Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Interview

Carlos Adriano: Your career has followed a certain sequence: after painting, from 1966 onwards, the experimental short films; from 1980 onwards, the full feature films and television; from 1990 onwards, the video installations. Although history (and moreover audiovisual history) is not a linear matter, do you see any development or “coherent ” pathway in your breakthrough trajectory, in the way those “phases” link or merge with each other?

Peter Greenaway: The wish to participate in all questions and aspects of visual literacy has shaped my interests. I still wholeheartedly believe that the sophistications of the painting aesthetic in the last two thousand years have organised the way we constantly see and interpret the world and it is still operating today in the same way. And the large excitements of the ways painters have seen the world in the 20th century have profoundly affected all other aspects of our existence and comprehension. I have always wished that cinema would take on those responsibilities, but alas, it has rarely done so because cinema is essentially a text-based and not an image-based medium—it need not necessarily have been so, but the demand to tell stories, replicate the activities of the bookshop, and appeal to the lowest common denominator of human interests have always, with few exceptions, kept it there. I began my career deeply fascinated by visual time structures, sequencing, and listing, all a response to the current activities being practised in painting in the 1950s, the 1960s, and 1970s. It was an optimistic start, fully championing the excellence of painting pursuits and hoping to see their equivalence in cinema. I saw that such ambitions were far too ambitious, the audiences interested in such things would be excessively small and limited and local. To widen the potential about communication of such things and hope to spread my excitements of visual language I endeavoured to display the same ideas in more publicly familiar arenas—predominately of course in narrative cinema— albeit the more sophisticated, perceptive, and radical narrative cinema of the auteur in Europe. For example, my first success, The Draughtsman’s Contract, was really a film that posited the notion that “does an artist need to draw what he sees or what he knows?”, a familiar enough argument that compares with all the art arguments down the ages since the Florentine renaissance—but most audience members who applauded that film and critics who gave it prizes did so because they saw it as an English country-house drama in the genre of English detective fiction—albeit being more Patricia Highsmith than Agatha Christie. There followed a string of films that pursued this trajectory creating a balancing act between deep visual pursuits and accessibility. It was a deceit in a way—sugaring the pill of extreme visual radicalism with much of which cinema audiences expected from cinema—hence the gradually evolving stance of irony. I wanted to always say that I was not really telling the truth, or at least not the truth that I wanted to tell. Perhaps all of us get along with the world by telling lies—we are seldom allowed to tell the truth—it is far too uncomfortable for all of us to bear—and we would probably not succeed. If we did tell the truth we would exist in such isolation and solitude as to be a burden for ourselves, which would be unbearable, especially if, like myself, you wanted to be gregarious, optimistic, and wholeheartedly enjoy human communication. The gradual fading away and then the demise of radical European cinema and the dominance of television needed to be addressed, and the two arenas of interactivity and multimedia which cinema cannot contain—must be embraced— hence continuing disenchantment with cinema and a diminution of its significance ensued. I believe cinema language per se to be extraordinary, especially when seen through the eyes of television language which is far more inventive, daring, experimental, and encompassing. With the advent of the digital tools, we have really left behind, or ought to have left behind, the pools and lakes of placid water and finally emerged into the oceans. Cinema is wasted on cinema—we really must put it to better use. The experiments and the searching continue. Perhaps it is a missionary stance which in our age is not so popular— but I want people to enjoy seeing, to become philosophically great viewers, and to use the possibility of visual literacy to reach great things.

You usually quote Vermeer, Bruegel, Velázquez, Rembrandt. Will painting, this ancient and artisanal mode of production, always remain a central or key framework for your work?

