Every two years John Packer of the Scottish cloth manufacturer Reid & Taylor put on a show. His fashion extravaganzas promoted some of the most expensive fabrics in the world, and attracted top designers and an audience of fashionistas, including guest of honour Princess Margaret.Read More »
From the IMDB:
26 Bathrooms is a witty, light little film that must be seen by those who appreciate Greenaway’s darker, more allegorical works. Simultaneously satiric and celebratory, the lighter side of his humanism washes through this quirky quasi-documentary of our most fundamental bodily needs and the spaces we create to fulfil them.Read More »
Made for TV and the French Bicentennial celebrations, this is an extreme case of Peter Greenaway’s obsession with cataloguing and classification. Comprising 23 case histories of corpses fished out of the Seine between 1795 and 1801, it forms a kind of micro-reprise of his monumental The Falls, piling up its narratives, Holmesian speculations and slow, clinical tracking shots over corpses, in a rigidly uniform structure. But within this forbidding system, Greenaway breaks up the frame, much as in Prospero’s Books, using Paintbox graphics to play on the comparative textures of television and paper. Death in the Seine is a pedantic film, because it’s about pedantry and the systematic collecting of facts which might or might not constitute evidence. It wasn’t taken up by British TV, which considering the film’s sign-off comments about the transience of memory and recorded knowledge, is a rather sour irony.Read More »
A short film based on the work of choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker where a woman dances before being joined by a man and the two then dance together.
‘Rosa’ (1992) was filmed at the foyer of the Ghent Opera House, Belgium, which was undergoing a huge restoration at the time (1991).Read More »
AMG plot
It makes sense that an offbeat director such as Peter Greenaway (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Prospero’s Books) would be attracted to a project such as 4 American Composers, a 1983 British television special profiling John Cage, Meredith Monk, Philip Glass, and Robert Ashley, four U.S. musical artists who haven’t been content simply to entertain, but feel compelled to “push the envelope” of music.Read More »
AMG plot
It makes sense that an offbeat director such as Peter Greenaway (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Prospero’s Books) would be attracted to a project such as 4 American Composers, a 1983 British television special profiling John Cage, Meredith Monk, Philip Glass, and Robert Ashley, four U.S. musical artists who haven’t been content simply to entertain, but feel compelled to “push the envelope” of music.Read More »
Synopsis:
A film made for the Central Office of Information concerning Britain’s coastline, with music by Michael Nyman.Read More »
This is a brilliant short documentary made by the infamous Peter Greenaway for Thames Television program “Take 6” in 1980. For this project, Greenaway tackles the task of interviewing British subjects that have been struck by lightning…and survived to talk about it. The documentary displays Greenaways signature touches, such as the element of Dark Comedy (Greenaways editing, the Monty Pythonesque narrator, the witty writing, that transitory music, and the nature of their stories in general) and, of course, his trademark attention to detail regarding mise-en-scene and framing. First Greenaway gets his subjects to reflect upon their experiences. He also interviews friends, family, doctors and other witnesses whom fill in the blanks where the strikee may have been unable to remember or recollect.Read More »
Quote:
The Falls (1980) is divided into 92 biographies of people who have all been affected by the VUE, the Violent Unknown Event, a phenomenon in some way connected with birds and flying.Read More »