Peter Greenaway

The Hong Kong connection nobody mentions

Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1996) — the erotic drama of calligraphy written on human skin — is usually discussed as a European art film. Its production history runs through Hong Kong: line production was handled by Riverdrive Productions, the company founded by Hong Kong filmmaker Evans Chan, who had backed it since 1991. The standard Greenaway biographies never mention this. It matters because The Pillow Book is Greenaway’s most East Asian-facing work, and its route to the screen passed through one of Hong Kong’s independent producers. (MUBI Notebook; DMovies)

Paintings with soundtracks

Greenaway trained as a painter and muralist at Walthamstow College of Art and has never accepted the career change. “I was trained as a painter, and I still think that painting is vastly superior to cinema,” he told MUBI’s Notebook in 2022. “We’ve only had cinema for about, what, 130 years? But we’ve had painting for at least 45,000 years.” He was, as DMovies puts it, “disappointed that paintings did not have soundtracks” — “so maybe what I make is not cinema, but paintings with soundtracks.” (MUBI Notebook; DMovies)

That conviction shapes his famous provocations: most people are visually illiterate, narrative is a literary phenomenon rather than a visual one, and producers — who cannot be pitched with four paintings and a book of drawings — demand text because they cannot read images. He calls the industry requirement that every film begin as a script the “Casablanca Syndrome,” and argues for a cinema of painters instead of writers. (MUBI Notebook; DMovies)

The experimental years

Before any feature, Greenaway made about twenty experimental films — very low budget, mostly 16mm, mostly black and white — while working as a film editor for the UK government’s Central Office of Information. The period culminated in The Falls (1980), a three-hour mockumentary cataloguing the effects of the VUE (the Violent Unknown Event, also given as the Vertical Unknown Event) on 92 people whose surnames begin with F-A-L-L, several of whom theorize that the victims are turning into birds. Greenaway conceived it as an “ambulatory film”: at its London and Edinburgh performances, buying a ticket entitled you to leave for a cup of coffee mid-screening and come back — “not the standard way to watch movies, but that again was part of the experimental practice.” (MUBI Notebook; DMovies)

His dramatic feature debut, The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), cost about £60,000 — “pocket money for most American filmmakers,” as he put it. The 1980s run that followed — A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), The Belly of an Architect (1987), Drowning by Numbers (1988) — built his reputation for staged tableaux, fearless eroticism and baroque violence, peaking with the Thatcher-era satire The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), his first and last real crossover success. (MUBI Notebook; DMovies)

The image system

Greenaway’s visual language is openly borrowed from painting: Vermeer, Rembrandt, Caravaggio translated into cinematic form through the static image, chiaroscuro, artificial light, the mannered tableau, the slow pan and the dense frame. But the borrowing is also a puzzle system. His films are, DMovies argues, “immensely self-reflexive, positing the idea that even he, an audiovisual painter, cannot explain the meaning of his work” — viewers must study the frame for clues the way one studies a canvas. Nightwatching (2007), starring Michael Freeman as Rembrandt, proposes that The Night Watch hides a murder in plain sight. (DMovies)

He has insisted on director’s cut across more than sixty films, calling committee-made cinema — “hundreds of people with different disciplines put their oars in to justify their commitments” — the curse of the medium. Digital, for him, was liberation: “I leapt into the puddle as soon as digital cinema came along. I thought that at last filmmakers can become painters again. We can manipulate the actual pixels of the frame.” The Tulse Luper Suitcases (2003–2004) pushed that furthest — a single fictional life told across feature films, a 16-episode TV series, 92 CD-ROMs and an online game. (MUBI Notebook)

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not enumerate Greenaway’s honorary degrees or awards, which the interviews read in full did not cover. It does not detail his VJ-ing, opera directing, or installation work beyond the passing mention in the open items, and it does not assert a complete filmography — only the works discussed in the cited sources.