rinue | Greenaway at the National Gallery

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.