Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway honored for cinematic innovations

British film-maker and artist Peter Greenaway received an honorary doctorate from the European Graduate School for Interdisciplinary Studies in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, on 24 August 2002 in recognition of his innovative search for a new cinematic language.

Peter Greenway, who made an international mark with his first fiction film "The Draughtsman's Contract" 20 years ago, received the PhD at the first EGS graduation ceremony and also delivered a public lecture, illustrated by video clips, on the use of music in film.

Born on 5 April 1942 in Newport, Wales, Greenaway trained as a painter before turning to film-making. But he has given music a new importance to cinema as well as showing an unprecedented concern with formal structures in addition to giving his films an original pictorial quality.

Peter Greenaway has taught at EGS since its creation in 1998. He has explained his commitment the unique mixture of academic and creative encounters at EGS by expressing the hope that he will discover a new Sergei Eisenstein (the cinema pioneer) among the school's select group of students.

Saas-Fee. Dem britischen Filmregisseur, Maler und Kurator Peter Greenaway wurde am 22.August 2002 von der Europäischen Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien (European Graduate School) die Ehrendoktorwürde in Philosophie verliehen. In Anwesenheit des Vertreters des Kanton Wallis, Dr.Kurt Grünwald, würdigte der Dekan der Abteilung für Medien und Kommunikation, Professor Dr.Wolfgang Schirmacher, die fachübergreifende Wirkung des bedeutenden Filmemachers. Greenaway habe Philosophie und Praxis des zeitgenössischen Films entscheidend bereichert, als einfallsreicher Kurator zwischen den Künsten vermittelt und vor allem eine neuartige Bildsprache für das Cinema entwickelt. An der in der Schweiz beheimateten European Graduate School hat Greenaway als Gastprofessor an dem vor vier Jahren eingerichteten Fachbereich Studierende aus aller Welt begeistert.

With Peter Greenaway the European Graduate School honors an extraordinary personality and gifted teacher whose world-wide reputation made the Media and Communications program visible to international audiences.

Peter Greenaway is one of the most important filmmakers of our time and is renown as the philosopher of cinema. Greenaway has produced a wealth of short and feature-length films, but also paintings, novels and theoretical books. His avant-garde films gained access to the mainstream and still explored unprecedented ground and challenged the boundaries of the medium Trained as a painter, the filmmaker has continued to display his own artwork (Thessalonika 1996, Parma 1999. Gent 1999), created several installations and curated exhibitions at many museums. Greenaway's collaboration with composers led to several operas.

It is exactly this cross-disciplinary approach bridging creative practice with theoretical insights that makes Peter Greenaway the role model for the Media and Communications students at the EGS. Greenaway was a founding professor of our division and has since returned every summer to teach — in all three years he also offered Open Lectures for the public and EXA students and faculty. Student's evaluations gave Professor Greenaway consistently the highest possible grades. Currently Greenaway has emerged on the arguably most ambitious project ever undertaken in media (only the EGS students know all about it): "The Tulse Luper Suitcase" is a multi-media artwork that changes the language of cinema. It consists in three feature films shot on 92 locations, an 8-hour TV series, books, DVD's, and an interactive Website.

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