 |
Greenaway: Let me start first of all by saying that I suppose I do have a reputation as a filmmaker, but I don't like films. I suppose about, what, 10 or 15 years ago I became very, very disenchanted by the cinema. I believe the cinema does not fulfill the aims and the ambitions for which it was originally intended and what is extraordinary the apologists of cinema who were talking very vociferously in 1910s and 1920s if they were alive, they would be very, very disappointed. I think that the cinema died on the 31st of September 1983. There is a reason for that, because on 31st of September 1983 the remote control, the zapper was introduced into the living rooms of the world. Cinema is a passive medium. I never quite understood really how it works. Here you are all again sitting in semidarkness looking in one direction. I've been told by Wolfgang that I can speak for at least an hour, so all of you are going to sit still for an hour. So, you are sitting in the dark, man is not a nocturnal animal, what the hell you are doing in the dark, looking in one direction, sitting still? And you commit yourself to the flat screen on which there are colored shadows. What an extraordinary description of an obsession. Unfortunately, I think, if the cinema died in 31st of September 1983 I think it was a still birth, because I don't think any of you in this room have seen any cinema yet. All you have seen is 105 years of illustrated text and that is not the same thing. Why is it that Woody Allen, Spielberg, Godard, Scorcese, any filmmaker that you name has to manufacture a text before he can manufacture a film? I'm sure there are some of you who can give me a rhetorical answer, but is this not strange, that cinema, which is supposed to be a visual medium, communicating a visual currency should be such a slave to text? As I said, if first of all cinema is dead, then what we are going to do about this? I would offer you a crumb. I would say that in fact we have had 105 years of preparation. A prologue. So essentially cinema begins now - Let me expand that now to include 5 years back and 10 forward. I suppose that this is something that. I've been practicing for sometime now, that it would really be a part of the new technologies to invent a suspicion of cinema, which will be a cinema, cinema and not some derivative, what Bazin called an uncomfortable combination between theater, literature and painting… and of that triumvirate painting is a pretty poor third. Could you with a hand on your heart actually say that you have seen a cinema film that is essentially about pictures? Would you not say that in every single cinema and film you have seen you could see the director following the text, and that making images was an occupation secondary to illustrating the text? Ok, It's is also important that I do something about it, because obviously criticism without being able to find an alternative or some way through is not very profitable. So I would proselytize that we should get ourselves together with the new media as soon as possible, forget, or at least put aside everything that has being learned, especially in the past 105 years and in some sense start all over again.
Cinema was invented in 1895 in Paris on the 12th of December. The first cinema masterpiece, I think, was Eisenstein's October, which was in 1921. So it took 26 years for the first cinema masterpiece, that is if you believe in cinema, to occur. If you date all of the new technologies from 31st of September, 1983, 26 years have not yet passed. So we have a little time. And I am going to be the one who will create the first new media masterpiece. It is my intention to make the first October of this new language. My God, isn't that arrogant? Woody Allen says: 'If you are going to be arrogant, my God, make sure that you are really arrogant.' What I am going to talk to you tonight is going to be the last lecture of the present course I've been conducting during the last two days and it really is, I suppose, how do you call it, about cinema outside the cinema. I do really sincerely believe that cinema language, as a language, as a vocabulary, is extraordinarily rich and powerful, but I feel that in some ways it has become a derivative essentially relying on narrative. So it has in some senses not fulfilled the promise which I think its extraordinary vocabulary can handle. Some of you might realize that if I say the 31st of September 1983 that there are only 30 days in September. I am surprised that all the hands didn't flash up, so you can see the day is just a little apocryphal, but that is all right because the circumstances still stand. I suppose my activity in the last 25 years has been to worry and be anxious about this notion of image vs. text, text vs. image. My complaint is all of us are fantastically sophisticated at communication in text, both written and spoken, across the language barriers, across the age barriers, across educational barriers. It is because, I suppose, in the West we are all so text-originated, text-circulated, text-consolidated. We all have to learn unwillingly the letters of the alphabet when we are very small. We have to learn the primers and the lot of a vocabulary, and when we're adolescents, begin to amass the words through reading, and of course the education never finishes because as adults we're always reading and practicing our arts, which makes us very very sophisticated. But precious few people go to art school, few people go to architectural school, very few people comparatively ever go to design school. Just because you have eyes doesn't mean to say that you can see. I've been speaking already, for what, 10 minutes? I bet in the last 10 minutes all over the world that more images have been made than in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries put together. There are two video cameras in this room. They travel by the old method of 25 frames a second, so every single second these cameras turn over they are in a sense taking 25 images. Just consider all the cameras that are whirring this moment all over the world, consider all the singular images, consider all the advertising agencies, all the painters, all the graphic artists, all making images. But I really wonder if in fact this plethora of image manufacture actually means we're literate about the whole business of not only making images, but also perceiving them. And I think our education basically in terms of the currency that is associated with visual communication is somehow extraordinarily poor. I would venture that we all suffer from visual illiteracy. I keep throwing out these provocations and I don't hear a single murmur, nobody seems to be remotely