Much of a response to this question must lie in my first answer. I have a large fascination for the representation of the world in painting. The painting contribution—knowingly and more often unknowingly—shapes the way we see the world. Ideas of form, beauty, immortality, landscape, culture are their creation. Consider the 20th century where painting and painters created the issues of surrealism, cubism, structuralism, minimalism, postmodernism. All such thought processes started with painters and have toppled over into general philosophical, and then common, usage. We can easily acknowledge the effect of literature on our thinking—in the 20th century—Proust (memory meditation and recall), Kafka (bureaucracies of the soul), Joyce (infinite narrative and language structures), Borges (metaphysical scholasticism), Márquez (magic realism)—but we seldom acknowledge the effect that painters have had, Picasso (continual metamorphism, nonfiguration), Corbusier (dissolution of classical form), Duchamp (legitimisation of conceptualism), Johns (new values for the sign), Rauschenberg (the values of intermedia), Warhol (collapse of art categories), etc. Giacometti once said that your grandmother probably knows little or nothing about Picasso but be certain that Picasso knows all about your grandmother. The trickle-down cultural effect of painting is certain to be affecting the way you dress, eat, think, believe, look, see, speak, and perform. My fascinations as a young man were certainly enthusiastically to do with my contemporaries as painters, but gradually the profound history of all painting began to entrance, and my enthusiasm for the baroque, especially the great painters of artificial light and movement— Caravaggio, Velázquez, Rembrandt—and the baroque concerns for excess, and the wider, non-Christian, non- European world, gradually took precedence. Painting has essentially a low and inexpensive technology characteristic, coloured chalk on a wall, graphite, and watercolour on paper, and can be pursued by nonelitist society, is primed to admit failure, demands experimentation—all these qualities and characteristics are just not present in cinema, and since painting is so cheap, so “untechnical”, so prepared to be capable of failing, then when painting is successful, it is especially significant and profound. 

What do you think of being called a renaissance man in the sense of a multimedia artist? Is it possible (or reasonable ) to “update” the concept of opera (in the Wagner scope) for the digital domain of moving image and sound making? 

All good and worthwhile artists have proven to be multimedia practitioners. We must never think of the term “multimedia” as a contemporary one. Michelangelo made wedding cakes. Bernini encompassed every activity. To specialise surely is almost an aberration in the history of creativity—and is more a characteristic of society than the artist, and now we have reached the information age with extraordinary digital tools, the possibilities triplicate in all directions far and wide. We must surely seize those tools and opportunities. And please remember Wagner was, as ever, a hypocrite—over fame, women, politics, immortality, Germany, money—he never wished for a Gesamtkunstwerk in its best and finest sense; all he wanted was for all the arts to serve the opera-house. For him, the composer had to be king, all the other arts were merely his subjects. 

Radical film artists, as yourself, praise the banner “cinema is dead, long live the cinema” (title of one of your articles). Could you name a new definition of cinema (electronic cinema, postmedia cinema)? What would be a new paradigm of cinema (as you wrote once that “we need to reinvent cinema”)? Do you think that so - called “digital cinema” would realise, or make true, an ideal of a “pure”, “complete”, “true” cinema?

Names are surely seldom found for a new phenomenon with any great percipience. So many of the names for arts movements are terms of abuse coined by unhappy critics— baroque, mannerism, rococo, fauvism, impressionism, pop art...? We will surely find a name for the new postcinema, though I suspect it will creep up on us and not be announced formally until we have used it enough to make it familiar. However it arrives it must surely describe an entity that must be interactive and multimedia (both clumsy and unsatisfactory terms) and will probably need to have a very special reverence for the visual—it is a curiosity that the inventions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are all Latin or Greek—coined by English-speaking scientists and inventors still educated in the humanities—television, cinematography—quickly shortened to tele and cinema, even the humble bus from omnibus—and of course, a great many of them have refused to stick. Velocipede, praxinoscope? I surely believe that the new digital tools can free us from the tyrannies of the text, the frame, the actor, and the cameras—all of which cinema has borrowed from other arts and situations making it a complicated mongrel, hybrid, bastard chimera which never really knew itself for what it was. To use a Darwinian analogy from natural history—cinema has been so easily able and capable of intercoursing with every other art, it never achieved the self-regulating and self-reproducing status of speciesism, that essential phenomenon in natural history which defines a new species, that separates a zebra from a donkey and that demands that, however hard and long and repeatedly they try, they will never produce a satisfactory offspring. All cinema can so easily be deconstructed down into its component parts, it never achieves autonomy and now I suspect it is too late—the small animals in the undergrowth have toppled the dinosaur whose arrogant extravagances have made it moribund. It is said, contrary to popular belief, that the greatest thing that could have happened to painting was photography—for photography allowed painting to get on with what it should be really doing—not mimicry, not documentation, not pursuing the mirage of reality, but developing the greatest device of the universe—the human imagination—in the pursuit of a comprehension of the human condition. Can we not have reasons to suppose that each ring stripped from the complicated onion of cinema’s beginnings will get us closer to ideas of a true unmongrelised cinema? Picasso said “I do not paint what I see, but what I think”. Perhaps we have to— curiously—give up the eyes—and go straight to the brain. Picasso’s dictum contains good advice. 

