You won't find many car chases in the films of Peter Greenaway. He's unlikely to be casting Harrison Ford or Bruce Willis any time soon. Critics complain that his films aren't like other films. Where are the stories, where are the stars? Where's the action? It's a very British gripe.
Yet Greenaway offers a visual intensity, a richness of colour and artistic reference and, more recently, a display of the aesthetic possibilities of digital technology as different as could be from Titanic or Jurassic Park. This is where the action is. In place of stories with beginnings, middles and ends, Greenaway's films are based on documentary lists, a predilection stemming perhaps from the early years of his career spent at the Central Office of Information. His preoccupation with sex, death, symmetry and number recall the eclectic 17th-century Norwich scholar Sir Thomas Browne. One would accuse Greenaway of bookishness were not his learning parleyed into such a rich visual language.
His new film, though, comes as something of a surprise. 8 1/2 Women tells the story of a widower whose son encourages him to embark upon a journey of sexual rediscovery by installing a bordello. The women they collect amount to a catalogue of fantasy stereotypes, but there the Greenaway trademarks give way to more conventional film mannerisms: big close-ups, naturalistic dialogue and film, rather than fine art, references to flatter the critics. The number of the film's title refers to Fellini, but it also signifies "the eight-and-a-halfth feature film that we've made," says Greenaway. "Eight, The Pillow Book, and nine, The Tulse Luper Suitcase, are really the significant ones."
In The Pillow Book, Greenaway merged story and list, and visual arts old and new, using both calligraphy and digital images to enrich his palette. The Tulse Luper Suitcase, his major life-work in progress, will extend this determination to use the full battery of techniques that can possibly be brought to the screen. Luper (the name is a Greenaway alter ego who has already appeared in past films) is an enormous undertaking involving a film a year for four years, a 52-part television series, a book and perhaps an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. (The bare bones of the project may be seen at www.tulseluper.net.)
It is sure to be a cabbalist's delight. There will be a history of the 20th century using the periodic table of the elements as its structuring device, and especially element 92, uranium, which has so shaped the century. Another number-based strand involves a retelling of the Arabian Nights. The 1,001 tales will be posted on the Internet, "one every night just like Scheherezade tells the Sultan". As Wagner hoped to create the musical Gesamtkunstwerk in the 19th century, so Greenaway hopes to do the same for the visual media.
In Prospero's Books, where he pioneered the use of digital technology, the layering of vivid multiple images was enough to make conventional films suddenly look black and white.Greenaway relishes Pauline Kael's description of the film as "visually indigestible, made by a cultural omnivore who eats with his mouth open". And Greenaway is not done yet. "We shoot at 24 frames a second, but we now know that 60 frames a second would be much better," he explains. "Human guinea pigs who have experienced projection at 60 frames a second almost feel a sense of nausea at the sense of reality." Then there are also the unexplored aesthetic possibilities of film technologies developed for other purposes such as military night-vision cameras or the fast- and slow-motion filming that has helped scientists understand natural processes.
For Greenaway, it all comes together quite naturally. The obviously digital images in Prospero's Books and The Pillow Book are there for the same reason as the art references in The Draughtsman's Contract and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. "It's to demonstrate artificiality. Cinema is a deeply artificial medium, and I want to show that when you watch a film of mine you are only watching a film. I'm fascinated, for example, by renaissance paintings such as the Sacra Conversazione by Piero della Francesca, where the Virgin Mary, as the centre of the world, appears in the middle, and the saints are all arranged like characters.
"Those ideas of bilateral symmetry are fascinating in their own right, but let's see if we can use them - in a good postmodernist sense - to re-enliven and re-excite the sheer phenomenon of looking, looking, looking. We don't really have a visual cinema. It's to do with our huge educational processes. You and I have been trained to be sophisticated in text, both visual and aural. All our childhood we were putting together bits of that vocabulary. There's very little equivalent in terms of training the eye to see images."
It took film many years to realise that you could move the camera. Greenaway is conscious of other "tyrannies": script, actors, even the rectangular frame around the picture. "Do we need the notion of the fixed rectangle? What is it there for? Where has it come from? What are our purposes? It didn't exist before the renaissance, because most painting was intimately related with the spaces of architecture. So somebody suggested the notion of this parallelogram as the optimum performance area within which art should practise. And there have been so many imitators. There's the proscenium arch of theatre. Cinema in its early days copied that notion, and television then copied that."
Greenaway believes new technologies - Imax theatres and virtual reality - will lift the scales from our eyes: "It's happening in all sorts of meta-cinema conditions. Just look at the news on television. It's pictures within pictures, frames within frames, bringing together this language which in a sense has been forecast a long way ahead, but we didn't have the technology to do it. Now we do."
Will Greenaway acquire the manners to digest all these possibilities with his mouth shut? Not likely: "The most significant artworks have always been about themselves. Rembrandt's Night Watch is about the business of painting, and Hamlet is very much about the business of theatre. I think the supreme artworks do have that self-consciousness. I think that self-conscious edge is the mark of a masterwork, so I wouldn't apologise for it or find an excuse for it. I think you have to build it in."
Greenaway is not about to compromise. "We need a defining work to legitimise the aesthetic possibilities of the new media. We almost need Eisenstein's October. About the same time elapsed between the beginnings of cinema and Eisenstein's October [1927] when we began to realise the full potential of the medium as the time between when these new technologies began to get a grip on our imaginations and now." Watch this space.
"8 1/2 Women" (18) is on general release