disturbed. I am here to be interrupted if you feel like it. What are we going to do about this? Unless we change, I suppose, the focus of our text-based education I presume very little will change. But lets say it's even hopeful as all we sit here, as people who I am sure are interested visual communication and also I imagine us all to be proto-educationalists, it is of course in our hands to be able to try to do something about it. I think in a way, I suppose, sometimes this is a dirty word, that art is not in some purist way meant to be educational. Let us say, it is not meant to be educational underlined three times. But I think that art is the most powerful educational tool that any of us have ever had, because it communicates obviously not only in terms of intellect and rationality, but spiritually and for all the other reasons for which we exist here in a civilized state. And so therefore I feel that it is somehow, certainly I could say this about so-called 'proto-cinema', that most cinema is made with one eye closed and one hand behind your back. The huge possible vocabulary, which is forever blossoming and blossoming and blossoming is somehow in a curious way underused. I of course have to got put my mouth where all these theories are, and it can only be stretched so far until I'm totally discreditable. But what I want to do now after 25 years of filmmaking is to see if I can pool together all these theories and, I suppose, evidence from all the material I ever made before in order to make a coherent whole. And I plan to make a project called the Tulse Luper Suitcase. Don't worry too much about 'Tulse Luper', just hang on to 'suitcase'. I think first of all the suitcase is the most magnificent metaphor for mobility in the end of 20th century and the beginning of 21st century. Just imagine all the people who are now on the move. Think about all these people who are moving involuntarily from the explosion when the Berlin Wall came down, think about all those involuntary people who are moving in Africa. And I have been told that 25,000 young people enter Beijing every night with a suitcase and stay there. Also, I understand in America, and it's been proven again by my students in the past few days, the place where you work now is not likely to be the place where you were born. So this is huge movement which is both voluntary and involuntary, amongst both the privileged and the unprivileged. So I do now think the suitcase is an ideal metaphor to be considered for the mobile society. There are going to be 92 suitcases in this film. 92, you might note, is the atomic number of uranium. I have a theory that when they dro pped the bomb on Hiroshima, the whole world before that that was based essentially on the element of gold changed overnight to be a world based on the notion of Uranium. Gold manifests, I suppose, all the greed and the ambition, the colonization, the exploration of what could be called the pre-Hiroshima world. When the bomb was dropped suddenly the whole power station changed. I suppose you could say that uranium was the reason, is the reason, why America became the dominant power, because it was an ultimate treasure and they hold the majority of the uranium in the world. So I propose that the subtitle of my Tulse Luper Suitcase idea to be, A Fictive History of Uranium. I'm quite convinced that in a couple of centuries there might be a moment when the historians will look back on the 20th century and describe it as the century of uranium. You might find strange that such an arbitrary number is something to be considered, but I don't think of course that it is an arbitrary number. We can to a certain extent rely on the atomic table; it will be certainly true that the uranium has an atomic number of 92 here in this very room, if there is uranium in this room, I am sure there is, and also in Proxima Centura and all over the universe the variety here is based upon the atomic table. And in a world where all the varieties are shifting and changing, the moral systems are changing. We no longer have the same religious or political beliefs, I suppose that there is a need for all of us to be fixed in some way to believe in something, which could possibly be regarded as finite. I suppose I have a reputation, from a lot of works I have done, for playing with this numeracy, playing with numbers in an almost cabalistic way. There are lots of reasons why I do that, because I feel that cinema is a very poor narrative. If you want to tell a story don't be a filmmaker, be an author. I think when you go to the cinema, it's an entirely different experience and I practically challenge everyone of you to tell me the story of Titanic, to tell me the story of Casablanca, to tell me the story any film. You will be able to give me a quick gloss but you have actually forgotten all the details, all the cement, the ways in which the story fits together. Why? Because it is not important. What is important when you go to cinema is the experience, the atmosphere, all the ambiance, the sense of performance the sense of event, or the style, maybe a line of dialogue. Some significant image associated with some aural effect. So I'm always curious why people worry so much about plot and the narrative in cinema if in a sense that is not what's really so important. So I would certainly for my particular purposes aim for all the other parts of the film process and put them much more in the foreground. My students also know that this concern that this anxiety for an idea of a fight between image and text is one that perhaps laughingly has become obsessive. But I always feel that if it itches you must scratch it. So you will constantly find how this man is being contradictory because all his films have been about text and I think that it is a fair and reasonable assumption because I think we need to be able to argue this through constantly in order to find a way to return to essentially visual medium. The Tulse Luper Suitcase, this is also I suppose a question of distribution and the way we look at movies. I don't want to make a simple, two hour feature film, I need more elbow room. I need to make a very very long film. I want to make a film at least eight hours long. I don't imagine any of you in this room are prepared to sit and watch a film for 8 hours. So to help you and also to help cinema distributors and managers we are going to cut it up into four parts. So four two-hour films. It is not a trilogy, it is not a serial, it is one long film. My ideal audience of course is, I would like them to sit for eight hours and watch it continuously, but like I said I know that is asking rather a lot. But as well as being four two-hour film