Besides film theatres or cinematheques, video galleries or museums, a new set of venues are available, like mobile cell phones, Internet, iPods … How do you evaluate these new “site -specific” situations and new audiences? Would these new spaces for screening moving images alter our perception and explode the conventional frames for a new spectatorship? 

We should surely pursue these new avenues of interest— the cinema might be dead, but the concept of the screen continues. We are entering indeed the age of the screen—it is ubiquitous. Cinema will recede and become a memory for academics. Who, anymore, looks at silent cinema—that enormous industry that quickly captivated the world? By 1910, fifteen years after its invention, everyone in the world knew what cinema was supposed to be and had experienced it. Nothing travelled quicker ever before—only the World Wide Web has travelled further faster since. Sound cinema will go the same way, and looking at what in recent memory has happened to the vinyl record, the hi-fi phenomenon, and videotape, sound cinema will go swiftly, so swiftly we will have to whip around quickly to catch sight of its disappearing dust. We will see perhaps its history repeated on the wrist watch, the mobile-phone, the voice-energised laptop— but they of course will be passed over soon too—and if we can come out of the coming water-wars sane and uncrippled, there is no telling that all these things will become interiorised and manufactured according to the inner eye. It is still quite some way from your wrist screen to your brain cells—but the gap is narrowing. 

How would you define Tulse Luper and how do you connect the project to Brazil? 

Tulse Luper was my reaction to the limitations of contemporary cinema—tyrannised by the text of the bookshop, the frame of postrenaissance visual presentation, the 19th-century use of the actor, and the limitations of the mechanical celluloid camera. I wanted to demonstrate a new multimedia interactive ideal. Cinema has outgrown its social entertainment characteristic, lost its particular sole position as only vehicle for public moral and intellectual education—the last flowering was the twenty years of auteur European cinema that probably created its greatest exponents and I was a pupil of those years. Now I wanted to create a piece of cinematic language that was not to be limited to wearing its old clothes. The Tulse Luper Suitcases is deliberately multifaceted, though has cinematic vocabulary at its heart. It is cinema, Web site, DVDs, television, videogames, theatre, opera, exhibition, VJ-ing, and a great deal of reading and talking. In São Paulo we hope to introduce just three of those components—the cinema with a seven-hour film, exhibition with a presentation of the ninety-two suitcases of the film, a VJ-fifty-minute session to demonstrate a possible future for the Idea of the Emancipated Screen, and much much much talking. 

As you remembered in an interview, John Cage suggested if you introduce more than 20 percent of novelty into an y artwork, you’re going to lose 80 percent of your audience. At that same occasion, you mentioned your wish “to go on making movies, without any sense of condescension or patronage”, but making “mainstream movies”, far away from an ivory tower, but not being “an undergroundfilmmaker ”. You said you “want to make movies for the largest possible audience , but on my terms”. How to balance these ambitions? Do you think that galleries and museums would concern an elite public while the Internet would stand for a “pop” or mass way of communication? 

