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Audience: Do you find that you're going in a different creative direction now? It seems that you have got a few different ways of working with musicians, have you found a way that you prefer, or do you like to experiment as you go along? Are you doing something specifically now that you haven't done before?
Greenaway: I'm not a composer, that's not my background, I wish it was, today there is a way that maybe the musical untrained have a greater access to musical production. You can see in that last thing where we bastardized that Strauss waltz. There is the ability to sample, re-sample and re-interfere, we're doing a lot more of that now. That's the way Boris Krisnick himself works, he works by appropriation and by sampling, so I think it's a legitimacy which is very common now in the contemporary music world.
Schirmacher: What do you think of one of our faculty members, DJ Spooky, he has been invited to do a remix of one of Pierre Boulez's operas - you know he's a young black guy, who sits there on his computer and plays it like an instrument. Is this somebody you'd like to work with?
Greenaway: I would be happy to, there's all sorts of approaches, it's a sharing, non-auteur situation. I'm delighted that someone with the status of Boulez is prepared to entertain that idea.
Schirmacher: Let me ask you a philosophical question, I'm sorry, I know it's Friday night but it's my only opportunity to be in your class, otherwise I'm excluded. Here again I got closer to your visual project, that you want to liberate the visuals from the stories, etc. So here it's something not different but even more specific. It is actually that you not only want to liberate the visual language, you maybe want to liberate all the languages possible, the gestures, the paintings, the music, the visuals, and the way you do it is probably very near to the way that Spinoza solved the problem of mind and body, a problem everybody is still so involved in, the question who is influencing who, who is master, who is the slave, what was first, what was second? Spinoza said that mind and body are acting independently, like on parallels. They never meet, but there is a kind of osmosis between them. If the body is happy, the mind works better. Not that they have a direct communication, but that they kind of sense their different energies and can work on that. And then somehow I felt the intensity of these different languages, they have not spoken directly to each other, but because one has so much fun in one direction, the other language becomes more intense as well. So somehow maybe your liberation project is this project of allowing parallel languages to be at their best, without caring if they fit together, because in our mind or understanding maybe we make a Gesamtkuntswerk out of it, but in fact in front of us they are allowed to play their own tune.
Greenaway: The fact that you feel that they don't fit might of course be relative to your understanding and appreciation, and the sheer novelty of the activity. For example when you put calligraphy and dance together, they are unexpected, like the meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table. There's an unexpectedness there that maybe you have to meet your own coherences in order to put together.
Schirmacher: Maybe I said it wrong, I don't mean they don't fit, I mean they fit but it's not the fitting of that communication which has been scripted, so to speak, to say who is first and who is second. They all have the power to play their own way, and they benefit because of that. If you had tried to make them fit it would have been a mess. So actually your creative skill is to let them go, not to try to control everything …
Greenaway: It's also I suppose a deeply political and social gesture, because I feel that so much cinema is so much so-called orthodox moving image material, is thin, is so banal, is content with not giving necessarily huge amounts of information, so that cinema largely has become a dull little puddle where everybody has put their feet now, we're so familiar with the genres, the tropes, the stories, and also the simple lines of demarcation, whether it's narrative or based upon any other structure. So all this is an attempt to get away from them that, I'm interested in overload, I'm interested in excess, in putting all these different languages together to make a richer, thicker, more exciting texture, which is after all more like life anyway.
Schirmacher: Our problem isn't overload, no way. It's underload.
Greenaway: Well, not necessarily, maybe you are particularly emancipated in this degree. The general critical orthodoxy suggests that these films are visually indigestible, that people want things slower, more practiced, more deliberate, but of course they're only falling back on their own prejudices and orthodoxies.
Schirmacher: My ten year-old son would not say this. That's a generational difference, you know. You have to wait until the people with these tastes are dead. But because of that everything is allowed and our brains and senses have work together. I had a problem with people who say that music and film should work together. The point is they only work together if you don't push it, if, as you said, you are bringing in people and allowing them to work with their own strengths.
Audience: Do you direct the choreography too, or do you have a particular choreographer…?
Greenaway: Well, I work with all sorts of choreographers, and within my control, I would give them enormous amounts of freedom. In 'The Tempest' we worked with other choreographers, you can see the dances operating in 'M is for Mozart', and I've done collaborations with lots of American dancers too. The notion of space that's within a dancer's control as well is always of great interest to me, there must be other ways of organizing human activity outside of the usual orthodoxies and I'm very keen to embrace those images.
Audience: I know your love for text, but your movies are visually captivating, I wonder if you've thought about making a movie without any text at all, no dialogue, no words on the screen, just images.
Greenaway: Yeah, it's a possibility, although I do I feel like I'd be chopping off this arm, and I like to use this arm. However, I do generally feel that most filmmakers are going into the studio with a blindfold and their arms tied behind their backs. The possibility for moving imagery is huge, and the conventional orthodox feature film only uses a small part of that spectrum. The introduction of graphisms, graphic arts, the acknowledgment of the picture plane, are very rare things in notions of orthodox cinema. It's such a rich and extraordinary vocabulary and it's forever getting richer and richer and richer. These are amazing tools and I think we are obliged to use them. As you can see in this particular stage of my life I'm certainly not a minimalist.
Audience: What do you think the effects are, politically and socially, of this kind of overload, or excess?
Greenaway: Again, the people who expect to be presented with a cinema which is about mimicry and illusion are of course going to have problems. Those people don't want to acknowledge the screen as a screen. They're not interested in the matter of the business, they're not interested in language for its own sake, so they're going to have problems. Audiences that are more literate about new technologies are delighted and excited about these possibilities. The brain and the imagination can well handle this complexity of languages, I'm sure. So for those who have a problem, it's essentially the shock of the new.
Audience: I'm a bit curious about 'Eight and a Half Women', I'm wondering if you were trying in some way to play with silence as something musical in itself.
Greenaway: I suppose perversely, maybe. I was out to challenge myself. We've been talking about the decline of artistic imagination, and the notion of a trajectory, curve, or progression. It's absolutely essential for me to attack forward and see what happens, to go deliberately into places I haven't gone before. Of course there are many examples of movies that have succeeded without music, and I was curious to challenge myself. There's another reason too, and I suppose this is one of the quarrels I used to have with Michael Nyman, which takes precedence, the dialogue or the music? There's an inevitable battle. Unlike the eye, which has the ability to sort things out, the ear doesn't have that ability. So unless you organize things very well, you just get a whole cacophony of noise that is very difficult to sort. You have to be careful about mixing music dialogue to make sure there's coherence and sympathy. Rather like Louie Anderson, he's really a frustrated pop star, and even though his heroes are Rice and Stravinsky he always wants to turn up the sound so loud until you can't hear anything at all. But I always fall out with composers because I'm quite convinced composers have no sense of humor.
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