s, it is also going to be what is now much maligned medium, the CD-ROM, probably two of them to work back-to-back. At least two DVDs, a television series in parts, each one lasting forty minutes at least two internet sites and whole shelfload of books. All these other materials are not meant to be like 'OK you have seen the film, now you can buy the T-shirt.' It is all going to be one continuous work, which will acknowledge both the past history of cinema but also hopefully making inroads into the things to come. Ok I have been talking about form, structure and ambition, I ought to say little bit more about the content. I am interested in debating, and I would like my cinema to be regarded as a cinema of ideas, primarily in two ideas: first of all, there is no such thing as history, there is only historians. Is that something you would all agree with? There is no such thing like history, there are only historians. Take the Second World War, even now, only 50 years later, everyone has a version of all those tiny little anecdotes and stories and circumstances that happened at that time. In a sense every single one of you has a different vision of me as I stand pacing up and down in front here and irritating you. There is a way I want to make a multiple point film. Some of you are aware I'm sure of the film called Rashomon which was very famous when I was a young man, which tried to portend at least five different viewpoints of the same story. The world contains a lot of people and I want to make a film like a Rashomon, which doesn't contain just five versions of truth but contains many versions of the truth as there are many people in the world. And I think for the first time maybe it is almost possible in the information age to do that. We now have in curious way the tools to be able to make at least an approach in that direction. I suppose also there is a way in which, although I want my ideal audience to watch the four films, buy the CD-ROMs, buy the DVDs, plug into the TV channel, buy the books and watch the television. I want also to be able to make sure that the actual characteristics of all these different media all intermesh satisfactorily. And there are a whole series of devices where I want to be able to take the material backwards and forward from one media to another. The suitcases will be introduced in a narrative film on a big screen. But I don't want to spend masses of time opening and closing suitcases. So you will be able to open and close the suitcases on CD-ROM, or the Net site or a DVD. Those take suitcases 46, two forty-sixes makes 92, so it is right in the middle. Suitcase forty-six contains, and this is Switzerland, ninety-two gold bars stolen from the Jews during the time of the Holocaust. Every single gold bar inside the suitcase has a story. Every one of these stories is now being written by me, and each one is a feature length. So imagine when you open suitcase 46, there are 92 feature lengths films with in a suitcase and of course there are another ninety-one other suitcases. So you can see the huge mound, the necessary huge pyramid of material that has to be generated. That is one of the devices. Another device is one of the characters wants to reinvent for the 20th century, or shall we say of the 21 century, the 1001 tales of Sheherezade. You all know the tales from the Arabian Nights, from which I suppose some people say began the Central European tradition of literature. And I want to take these stories with casbahs, sultans and scimitars, and rewrite them with New York taxis, with societies in Saas-Fee, with new clothing by Jean-Paul Gaultier. So imagine all those stories again rewritten to fit the 21st century perception. The idea is to make an Internet site which will reproduce these stories and if you think, about 1001 stories is about 3 years. That is about from the time I started filming until the whole thing is finished. So every single night, although there is no such thing as an Internet night, is there? A website night doesn't really exist. Lets say at least once every twenty-four solar hours there will be a new story. And those stories are of course will be intimately related to all the other materials being manufactured. There are two ways in which material will shared backwards and forwards between all these various media. And there are of course another 92 strategies in which that will happen. Some of the other devices, which I very much want to do is I do not want to shoot with one camera. I want to shoot with multiple cameras all the time, which is basically again equivalent to explaining that there is no such thing as the single viewpoint. Contemporaneously with a singular version, which we could say would be the director's final cut, I also want to make a censored version. So the censored version and the uncensored version also run parallel. I want to indicate the Tulse Luper is one of course of the 92 characters. You will be amused I am pleased to know that one of the characters, that is absolutely signed up for this already will be Madonna. So all 92 characters will be the length and breadth of actors and actresses of all descriptions all over the world. And they will make a contribution to the life of Tulse Luper and of course they will all be in some senses archetypal characters. I am quite convinced that dramas all the world basically pulls their characters from the same pool, the clown, the thief, the virgin, the king, the politician, the thug, etc. You can, I am sure, fill in about 100 characters. So if you're Chekhov or Shakespeare or whoever, in a sense you always bring up these characters, of course it has very much to do with the characteristics of each play work, to make them live for you in a new way. So we have 92 characters, 92 suitcases, and also we're going to have 92 events. Of course it is a game playing in one particular way and I can see or imagine already the audiences saying 'my god, they've got to 46, we've got to go for another 46.' So I find entertaining and fascinating you all, in order to allow you to keep all your enthusiasms alive until very end. I have been promised by the Venice film festival to have a particular slot, the first one next year, that is 2002, to have the first film made. And subsequently the next year we'll have another one and so on. So we will have a permanent basis, if you like, of Venice. You know Venice is such an extraordinary place, responsible for so many fantasies and mirage activities and abilities to fantasize, perhaps beyond the reaches of European imagination. It seems to me to be the ideal place to posit this particular material. There will be a lot of text and there will be a lot of multiple filming.