The balancing of the equation posited by a demand to make public cinema on my own terms of course is fraught. But the fact I am answering your questions and am a participant at the Videobrasil Festival is some indication that we have not done so badly. We occupy a new information age—we can progress away from that little stale puddle of small and limited presentations notions and content limitations that is forever shrinking and becoming more odiferous every day—always in cinema the same ideas, situations, plots, formulations, trading in knowns, reworking givens, repeating the genres—pissing on one another’s shoes. Let’s embrace a wider field—let us make worlds with different centres, different syntaxes. An enthusiasm for architecture and a consequent vocabulary of plans, façades, and elevations, makes The Belly of an Architect. An excitement about calligraphy and text versus image creates The Pillow-Book. Prospero’s Books prioritises dance and choreography. Ritual and procession dominates The Baby of Macon. Familiar cinematic preoccupations are not absent—emotional identities, narrative continuities— all the hooks to a familiar world that will not alienate attention and shrivel interest by speaking in an entirely foreign language are acknowledged, but the boundaries are surely to be pushed. These films are really about architecture as responsibility, calligraphy as a means to join up again the image and the word, choreography to find ourselves again in a sense of space and ritual as an essential positioning in the hierarchy of things—these films are not about anecdotal characters easily manipulated by an author of dialogue in a cinema demanding therapeutic and cathartic emotionalism. Is cinema really an excuse for the shrink couch, the doctor’s chair, the priest’s confessional, the armchair strip club? Reality cinema has severe limitations, the pursuit of reality too often a mere exercise in virtuoso mimicry, and the over-savvy smart-arsed pursuit of “being a film director”, “making cinema”, “retreading Hollywood practice” is seen too often to be an applaudable end in itself. It is a curiosity that galleries are becoming theatres and theatres are becoming galleries—concepts of high and low cultures are colliding, Steve Reich talks to Sting... and there are so many people in the world that minorities for everything are growing very large indeed. Those minorities can support massive unorthodoxies— we can continue to prosper. 

Could you talk about your use of irony (as a structural strategy) in your work? How does your irony differ from a postmodern strategy about irony? 

I am sure we can all agree on the tolerance, understanding, acceptance of the opposing view, with wit, humour, and sophistication that constitutes the ironic stance. Cartesian “Know thyself” has to be a contemporary credo. There are no definitive verities any more. All is acknowledged now as subjective. There is no such thing as history, there can only be historians. God, Satan, Freud, Science, and even yes, our mothers—are all frail tools with which to understand the human condition. We must continue, but we must continue fully cognisant as we can be, of all possibilities. The dualism of Aristotelian philosophy must be superseded. There is no longer this or that, there is this and that. Irony is the very opposite of the fundamentalist stance, that I am certain we must all endeavour to fight and eradicate. Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin have knocked all our vanity aside—we live on a very very crowded planet. Borges suggested a history of the world must be a history of all its members, living and dead. Irony is a way to begin to deal with such mocking enormities. 

Certain narrow (or “puritanian”) views take your films as scandalous as far as sexual subject is concerned. At the same time, you drive a radical approachas far as form (style, structure) is concerned. What could you say about the transgression you cultivate both in “form” and “content”? And what could say about the play of eroticism in subject matters (theme of films) and the play of erotic appeal in the sensual forms you deal with in your work? 

