wants to make clear that he’s never really taken himself seriously as a filmmaker — although like so many of the paradoxes that comprise Greenaway’s identity, it’s not wise to take such a claim too seriously.
Now 80, the director of such arthouse shockers as 1989 cannibalism satire “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover” and 1996’s NC-17-rated “The Pillow Book” hasn’t mellowed one bit. He’s still working — Greenaway is wrapping “,” a years-in-the-making portrait of Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși’s trip to the European art capital — and still battling in his own defiant way against the idea that cinema is a medium for telling stories; he’s convinced it’s capable of so much more.
“It has crazy ideas where the people don’t have names, and it’s all about memory, which is remarkably unreliable,” he says. “I’m not a tremendous devotee of abstract art. I still believe in notions of forms and figuration, but it was the film that traveled closest to the wind, to the idea of being an abstract film. It stripped away anecdotal information and replaced it by other sorts of anecdotal information.
Thus, Greenaway found fresh support for such follies as he’d been making for years. If “The Falls” could be seen as the absurdist culmination of the short-form work he’d done before, 1982’s “The Draughtsman’s Contract” was a critical and popular breakthrough. Like “Last Year at Marienbad,” the film is a brain-teaser of sorts, though Greenaway insists the mystery is not so complicated as it seems.
Therefore, Greenaway looked to other systems by which to structure his films. “‘The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover’ is an illustrated menu. A menu consists of hors d’oeuvres all the way to the coffee, so I used that as a structure,” he explains. “In ‘Drowning by Numbers,’ the title tells you everything: It’s a film simply about numbers. It’s all a very self-conscious way of saying, ‘This isn’t reality, it’s a film.’ A film is a construct. Let’s play with the artificiality.
Source: Entertainment Trends (entertainmenttrends.net)
Literally read this article while eating a sausage link. Talk about timing.
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