Just to give you a break from my breathlessness I would like to show you a film that I recently have been engaged in making with multiple cameras. I ought to tell you something as a little bit of background. I was commissioned to make a polemic about the landscape of North Holland. The landscape of North Holland is about as far as you can get from the landscape out there. It's totally, totally, absolutely flat. One singular horizon. It is in danger, as it has always been since it is very much a man-made landscape, of continual flooding. The characteristics of recent European commitments have often suggested that we ought to regard Europe as whole and not as a series of different types of landscapes and to make shall we say, this of course is very famous material, one area in a total tourist resort. Perhaps we could turn France into a museum. Perhaps we can turn Italy in a single restaurant, that sort of thing. And in some peculiar way the Dutch were worried that there are too many Germans on holiday in their country. There is also a possibility of a melting of the North Pole, that somehow Holland will be used as a reservoir for all that surplus water. There is also the growing and the enlargement of all the cities and all the towns, spreading out, covering the landscape with more and more concrete. There is a question also with the directives from the European Community that certain crops can only be grown here, certain crops can only be grown there. So there are all sorts of problems. And we made an exhibition and we made a series of films to debate the situation. I was allowed to build what is called a grand terp. The Dutch, originally coming I suppose largely from Eastern, when they approach the flat lands of Northern Holland were confronted with the problem about their cattle, their women, their children, how on earth were they going to keep their feet dry, so they made what essentially are called terps. And that really is scraping up the ground, the mud and gravel, virtually with your fingertips, and making a pile about a meter high, just big enough for you to stand on. So when the tide came in and went back out again, you and your cattle didn't get wet feet. And in some peculiar metaphorical way that is the beginning of civilization in Northern Holland. So I was allowed to make very exaggerated terp. So imagine most terps, even the sophisticated ones, were probably only about 2 meters high and about as big as this room. Some of them have grown so big or have been consolidated, that whole towns now exist on them. But I made one, which is twice as big as this building. We put inside it all sorts visual and textual material to explain. What I also wanted to do was to introduce my audience to some characteristics of the Dutch landscape. So we made a series of journeys, each one lasting exactly 10 minutes. We traveled backwards and forwards across Holland by plane, by helicopter, by bicycle, on horse back, on cars and of course on boats. What I wanted to do is to demonstrate peculiarities of looking, different perspectives of looking at the landscape from different view points. As always to help the finance, Dutch television came in and said 'OK if you are going to use these films inside the terp, we could also use them as well.' So I would like to show you at least the beginning of this multiple journey, we did backwards and forwards across Holland for this polemic. And this is no just an idle prologue, because this is some of the language, which I want to use in the Tulse Luper Suitcase. I wander if I should switch of the light from somewhere?