Procreation and all its attendant myths, philosophies, excuses, justifications, involuntarily and voluntary excesses, religious hesitations, annulments, exhortations, incantations, moralities, and dubieties is dominant. Can you think of a stronger force for existence? We live to procreate, not just us, but fleas and hippopotami as well. All our systems of governance, cohesion, exhortation are built around this formidable obstacle and excitement. Our society is forever breaking out in a sweat about these uncontrollable demands—Playboy, Berlusconi TV nymphets, Second Life sexuality, Oscar Wilde, Titian pinups, the Willendorf Venus, John Knox, Johannes Calvin, Savanorola, Papal celibacy, Christ, sadomasochistically exhibited on the cross, the infant Christ’s genitals always on show, circumcision for women and men, the ecstasy of Saint Theresa... the list is endless, endless, endless. There are surely only two subject matters—sex and death—what else is there to talk about? Balzac suggested money, but that is easily subsumed into sex and death—if only to pay for one and avoid the other—Eros and Thanatos—beginnings and ends—the two ultimately nonnegotiable phenomena—you cannot beat them—maybe now you can delay them a little, put them off, subvert them just a little—it seems contemporary life is forever trying to do that—but you have to confront them in the end. Ideal subject for unlimited contemplation. The big taboo subjects of the 20th and 21st centuries are abortion, homosexuality, and euthanasia. Holland, my adopted country, has faced them head on—and has made its peace with them—but I don’t think you can say that for most places in the world. These are the contemporary paranoias of sex and death. I was trained as a painter before all art schools converted to Mao-Duchamp. We drew the naked and the nude for twenty hours every week. The centre of Western art focus has traditionally been the naked human—subject of difficulty, virtuosity, and certainly of desire. Benchmark of provable capability, weight, substance, sight, shadow, colour, form, movability, sensuosity, life itself. Cinema rarely, if ever, deals  with these things. It ought to. I am trying to make up for lost time. Male sexual desire makes the world go round and round and round. Maybe you might have seen the film Eight and a Half Women? 

Your beginning as film editor (in the mid-1960s at the Central Office of Information) had any influence in your work or approach towards film and video? Do you consider “montage” one of the bare essentials of moving pictures? 

The editor now, in the first years of the 21st century, is the king (sometimes, if you are lucky, the queen). He/she is the ultimate fixer, as indeed his editor equivalent is in so many other postdigital revolution arenas. The sifter, the mover, the arranger, the gatekeeper. Everything now is manipulatable, not just the arrangement and placing and pace of shots, but the very shots themselves: colour, contrast, aspect ratio, selective distortion, every metamorphosis within a shot. This used to be normally the preserve alone (or almost alone) of the cameraman. It is now the editor’s domain. I made a conscious decision in the early 1960s to learn a trade within the filmmaking process and there was no question whatsoever it had to be a film editor. I am by inclination and personality, a hermetic ironist, misanthrope, forever dubious of narrative and all its little puny anecdotal behaviourisms, tricks, tics, and mannerisms. I am a collector and collator, a list and catalogue maker, forever arranging and classifying. Practically all my movies are catalogue movies: eight of this, twenty of that, ninety-two of these, three of those. Whether they be people, events, buttocks, colours, sea urchins, or geological periods. That’s the way I write stories, scripts, novels, screenplays, operas. I am a clerk. Editors are clerks—getting the order right, the cards shuffled correctly according to a given set of conditions. I love museums and dictionaries, directories and encyclopaedists, and lost-property offices. My heroes are Diderot when he wasn’t with Catherine the Great, and D’Alembert when he wasn’t being pompous, Samuel Johnson when he was drunk and angry, Linnaeus in a Swedish stone quarry, Dante in melancholic exile thinking that his Comedy was an attempt “to connect the angels in their heavens with the stones on the road”, and it would all only in the end be an excuse to go home to Florence. And Beatrice. The COI (Central Office of Information), with its Kafka politburo title, was a propaganda organisation arranging for the British way of life to be preached to the ex-British empire colonies who had all just started their own television stations—I learnt film as soft-porn propaganda—, the delight and deceit of statistics, the authoritative voice, demographics, the art of the well-placed quotation, sophisticated spin doctoring, “economy of the truth is not lying” (Mrs. Thatcher). Naturally a player of the cabbala, naturally a crossword puzzle solver, naturally a symbolist and emblemist, an allegorist, a metaphoricalist—editing had to be my métier—the truth, after all, comes at you at twenty-four frames a second. And the COI was by default, and its innocent (almost) calumnies, a great teacher. I once made two films at the same time. A thirty-minute film called Act of God for Thames Television, about people being struck by lightning and surviving, which, as near as I could make it, was absolutely honest, if incredibly bizarre, and The Falls, a fiction lasting three hours for the British Film Institute which was a total pack of lies, and also very bizarre. A considerable audience around the world believed the second and refused to believe the first. There you are—COI training. 

