Background
Greenaway, Peter was born on 5 April 1942 in Newport, United Kingdom.
Greenaway, Peter was born on 5 April 1942 in Newport, United Kingdom.
As a young child, Greenaway and his family moved to London where he would study at Walthamstow College of Art. He failed to get into the Royal College of Art film school, but as he began painting so his obsession with film grew.
He found work with the British Film Institute, where he was able to see many of the classic experimental films. He became an editor, at the Central Of fice of Information. But he had purchased a 16mm Bolex and so—with his own money—he began to make short films. In time, his formalism would become a beneficiary of patronage from the B.F.I Production Fund, Channel 4, and European television. Yet, by now. The Cook, the Thief has earned close to $10 million in America, and Greenaway has grown warily into some taste for actors and melodrama.
The Draughtsman's Contract had an air of erotic thriller that was made more piquant by its mixture of cinematic stringency and baroque lushness. But in The Cook, the Thief. . . the celebration of form only made the cruelty in the material more excruciating, and vacant. John Boorman (by no means a happy sailor in midstream) has gone into print to speak of the cruelty, the coldness, and the awesome, sterile certainty in Greenaway. Those are valid criticisms of a man who admires The Seventh Seal and Blue Velvet but who has rarely captured their humanity. Whereas Belly of an Architect was probably changed for the better by Brian Dennehvs bulky warmth, Prospero’s Books is an unkindness not just to Shakespeare but to John Gielgud, too.
Quotations: “. . . I am arguing for cinema for its own sake, and for its ability to hold thought and ideas without necessarily demanding that an audience should be battered into suspending disbelief or that such a thing is cinema’s sole function.”
Greenaway is not to everyone’s taste—but he does not claim to be. It was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.” Which doesn’t mean that the lone, self-sufficient artist may not also be marked by arrogance. Greenaway is a filmmaker as one might be a modern painter or an experimental novelist.
Despite the considerable art-house success of both The Draughtsman's Contract and The Cook, the Thief, he is not just a confessed intellectual, but someone fascinated by games, number theory, structuralist principles, and unmitigated aesthetics.
Greenaway is a test case in the question as to whether cinema can really be as solitary as art or literature.
Greenaway is an authentic misanthrope. There is a barely veiled disdain for the pale weakness of human flesh amid the posed swagger of bunting, decor, and food in The Cook, the Thief. . . . And when Greenaways camera makes its rapid, side-long tracking movements from space to space it resembles a rat in the skirting boards, thrilled by human squalor.
Married; 2 children.