In a sense this is where cities and civilization arise from and probably will all go back down to again. The story, by giving you that geographical overview, use of maps, and landscape travel, is basically the story about the man called Tulse Luper. He is apocryphal, but his ambition I suppose as a writer and as an explorer and his main ambition is to find things. To find things that are lost. People, countries, manuscripts, circumstances, etc. But concurrent with that he is also a professional prisoner. So he is continuously put from one prison to another for personal reasons and political reasons all across the country. He is no man to lie idle in a prison, so every time he is in the prison he starts writing on the walls, keeping secret diaries, keeping in fact three secret diaries each time. One for himself, one for the jailers and one for posterity. You must know that De Sade's famous days of Sodom were written in that fashion: One for the jailers, one for the authorities and one for himself. They were discovered about 25 years after under the brickwork of his particular prison cell. He travels across America and then he ends up in Northern Europe, and there is a long stay for example in the third class bathroom of Antwerp railway station. He then goes to North France, where he becomes involved in the French history, ultimately he comes to a situation at the end of the Second World War where he is on the German east-west border. That is crisis point for him because that is the time when the atomic bomb was dropped. And then there is a jump in his history and he moves, because after all being Tulse Luper and speaking English, he is a British citizen and he ends up in Hong-Kong, which of course Britain still owns Hong-Kong. From there he makes a long picaresque travel throughout the East. Again finding some personal voluntary imprisonment in Manchuria. There is a way that every single prison he visits, he manufactures material which later people will eventually make into some other art projects. Phil Glass has taken suitcase 29 and he and I going to make an opera which is going to be called The Man in the Bath, which related to the experience that he had in the bathroom in Antwerp. I have an agreement with suitcase 69, which is full of Vatican pornography to have an exhibition in Rome. The Guggenheim in Bilboa has agreed to take on suitcase 41. We will again have a manifestation of all the references the Tulse Luper makes in pictorial terms to uranium. For every single suitcase there will be another manifestation, which will exist in an independent sense but obviously have all the relationships back to the original. For suitcase 46 already we have a play simply called Gold about the 92 stories that I have found inside suitcase 46, which begins rehearsal in two weeks when I am in the new national theater in Frankfurt, so we are already rolling. The actual manufacturing of the material, though, is shooting in Colorado and won't start until November. So you see this megalomania, but I feel what I want to do, and this is of course very very self, I suppose, very self-defeating and very self-conscious, I feel that we need to find or make some definitive work which will be a benchmark. We all are chattering about new technologies, journalism is full of it, we have all sorts of enthusiasts, I can certainly see enthusiasts here who I know are extraordinary excited by all these phenomena. We also encounter a lot of cynicism and lot of doubt because after all in some senses it is only a new tool and civilization has seen so many tools coming and going in parts. But I do really think that there is a way that cultural history moves forward by manifesting what could be called benchmarks. All of us can name some. And of course this is making extreme and very arrogant comparisons. Dante's Inferno, that extraordinary work of art that united the medieval mind with the modern mind, was an encyclopedia. It was the technology of its own time. If you read Dante's Divine Comedy you will be instructed how to tie a baby's nappy, how to treat the Pope, how to avoid Satan, how to make drawing pins, almost, I'm sure, how to make television. An extraordinary work with thousands and thousands of references very self-consciously was written as a summation. We can think of other things I suppose in the English context things like Milton's Paradise Lost, much more recently something like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake? I am sure all of you could put your finger either on benchmarks which exist by consensus for us all or certainly for you personally. I suspect of course that these works are only found retrospectively. I wonder really seriously can you make definitive work. Not only does this stink of an absolute arrogance of course, but also I feel who is to make the judgment, who is to make a decision about what is significant. But I feel that, let me reiterate again, you know Blair Witch Project happens over here, Mike Figgis makes a project over there this that project here, this is that project there. But I do think that we need some sort of synthesis to bring it all together to give us a sort of legitimacy to be able to continue to imagine that we really do have here not just an information tool, not just a tool for manipulation and power bearing but a tool for real aesthetic excitement. OK so you have seen the basic layer. I am going to try and treat the whole over the world in this sort of filmic material. Next comes the textual layer.
Let me show you another project, a film, Bologna, Italy. Bologna is supposed to be responsible for making the first European university. It is a city I suppose you could say that have been based upon text. Umberto Eco has chosen it as his borrowed city, if you like, a city where he proposes his notions both fictional and unfictional. I was asked for a sort of belated millennium celebration to make a manifestation in the Piazza Maggiore… Any of you know Bologna? A beautiful classic Italian piazza. On one side is the cathedral, on one side is a palace, on one side is a 17th century shopping mall, and on the other side is, I forgot what is on the other side. But there is a way like all classic Italian piazzas, they somehow summon up the whole life of a particular city. All the major Italian towns have got one. The one in Bologna is particularly good, because it is absolutely square. And we made a huge amount of projections on all four sides accompanied by video and projection of sound. So imagine these huge, huge images on grand facades, I actually can't reproduce that here. But we amalgamated all these four walls and made a presentation. I wander if you can show it please.
