Peter Greenaway

My attention divided between a Swedish radio broadcast, and my latest blogpost, still I go forward.

Yesterday I saw Peter Greenaway at the Rotterdam bookstore Donner. He was there to talk about film, painting, writing, visual imagery. A theater production of his premiers this week in Rotterdam, and he was there to promote, to discuss.

When asked to describe himself, he said that he disliked being dubbed a director, likening it to being the conductor of an orchestra, a somehow inferior artistic function. He said that he always called himself a television technition, stating that he'd started out as an editor, on that side of things, putting things together.

His eight-nine-year-old daughter sat on the floor coloring in five large gray circles with a professional drafting pencil onto a professional drafter's pad, thickly textured white paper. The dots became cakes of silvery black as she scribbled away, four dots in a square arrangement, and one on top, in the middle. Her dress was also covered in silvery white buttons around her midriff. She looks like him.

Once the pencil started working against her, (because after a while, caked on pencil starts flaking back at you as you draw), she drew a slight and uneven circle around the five large dots, and skipped off to her aged father sitting alone by then in an empty row of chairs. His pearly white prosthetic teeth chattered something back to her that I couldn't overhear. They were false teeth, and the skin was tanned leather, but the manner was surprisingly gentle, paternal.

Greenaway said that film could have been one of the greatest communicative mediums, could have been, he emphasized, if it weren't dominated by writing. The elite has its hold on the way things are done, and so writing, perceived as a superior art, will always have its unjustified hold on film.

You can't have a film without a script. He always has to write everything down for everyone, or they won't understand, but really, it is the visual language that should dominate, somehow superceeding the word.

We should really do away with words all together, let go their interpretive hold on us as people, and give ourselves over to pictures. Pictures go beyond words, and form a superior language, if only we could form them, doing away with words for once. Imagery should come to prevail over the word, leading us into a realm beyond the mere word-based reality we live in currently.

He went on to discuss the ground-breaking work he made with Rembrandt's Night Watch, projecting bright lights right onto the ordinarily dimly lit treasure. (I missed this production.) Rembrandt never made an ugly portrait of a woman, he said, although he did paint ugly women, but Vermeer is really his favorite painter. He "made" the landscape what it is. "Rembrandt is too Hollywood," he declared. "Who knows what we'll think of Rembrandt as a painter in fifty years," after all, he didn't have the status fifty years ago that he has today.

I guess it's also rather "Hollywood" that Rembrandt died an impoverished, broken man.

It made me wonder if Greenaway ever took the time to behold Rembrandt's etchings, some of the most marvelous objects I've ever seen in their intricate beauty.

Greenaway has plans to brightly lite other world masterpieces of paintings in the future. The Rijksmuseum (he kept saying "rice" museum) paved the way for such projects.

I read in a Dutch paper that his project in the Rijksmuseum, which attracted 6,000 visitors a day (or was it the Night Watch that attracted them?), didn't make a bit of sense, as stated by a writer, of all people. If only they'd made a collage, projecting their review someplace, perhaps the reviewer could have done justice to the Night Watch project, but then again, I didn't see it. It's odd.

Two of the singers were on hand to give us a taste of what's in store this week in the Rotterdam Schouwberg production, Rembrandt's Speigel. They sang about red, I believe, red is the color of blood, red is this, red is that, and then, shockingly, yellow, yellow is this, yellow is that, "yellow is the color of PISS." (hiss.) I wanted to add, "but only if you're pissing out excess vitamin supplements, in which case it's yellow. Otherwise, it can be colorless, I've noticed," but I guess this wouldn't have as much punch. I wonder what would happen if, instead of words, pictures came out of the singer's mouths. That would be truly profound.

I would never argue that visual art should or does have supremacy over the written word. It's a bizarre either/or dichtomous line of thinking that I don't understand. One could argue that imagery has long since become more influential than words, but of course, there's always a script somewhere, right? And, perhaps you might also add, it's become more influential with the hoards I imagine Greenaway disdains, like the masses of people who can so simply, so basely, be entertained by the dump synonymous with artistic degradation, Hollywood. Horror of horrors.

It made me wonder if bringing a child into the world at his age had so drained him of what little energy he has left to give that it had distorted his ability to process thought. Such bizarrely platitudinous pronouncements. Such a jumble of ideas so thinly expressed. I expected more.

And then, the production Rembrandt's Speigel (Rembrandt's Mirror) will be done in a language that he, Greenaway, doesn't understand! He's only been working here for 21 years, has a Dutch wife, and a child, and he still doesn't understand the language. Don't get me started. But then, he's a not-so-typical example of someone who's been shielded from ever being exposed to Dutch for 21 years out of courtesy of his stature. I'm sure no Dutch person would ever dare converse in her own language in his presence. If they had, after 21 years, the language would have rubbed off on him, but he's a great artist, so he can be excused. Funny that he called himself an honorary Dutchman.

When the composer of the music, Vincent van Warmerdam, got up after Greenaway and proclaimed that there are no theatrics in opera, I really started to wonder which zone I'd landed myself in. Had he ever seen an opera?

Greenaway also told a story about his Rotterdam-based Dutch producer, Kees Kasander. Kees approached him at the Rotterdam film festival years ago, and said, "Hey, do you want to go to Hollywood, and make films with Elizabeth Taylor on an airplane with sixty pigs, or what? I'll fund all of your films for you." And so he they did, years later, form a partnership. Greenaway was saved by the Dutch Kees from Hollywood pigs. Could the pig be a reference to Taylor's weight? I wonder. He didn't specify. Pigs should no longer be permitted as analogies for obese people. But then, Kees was mixing words and imagery there, an even greater crime than words themselves? I'm getting confused.

Greenaway's been living in Amsterdam for twelve years. He married Saskia, the brain behind a lot of the imagery in his films, and the woman to whom he deferred. "I don't know. You'd have to ask Saskia. She's produced so many images." Saskia was sitting behind me. The interviewer, a Dutch actor who'd appeared as a waiter in one of Greenaway's films, wanted to know what it was like for them to prepare for a production together. He said something like, "You wake up in the morning, sit at the breakfast table, and talk about the production...," to which the pompous Greenaway modestly blushed.

Years ago when I read Gore Vidal, he lamented the demise of the writer as a "star" in Hollywood film. Perhaps Greenaway is going down this path as well? Throw out the writers. Let's just paste together a bunch of clips. Who needs concept, after all. I was mistaken. I always thought that the basis of a great film was a great script. Who needs words, though. Words are moot. From now on, I'll carry around a set of flash cards with me, and point to them whenever I want to communicate anything. A picture is worth a thousands words? AWH! There she goes again with that word garbage thing a ma boob! Could I be possibly becoming Hollywood, too? Oh, dread greater than dread itself. Flash. Flash. Words disappear.