Which films or which filmmaker do you consider key on the process of making cinema as a true art? Does any recent film or filmmaker attract your attention? 

If you initiate cinema with the Lumière Brothers in 1895 (there are some who might take it back to the ancient Greeks), then we have had 112 years of the medium. Is that sufficient time to create a body of critical substance? After all it was not until the 1860s in Europe that painting finally separated itself out from the illustration of text (Greco-Roman and Judo-Christian history and mythology) that had persisted for more than two thousand years, to become autonomous and free standing. Celluloid Cinema has been a slow-moving, conservative vehicle, and its basic conditions have not changed very much— more expert and reliable machineries and a much greater publicity machine—but the narrative insistence, the psychological portrayal of cause and effect characters (both Freud and cinema published their initial works in the 1890s), the Christian ethic (negativity to redemption, the need for closure, and a largely desire for a positive happy ending, at least a resolution of satisfaction) are with us still. It has separated itself out into the borrowed genres of literature. Scorsese makes the same films as Griffith whose curse of the introduction of narrative lies heavy on the history of cinema making it a text-based affair and a slave to the bookshop, certainly a victim of text. The only real attempt to find a different nonbookshop-narrative language must lie with the cinema giant Eisenstein, montage theory as he devises and practises it is a unique invention, decidedly visual, scarcely ever literary, uncompromising in its direct attack. And Eisenstein, the innovator of cinema language grammar and syntax surely is the only filmmaker you can put up there with Shakespeare and Beethoven in the “mighty” innovation/consolidation stakes without embarrassment. There are surely no others of comparable innovation/consolidation status. His thinking, breadth of intellectual vision, compassing of world culture, understanding of the new cinema medium was very solid and profound—his legacy is impressive. I sometimes think maybe Méliès could be another candidate. The manipulation of the visual apparatus was his, though his own attitude to it was not self-conscious and he is largely an accidental genius; and one suspects another would soon have found and developed what he found. All the other early film practitioners are largely theatre copyists, and then it gets worse and worse as all succumb to telling bedtime stories for adults stolen from literature—illustrators not prime creationists, conductors not composers. The search for film innovation has created bumps and beeps, flurries and showers and frissons of excitement every now and again, but they are largely of a social and political order (new responses to another technical innovation), the framing of the close-up, the moving camera, sound, colour, small cameras, cheap cameras, etc. (exoticism attached to dissidence), be it Russian or Chinese or American heterodoxy, various revolts against the robber barons, cheekiness in the face of the status quo (épater les bourgeois), striving for the status of the bohemian or the avant-garde (which John Lennon suggested was French for shit) and is only a one centimetre legitimised pace ahead of the aesthetic rat race—the jokers legitimised in the king’s palace as long as they are only mildly and controllably subversive (for example, if he really disturbs us, we simply don’t give him any more money to disturb us anymore again ever). Over the years, most of them now a considerable time ago, I was excited with the usual stable of directors, usually European, predominantly French and Italian—but with perhaps the exception of the truest a film ever got to being a film with Resnais’s Last Year in Marienbad (I have my own 35mm copy in eight reels), I would not wish to necessarily see any of these films again. Whereas the desire to see a great many paintings sends me regularly and with excitement, to all the major painting galleries of Europe over and over again. I do remain optimistic. I feel the screen record for the last 112 years has not been so very great. Now, with better tools, with greater awareness, and with greater understanding of film as language, let’s get on with the next 112 years which surely has to be much better.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "16º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica SESC_Videobrasil": de 30 de setembro a 25 de outubro de 2007, p.16-17, Edições SESC SP, São Paulo-SP, 2007, p. 54 - 63.