It's not looking at dead text, but text as it is being written. To be able to watch it in all its extraordinary ability to choreograph meaning in association with the actual activity of making it. My time is running out, but just to show you that although these are the basis, and that there are many many other layers. I would like to show you also the possibilities of maneuvering of very complex pictures which are associated with the operatic traditions. I think that we don't have the time to see it all so why don't you just fast forward it. One opera in series of 10 about the deaths of European composers. I don't know whether you know about the death of Anton Webern. In 1945 died rather mysteriously, this major figure in 20th century music along with Berg and Schoenberg mysteriously is lying death in the snow one morning in Mittesgeld. There are all sorts of reasons to explain why he died, and I became very fascinated and wanted to make a documentary about it. But I was considering all this in 1980. Those of you who are pop music fans will know John Lennon died in New York in 1980. And I found correspondences between the death of Anton Webern and the death of John Lennon, which made me investigate other composers' deaths. And in the end I found 10 mysterious deaths of composers between 1945 and 1980. And I wanted to make series of 10 operas. This is opera number 6, which is about the death of a South American composer called Rosa. And I just shown the denouement. I think that the opera is unfilmable because it is basically all about one singular shot, which cannot be broken because it breaks your concentration in a non-operatic way. But I was given permission to reconstitute the opera in filmic terms, to remake it essentially for a screen. And in doing that I tried to bring in all manner of contemporary uses of technology one of which has of course very much to do with text on screen. You know in opera most of the words get lost, you never understand them. So here I have the golden opportunity to give you not only the pictures but also to give you the incomprehensible text. It is very violent opera. It is about blood and humiliation, but I think that it is very much in the tradition of the European. Just think of all the humiliated heroines, Tosca, Madam Butterfly…so it very much contains and even pushes that tradition even further. I'd just like to finish with this, because all I am trying to show you here are some of the layers of the language, which I very much want to be considered as a part of this big project. The way that these original singular pictures were reproduced inside the grand terp were indeed rather in a room like this, perhaps a bit bigger. So the whole audience was in the middle, and the screens were all around the outside. So you partook in a sense in a cyclorama of these activities, so it was very three-dimensional. Because of the necessities of making a film we have other ways to use the image. I think your anxieties are really very interesting and correct, because we are using here I think up to 14 cameras. I would like to show you the whole film, but It is about an hour long and there are many, many variations of a theme, sometimes we play with singular, multiple and so on and so on . One of the interesting experiments we mounted 9 cameras covering 360 degrees on the tops of all these vehicles. Lets take a car, drive the car through the countryside, often the roads are twisting, and reproduce the notion of these 9 cameras in this sort of space. It is an extraordinary experience, because when you drive a car you basically look forward and obviously you might see the rearview in mirrors, but be surrounded by the countryside, which is moving you inside the car. And that you reproduce that in a helicopter, you reproduce that on all sorts of other transport. It can be an extraordinary experience. What we want to do in association with the Tulse Luper Suitcase, and already we arranged that with the Rotterdam film festival is to bring our own container with our own equipment and our own screens and set up these environments in any building whatsoever, inside a cathedral, inside a barn, wherever else. So these in a sense will run parallel to all the filmmaking activity. Three-dimensional examinations of the possibility of multiple screening. As far as sound is concerned, also we played experiments. There is a very famous old 14th century church in a little just outside Amsterdam, which is build up on a terp with a circular road around the outside. And not only did we go around with a car, which had these 9 cameras on but they were on a terp, so the terp itself was turning. So you get a vortex inside a vortex. And to make that really applicable in terms of sound we put a choir inside the little church. So the sound in a sense traveled independently of the movement. I think that is an extraordinary language and there are all sorts of possibilities not conventionally as I suggested might be in the beginning of this little diatribe, in terms of normal narrative cinema within a fixed cinematic space, but to take cinema out of the cinemas and use its extraordinary and developing language in all sorts of different environments. We have developed these nine cameras also like a Moebius Strip so not only can go this way around, they can also go that way around. Then we need to build environments that of course can cope with that. Just imagine what the language is. The individual screens are all moving in different speeds. The little experiment you saw on the bicycle, all of the images start at the same point but the actual films travel different speeds, by the time you get to the end of the three minutes they all come into sync again. So all those dislocations of space and time can be played with to your heart's content. Very exciting.
Audience: You think that it is closer to our perception?
Greenaway: Perception is a learning matter, isn't it? You know when they first made cinema they thought that people wouldn't be able to withstand the flickering lights. It's like when man began to travel in train more than forty miles per hour they thought that the human body would explode. In terms of vision just think how far we have come. If you compare a silent movie with Casablanca, with Star Wars. The perception of imagery, the huge amounts of information that is being thrown at you. We accommodate, we accommodate. We catch up, maybe it is painful to begin with, we have to learn how to look at it. It gradually becomes part of a common phenomenon.
Schirmacher: Yes, now I would like to jump in, but only to ask Diane and Victor to join in. He likes debates, it seems like he doesn't because he always jumps at you when you say something he doesn't like but that's because he likes arguing. These are two guys from the side of literature, rhetoric, tradition if you want, what is your reaction to this?
