"Creation, to me, is to try to orchestrate the universe to understand what surrounds us. Even if, to accomplish that, we use all sorts of stratagems which in the end prove completely incapable of staving off chaos." — Peter Greenaway
Peter Greenaway was born in England in 1942. He trained as a painter and first exhibited his pictures at the Lord's Gallery in 1964. He began working as a film editor in 1965 and spent 11 years cutting films, including numerous documentaries for the Central Office of Information. In 1966 he started making his own films and since then he has continued to produce films, paintings, novels and illustrated books. His feature, The Draughtsman's Contract, completed in 1982, received enormous critical acclaim and established him internationally as a filmmaker to watch. In 1988 his feature Drowning By Numbers won the prize for Best Artistic Collaboration at the Cannes Film Festival, but it wasn't until the 1989 release of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, the first of his films to be released in the U.S., that he became known in the States.
Prompted by the release of new prints of two of Greenaway's early features, The Draughtsman's Contract and A Zed and Two Naughts, Cornell Cinema has assembled a series of Greenaway's early work, beginning with his dazzling first feature, The Falls, which J. Hoberman described as “Electrifyingly intelligent…The grand summa of Greenaway's first period… The Falls is a succession of thumbnail biographies of 92 characters, all of whom have been bizarrely mutated by an undescribed catastrophe called the 'Violent Unknown Event' or VUE, and all of whose surnames begin with Fall.”
The series continues with four more features, all of which display Greenaway's fascination with order and chaos, themes which are explained in detail in film scholar Marcia Pally's article “Order vs. Chaos: The Films of Peter Greenaway,” which is excerpted below:
“Like all Greenaway films, Cook Thief is about order and chaos, and men and women—or rather, the order that civilized men try to lay on Mother Nature. Chaos is not called Pandora's Box for nothing…
Drowning by Numbers is mostly about numbers and the way they are used to organize the games people play. Though most human relations of any importance are driven by formless desires, we spend much of our lives trying to give them shape. We search for patterns and sequences, and delight in the psychological lingo that appears to explain and contain. We seek rules and predictability, and call relationships the games people play because games have both…. Drowning by Numbers is filled with games: those men play with women, women with men, and jump rope, cricket, and some games out of Greenaway's fabulous conjuring…. The most sustained game is the one Greenaway plays with the viewer. The films starts with a little girl skipping rope as she counts from one to one hundred. From then on, all significant items in the movie are counted, starting with one, and all the film's action—the games and drownings—must be concluded by the time one hundred is reached. This is thorough Greenaway. Human games and their reliance on ritualistic counting are both the subject of Drowning and its form. As the characters play games with each other to best the chaos of passion. Greenaway arranges his plot and sets according to games of his own. Drowning is thrice about imposing order on chaos, on man's irrational impulses and nature's inevitable decay: first, within the narrative; second in its structural organization; and third, in the look of the screen. Greenaway is an order-and-chaos enthusiast…
In Belly of an Architect, Brian Dennehy plays the protagonist who believes the principles of architecture will order the world. He combats the backstabbings of corrupt colleagues and nature's erosion of both buildings and bodies. Before the film is over, he loses his architectural project and is lost to stomach cancer. The screen in Belly is littered with scaffolding, drop cloths, plaster, dust, and large crumbling halls leaking water and mud, which Greenaway attempts to choreograph into elegant symmetries much as his hero tries to preserve the architectural classicisms he finds so soothing. Again, the ordering system inside the film contains it.
A Zed and Two Naughts preceded Belly with its story of twin zoologists who try to get to the bottom of evolution. What makes one species follow another, what guiding principle conducts their progress? Greenaway ends up with an inverted Noah's Ark of a movie both in the story and in the look of the film. Specimens from every species are set out in the twins' lab, not to be saved but to die and decay, as though the careful photographing and cataloging of their decomposure would reveal nature's underlying program. The final species must of course be man. With the same luck as all Greenaway heroes, the twins start out to organize nature and end up her victims…
Greenaway's first commercial feature, The Draughtsman's Contract, is the story of a draughtsman who in 1694 is commissioned by the lady of a great house to do twelve drawings of her estate. At first it seems he's quite in control of his lady and landscape, getting them both down where he wants them, till his precision does him in. By meticulously sketching the manor house and grounds, he inadvertently copies clues to a murder. Understandably, its perpetrators don't want him around. The orderly little draughtsman falls prey not to nature's whim but to man's greed and violence. The twelve sketches are at once the clues to the murder and the structure of the movie.”
The series is cosponsored by the Dept. of Art and will be introduced by Professor Buzz Spector on February 4.