Veteran British art-house maverick Peter Greenaway made a rare public appearance at the Dutch film festival IDFA this week, picking up a Lifetime Achievement award alongside a retrospective of his work and a rough-cut screening of his latest stylised bio-drama, Walking to Paris. Known for visually ravishing, highly theatrical dramas including Drowning by Numbers (1988), The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) and The Pillow Book (1996), the 81-year-old director has long been resident in the Netherlands. He has not released a feature since Einstein in Guanajuato (2015) eight years ago. But as he told IDFA’s artistic director Orwa Nyrabia, his mission is not finished yet, with multiple projects in the pipeline that he hopes to complete before reaching his self-imposed “death knell” age of 92.
Greenaway certainly showed few signs of mellowing with age during his IDFA talk. This is a director, after all, fond of making provocative claims like “cinema is dead” and “all film writers should be shot.” In Amsterdam, he repeated his long-standing gripe that cinema remains stifled by literary tradition when it should break free from text-based narrative altogether for the more elevated, contemplative, visually-led mode of painting. He once again expressed pessimism about the future survival of film as an art form, claiming: “I do believe there will be a day when my great-great grandchildren will probably say: cinema? What was that?”
Even so, Greenaway himself still appears heavily invested in this flawed, outdated art form. In Amsterdam he introduced the first-ever public screening of Walking to Paris, an “85 per cent” finished cut of his long-gestating period drama about Romanian modernist sculptor Constantin Brâncusi. In the early 20th century, hungry for the big-city art-world glamour of Paris, an impoverished but ambitious Brâncusi embarked on a 2,000-mile overland hike from Bucharest to the French capital, passing through Hungary, Austria, Switzerland and Germany. This epic journey, Greenaway claims, became his “apprenticeship”.
Starring Scottish actor Emun Elliot, Walking to Paris is a meticulously assembled montage of painterly landscape imagery, beautifully composed multi-screen tableaux, sex and violence and full fontal nudity, all set to a sumptuous mock-baroque score. A classic Greenaway film, in other words, which fleshes out the skimpy facts known about Brâncusi’s marathon pilgrimage with fanciful speculation. “We made a film of part fact, part fiction,” he told the IDFA audience. “I can’t prove anything, but you cannot disprove anything. So we’re in a useful sort of equivocal world where both of us, I think, have something to gain.”
Greenaway revealed that Walking to Paris is currently stuck in legal limbo in a Roman laboratory while its Swiss, French and Italian producers are “squabbling over who owns the copyright.” Meanwhile, the director has already begun shooting his next feature project, Lucca Mortis, in Tuscany. Stepping in to replace Morgan Freeman, Dustin Hoffman stars as Jacob, an American writer musing on family roots, death and mortality in the Italian city of Lucca.
“I believe we must take death more seriously,” Greenaway declared. “The Greeks suggested that all the world’s art is either about Eros or Thanatos. Cinema, I think we would all agree, is predominantly interested in Eros, the beginnings of our experimentations in sex and the beginnings of wisdom. I’ve made quite a number of films in that particular area, but the other thing is Thanatos. Some extremely good films have been made about old age: Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, for example. But not that many.”
Lucca Mortis is clearly a personal statement film for Greenaway, who also addressed his own feelings of mortality in Amsterdam. “I don’t think I have many years left,” he said. “I’m 81, which is far too old. But I would hope to be able to continue perhaps a little bit more. My magic number is 92, the atomic number of uranium. I would like to be able to reach 92. No guarantee of that whatsoever. But I assure you there are a great many projects which are bubbling underneath, and I only have to find the money. So if you have got any spare cash, there are at least five feature films ready to go…”
