greenaway does, in the same paragraph as tearing down the walls of cinema.

Any book of interviews with Greenaway needs, then, to be assessed for what it contributes to an understanding of his work. What these interviews show is that even a non-commercial film director such as Greenaway can end up being as formulaic as the formula fiction he consistently derides. Greenaway stated in 1979 that “What I’ve tried to do in my films since [his earliest work] is make them less simplified than that, less one layered. Evoke nature by putting its opposite in the foreground – artifice.” (5). At least he is honest about this, proclaiming perhaps self deprecatingly that he identified with Jean Renoir when he “suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it.” (89). For those interested in Greenaway’s one idea, this collection shows how erudite he can be about it and how enthusiastically he has embroidered it over the years.

Alex MacDonald