Greenaway at the National Gallery

[rinue]

Went to a talk by Peter Greenaway (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover being one of my favorite films); saw bits of Nightwatching, which didn't excite me. Actually, he was pretty much full of crap. Various nonsense about "cinema is dead, people want to skip around." If hypertext has confirmed anything, it's that people would rather read or watch things end-to-end - and even though DVD chapter skip is available, we don't skip ahead any more than we skip pages of a book. The comfort and attraction of films is that it puts things in order for us. We are in an altered passage of time. We are attended to and cared for. We are told that things make sense. In film, as in music and books, we are allowed to immerse, and forget what troubles us. These are the deep-seated human attractions to storytelling; it's wired into how our brains work.

I think it is no coincidence that I most often hear the "cinema is dead" argument from older filmmakers; if you can't be the first to do something, it's most attractive to believe you're one of the last. And the first of the new.

He also said a lot of smug stuff about how film is text based because it starts as a script, and instead it should be more like painting, with no explanation of what this means and no justification for the idea that film is not highly visual. I don't think he actually believes or has thought about what he was saying, based on his process of working - his own films are highly textual, and come from very literary research. It seems like the usual tedious self-promotion through shock. Either that, or he is a hypocrite. In any case, it backfired and turned the audience strongly against him - an audience with a deep love of paintings.

And he got the technical specs wrong on the digital cameras he was touting.

Disappointing.

Comments

[liquidmorpheme.livejournal.com]

I mentioned I once read an interview with him wherein he said something to the effect of he dislikes narrative film, or thinks that they shouldn't be linear. I think of this when watching his films, because I find he's a terrible story-teller (point: his films are both narrative and linear).

Anyway, I think I've thought him to be full of crap for a while, despite liking his work quite a bit.
--

Ciro

[rinue.livejournal.com]

I tend to have similar (but lesser) trouble with Ridley Scott interviews (unless he's talking about editing, which is great); perhaps it is an unfortunate drawback to directors who think about themselves as primarily visual stylists?

It makes me think about Hitchcock (as I've mentioned before, Alan's class this term is all Hitchcock all the time, which I'm enjoying) - the interviews are fascinating, but you have to be very careful to take things with a grain of salt because he's busy trying to promote the idea of the director as the orchestrator of the film - as someone who can have star power. So he tends to call actors things like "cattle," which it's obvious he didn't actually think so.

Back to Greenaway, I am highly dubious of the upcoming Nightwatching, because most of the bits I saw annoyed me (very stagey and flat), and because it's not clear to me which parts are real and which parts he's making up - which means I'll have to duplicate his research. That said, I'll probably want to see it. And to get mad at it and pick it apart, and then to maybe think of bits of it as very interesting. You know.

By the way, I have sent you something which may take as many as six weeks to arrive but will hopefully make it there sooner.

love,
Romie

[valancy.livejournal.com]

That sucks. C. And I were just talking about his work, too.

[rinue.livejournal.com]

Well, I always kind of suspected he was a dick, and pompous. I mean, look at the films (which I like anyway), plus the kind of personality one would have to have to get them made. Kind of a necessary evil, I guess. Still, I'd kill myself if I was stuck on a yacht with him - or, more likely, push him off it, the tedious blowhard. So I guess I accomplished something in that I know not to crew one of his pictures ever, unless the money is extraordinary.

[valancy.livejournal.com]

Napoleonesque, eh?