Vitanza: I don't want to debate at all, I'm just awed by it. This is not the first time obviously. You talk about making the eight-hour film, breaking it up into two hours each? Let me tell you briefly one of my experiences in watching 'Prospero's Books' I rented the cassette and started playing it. It was so intense that after 10 minutes I had to turn it off. Not intense in sense that it was painful, but I had to turn it off. I had to walk around the house a little and come back. I did this 10 times.
Greenaway: I understand your difficulty. We showed the first 15 minutes at the Venice film festival and the audience was incredibly excited. They say: 'OK you now have done The Tempest. You can now do the other 36 plays in the same way. Here is a new language that we can all learn. Amazing, amazing.' Lots of clapping. When we finally finished the two-hour film, we took it to the Cannes film festival. People were leaving halfway through. They were exhausted visually. They found, just I was criticized by Pauline Kael, the New Yorker suggested that Greenawayis a cultural omnivore who eats with his mouth open and gives us all visual indigestion. But I think that has to do with the educational process, it has to do with expectations. And I am sure you know maybe if we got together in 10 years time you wouldn't have those problems. I think they, cultural demands and thank God they are cultural demands I never going to let you sit on your backside and just accept your ideas of what cultural procedures are. And the language is becoming more and more sophisticated and our capabilities, look at young children handling all the new media. They are very quick at grabbing it. OK Prospero's Books is an archaic text written in 1611. I can't expect a 16 year old who likes Sting or Police or whatever to be able to necessarily grab into that same vocabulary. Why should the devil have all the best tunes? Why should all they go to MTV? let us use them in association, especially with all those classic works we enjoy, and even more importantly, with all the new ones we can invent.
Audience: On the contrary, the first time I ever saw the 'Prospero's Books' was being played on a video wall in a downtown club in the middle of the night. You said you were going to take an eight hour film and chop it into four films, and then suggested the you can take a 2 hour film and chop it up into 10 minutes, how far down can you take this…
Greenaway: I think that the DVD is invented just for me. It is such an extraordinary medium that I can cope with all this encyclopedic material in a way that I can get the audiences to enter it and leave it. The ability to go to your favorite section is perfectly legitimate. I want to use our browse techniques rather than the basic model of cinema as the 19th century novel. Most cinema hasn't discovered James Joyce yet. So I think that the whole complexity of the way we could organize our new media are highly sympathetic to a projects like this. I want to make ambulatory movies I want to get away from these closures from a hundred and twenty minutes chronological narrative stories, based upon a literary 19th century text. Its old-fashioned, it is boring, it doesn't really entertain us any more.
Audience: Isn't your work, in a sense, full of stories?
Greenaway: Well I am anti-narrative in the cinema and I use two techniques. I give you so much information that you can't possibly handle it or I strip down things so economically that there is virtually nothing there. I am very, very critical of the narrative cinema we have ended up with. I support narrative but if you want to tell stories be an author, don't waste your time in the cinema, because cinema is not really about storytelling. I began a life as a painter, I think my middle period is certainly being as a filmmaker but I have an idea I am going to finish my life being a writer. And I do applaud the ability to handle the narrative, of course I do, but in its rightful place, which I think is essentially in text. Unfortunately, maybe the greatest narrative traditions are in storytelling orally, but certainly the Western world that tradition is gone. Maybe if you are parents, you tell your children bedtime stories. Look how effective it can be, not just because your audience is young and impressionable. The ability to tell stories is probably the most powerful way in which we have to express that. The second best is text, Because as you intimated, you can browse, you are in control of the time frame, you can flip to page back, you can reconsider. If I am a filmmaker I am in control of your time frame. However, with new technology you can stop and start and so on and so on, but then again one of my interests is how we are going to reconcile these two time frames, the time of the viewer in a gallery painting situation and the time frame possibilities of the director who controls your time frame. I think that one of big arguments about museumology in the future is to be able to reconcile this. Aren't you irritated like me by going to all the museums in the world and having to stop and watch a damn video? You know like Mona Lisa I want to be able to look for 3 seconds, 3 minutes, 3 days if I wish at the Mona Lisa. I don't want anybody to interfere with my time frame. When you get a video, which is temporal, that is broken. We need to have a place to show videos, of course we do, but I think we still have to organize, are we going to show them a gallery situation? And I think for most of us that is deeply uncomfortable in some way.
Audience: My question is, to go back to the first movie and to the problem of perception. This was fascinating for me because I was experimenting in that perspective. My intuition is that there is a big potential for entering into the very mechanisms of visual perception and of perception of time, depth, relative size and so on and so on. So I wonder what would be the radical variant of the deep entering in such cognitive mechanisms and what would be the radical combination of music like Krzisnik and such play with the perception. It seems that there is a big potential for development in breaking the single point of view, the solid presence of the subject in this faceting of movement.
