Peter Greenaway's critical breakthrough occurred in 1982 with the 17th century drama The Draughtsman's Contract, establishing him as one of the most innovative and important filmmakers today. This murder mystery begins as a story about a young painter contracted by a wealthy lady, Mrs. Herbert, to produce a series of drawings of her estranged husband's estate. The painter becomes much more involved into the life on the estate, becoming her bed companion as well. The story about power and deceit gets complicated after the discovery of Mr. Herbert's dead body, turning the artist's sketches into valuable but still ambiguous clues in discovering the potential perpetrator.
The inspiration for Peter Greenaway's next feature film A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) came from a tape showing the decay of a mouse, a monkey with one amputated leg, and a borrowed photograph of a smiling woman standing between enigmatic identical twins. The film starts with a car crash in which both of the twin brothers' wives die, and we follow them getting involved with a woman who seems to be responsible for the accident and is recovering after a leg amputation. The brothers are both zoologists and spend most of the time photographing decaying animals, as a way to deal with their loss. The woman they both share soon becomes pregnant with twins herself, and the structure of the film image follows the idea of symmetry throughout the film. The search for the other half, mistaken identities, as well as substitution, all play a role in one of the most incredible visual essays confronting the viewer with the human zoo, its passions, perversions, and the inevitability of death.
The Belly of an Architect (1987) focuses on obsession and architecture, two important concepts in Peter Greenaway's vocabulary. A middle-age American architect, Stourley Kracklite, arrives in Italy to work on an exhibition about the work of a French architect, Boullée. During the course of nine months, his stomach brings him severe pains, parallel to the crisis he goes through in his marriage, the misery he feels for being old and fat, surrounded by the perfectionist Roman art and architecture. Becoming obsessed by the work of an architect who turned into a controversial figure, being an inspiration for Albert Speer, Kracklite seems to be unable to digest reality, a fact that becomes evident in his own creativity, leaving us with a man who is soon to lose everything he ever cared about.
Monday, October 21, 2013
Peter Greenaway - Professor of Cinema Studies - Biography
