Destructing the Mainstream Perception
Peter Greenaway¡¦s Films and His Stairs Project
¡§ Most of dominant cinema is sort of illustrated novels.¡¨ Peter Greenaway.1
What are the mainstream audience¡¦s expectations in contemporary cinema? ... To Greenaway, cinema is not made to fulfill these expectations. What he does in his films are deliberately the opposite. ... ¡¨ Peter Greenaway. ...
To Greenaway, however, to make a film should be more than constructing a trajectory, for a trajectory always leads to a fixed destination. ... Therefore he has introduced database structure into his films. ... In films, this physical selection is unable. ... Greenaway¡¦s use of database structure can be traced back in his early short films. ... Greenaway just provides the materials; audience finds the logic to link them up. ... This brings out another Greenaway¡¦s way to show his concern on media and language. ... The giving of pleasure had apparently been reciprocal, for Paulo¡¦s favourite girl had bore a son some nine months after Paulo¡¦s death. ... In Dear Phone, Greenaway is mocking the way by which storytelling presents the ¡§truth¡¨. ...
Reduction form Narrative to System and Multi-stories
If Dear phone, as an experimental short film, is a complete break down of narrative, Greenaway¡¦s features films can be understood as narratives that consist of plenty anti-narrative and non-narrative elements. ... The good example is Prospero¡¦s Book, a Greenway¡¦s feature film made in 1991.
Prospero¡¦s Book is a Greenaway¡¦s interpretation of Shakespeare¡¦s play, The Tempest. ... But he has managed to save his books from the tempest - books he prizes more than his dukedom - and Greenaway wonders about that water-soaked library. ... ) Throughout the film, these 24 books form a list and Greenaway deliberately makes it more like a list so that it is self-contained rather than absorbed into the story. To achieve this, as Amy Lawrence points out in The Films of Peter Greenaway, he uses the following ways: 1) The title and number of each book is written in white calligraphy and superimposed on the image under the book. ... 5
The narrativeness of Prospero¡¦s Book is diluted by the fact that the majority of its content is represented in an encyclopedia system. ... ¡¨6 One example is ¡§In an illustration from ¡¥A Harsh Book of Geometry¡¦ ¡K¡K we can see the way the layering of images, made possible by the new technology, works with Greenaway¡¦s Characteristic style as a graphic artist: the presence of maps, nude bodies covered with numbers, arrows and unintelligible diagrams, pseudomathematical lines, with various parts of the image identified by letters and numbers- the significance of which remains unknown. ... One example is ¡§¡K¡Kas Prosper warns Ferdinand to respect Miranda¡¦s virginity until the wedding. ... Greenaway recombines photographs from Muybridges¡¦s eleven-volume study Animal Locomotion ( 1885) to evoke what the narrator tells us are poronographic scenes from antiquity. ... Therefore in contrast to the one way journey provided by traditional linear narrative, the perception experience of Prospero¡¦s Book is going a diversity of journeys at the same time, in different directions, on different levels, and shifting from here to there, up and down from time to time. ...
The Draughtsman¡¦s Contract, The Pillow Book, Drowning by Numbers, A Zed and
Two Noughts
Prospero¡¦s Book is called a ¡§ museum film¡¨ for it is crowed with different sources of
information and the encyclopedized way they are arranged. Other Greenaway¡¦s feature films retain more narrative qualities. In the following, we will see how Greenaway plants the database structure on these films that would otherwise be traditional narratives. ... They are the effect of the requirement of the draughtsman¡¦s employer and at the same time the cause of this draughtsman being accused of murder later in the story. In this sense, they are of the same nature as the drawings by Jack on Rose in Titanic, which are just another prop in the films. ... As a result, different from the database in Prospero¡¦s Books in which the 24 books are presented one after another, in The Draftsman Contract, the 7 drawings in each group develop their trajectory together in parallel. ... However, through the manipulation of Greenaway, again, these books stand out from the films and become more self-contained. ... In the case of narrative, being reminded of its interface avoids us falling into the trap of the author¡¦s dictation. ... as the ¡§Z¡¨in the ¡§ZOO¡¨ sign slowly disappears, its two remaining letters are released from being part of a word and become two ¡§O¡¨s( for Oliver and Oswald ), until there is only a single nothing. ... As a letter, the zed is what holds the two ¡§O¡¨s within one realm of representation, As the end of the alphabet, though, once it is gone, we have what is left after the end-nothing. ... These characters experience all kinds of illusion, seeing the past, the future and other imageries in the Prospero¡¦s imagination. ... That they are controlled by the Prospero¡¦s books is visualized by the effect of highly condensed text being superimposed right onto the scene in which they are performing dreamily. To emphasize the dictation of the author to the readers, the Prospero¡¦s voice over goes on and on, presenting all the details and information of the books, while all the enchanted characters keep mute. ...
Reality in Art
The Draughtsman Contract makes another challenge on the author¡¦s authority by means of allegory. ...
With this allegory, Greenaway reminds us that the reality that we perceive in an artwork is just the reality through the author¡¦s perspective. ...
Frame
In The Draughtsman¡¦s Contract, Greenaway has introduced an important device, the grid. When the draughtsman is using the grid to examine the spectacle, our attention is draw to the ¡§ reframed area¡¨, at the same time because of the presence of this frame, we keep aware that ¡§that area is reframed¡¨, which is the draughtsman¡¦s perspective. ... Furthermore, if we notice that this frame has a similar height-to-width ratio with the frame of the screen (on which this movie is played) and that every time this grid appears, it¡¦s frame is always parallel to the screen, we would get its allegory more easily. ... This grid reminds us the film is an artifice, a construct and tells us not to get completely taken away by the manipulative involvement; it could become a symbol of the self-reflexive awareness in Peter Greenaway¡¦s films.
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