Greenaway: In a sense you are voicing some of the anxieties that Nicolas did as well. I would like to repeat: cinema out of cinema. What we are doing here is using new languages of perception and organization within an old medium. That is the old-fashioned medium of single screen with all of you looking in one direction. So my encouragement is to have multiscreen spaces, 360 degree environments where these sorts of experiments could be conducted in a much more interesting level. In a sense this is a sort of a convenient way for me to show you at least some of the element of this language which has such an enormous potential.
Audience: I was wondering how you see wireless devices, gameboys, and also virtual reality devices kind of fitting into this visual language.
Greenaway: Those particular phenomenon and what they represent aren't necessarily right in my eyes and for my interest, but they have to be embraced and all the strategies of the structures that are involved there I would like certainly to be able to use. You saw the beginning of this little section of introductory animated map and all the things that go with three-dimensional animation. That is the first time I have ever done it, but again I can see how powerful maps are. They show you your way, where you have been, where you are and where you can be simultaneously. So the development of those things has extraordinary potential, and that sort of language is very much relevant to the structures you have been talking about. I want to be able to develop those in the project as well.
Schirmacher:But what are the new boundaries, after you break out of the old ones?
Greenaway: Well we will find this out, Wolfgang when we get there!
Schirmacher:I know, but you understand how important boundaries are, in order to push you, you don't accept them but push them.
Greenaway: Well nothing is in steady state, everything is mutable. So that will be a continuation to pursue whatever those new boundaries are and what that they give us.
Schirmacher:Do you have any idea what will happen, is the boundary our imagination?
Greenaway: Well one of the tyrannies I keep talking about is the tyranny of the camera. This always sound so strange, because you would think that the camera is ubiquitous to the creation of cinema, but I think that big boundary about cinema is the camera itself, which has given us a representation of the real world and we always know that the real world is more dangerous, more fascinating, more interesting than ever it can appear on screen. And in a sense we started too high up, in a sense we have been introduced to the notion of cinema at Richter scale 6 and we should really have come in at zero. Let me offer you two, for me, oft-quoted quotations. Picasso said: 'I paint what I think not what I see.' And Eisenstein going to South America on his way to make documentaries about Indians passed through California, Eisenstein the greatest filmmaker, I am quite convinced that ever existed a man, who could I put up without embarrassment against Michelangelo and Beethoven, he meets Walt Disney, he says 'Walt Disney is the only man who makes films.' You can see why, whatever you can think about Walt Disney's politics etc. There is a way he used Walt Disney as a man who starts from nothing. So compare Eisenstein quote to Picasso quote and that is what I think the new technologies will do. You can go back to Richter scale zero and start all over again, but start off with making artifacts, which come essentially from thinking rather than from seeing. Because in a strange way the eyes get in the way, the eyes are extremely lazy, the brain is far more active and useful. So in a sense in a peculiar way, and this sounds deeply paradoxical, get rid of the eye, go straight to the brain and I am sure that is the place where modern technology will end
Audience: This is possibly a simple question, but if people are accustomed to experiencing both cinema and technology in a particular way, how will you get them to respond to what you're doing?
Greenaway: Well again we talked about distribution and what is the point of making the product unless people can see it. But in a sense unless you make the product you can't find venues until then. We have promises from the Venice film festival. You know they have the wherewithal, all the public relations, Mussolini invented the Venice Film festival way back in 1921, and you know what a great organizer he was. It will open up, because I think all film festivals have to do that and I also indicated how Rotterdam already is interested. Rotterdam as always has been a very exciting avant-garde central European art movie festival. But it has a large area, which is also deeply devoted to all new languages. And I am sure they will offer accommodation for this. What I also suggested and we have done this before with operas, there will be a way that we somehow as the producers need to have control over this so we put the whole thing like in a puppet show into a container and take it with us. And we can put it up in all sorts of different places and replicate it. So there is not just only one, they can be 2 or 3 or 4 . But there is a question financing and distribution as always, and we shouldn't be frightened of that…let's make a software version and worry about the hardware afterwards.
Schirmacher:It seems that you, for the next 2 years at least, you go 360 days a year on this new project.
Greenaway: It's going to take 5 years
Schirmacher: Five years only to be a slave to this project…
Greenaway:What a beautiful slavery it is going to be. Because for me what is most exciting and I am sure that is true about any media investigation - the sheer excitement of investigation, of searching, of trying to find, to match the demands of our imagination towards the technology that we want to use. it is that sense of investigation which is the most exciting thing. Then I can make provocations and I can indicate ambitions, but you learn from your mistakes and who know what is around the next corner. All sorts of really new exciting things, which I can't even imagine. So I look forward to finding those.
|
