Peter Greenaway has carved a place for himself as one of cinema’s most unique voices over several decades of singular, scandalous, often inscrutable films. While certain distinctive themes repeat (art, uranium, and sex, for example), Greenaway has always bristled at categorization, and his filmography stands as a testament to a director who refuses to be constrained by convention.
Below is a list of the director’s best work, from early, low-budget experiments to late, low-budget experiments, with a detour through some of the most idiosyncratic, challenging, and rewarding films in movie history.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
8 The Draughtsman’s Contract
United Artists
Greenaway’s first conventional film, The Draughtsman’s Contract introduces the themes that would dominate Greenaway’s works to come: art, scandal, crime, and perversion. The story of an artist and his patrons engaging in elaborate blackmail, artistic obsession, and taboo sexuality marked Greenaway as a painterly filmmaker to watch. While it fails to reach the heights that later films would attain, the attention to detail, both aesthetic and psychological, would continue to define his work for decades to come.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
7 Nightwatching
ContentFilm International
Greenaway’s 2007 film Nightwatching, starring Martin Freeman, marked his return to the approach familiar from The Draughtsman’s Contract and the first in a set of films that would come to be called his “Dutch Masters” series. Extrapolating from Rembrandt’s famous painting of “The Night’s Watch,” Greenaway crafts a murder mystery in which the poses of the subjects in the painting reveal deep criminal motives within them.
Like The Draughtsman’s Contract and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, the film distills Greenaway’s obsessions into a more-or-less conventional movie biopic about an artist. In many ways, though, the movie’s most interesting aspect is its role as only a part of a larger, interconnected project, this time in conjunction with Rembrandt’s J’Accuse.
6 Rembrandt’s J’Accuse
Rembrandt’s J’Accuse presents itself as a documentary taking aim at contemporary visual illiteracy by positing that Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” painting is, in fact, the documentation of a murderous conspiracy. Released in conjunction with Nightwatching, and taking that (fictional) film’s premise as a truth that is revealed by the painting’s details, this experimental documentary carries on Greenaway’s ongoing interest in conflating fact and fiction and exploring how art blends the two in order to attain its own, perhaps questionable, ends.
5 Walking to Paris
Motus Studios
Throughout his career, Greenaway has pushed the boundary between fact and fiction. In Walking to Paris he takes up the true story of Constantin Brâncuși’s journey by foot from his home in Romania to Paris. This trip really happened, but the details of what happened along the way are lost to history. Greenaway takes this as an opportunity to flesh them out with his customary blend of sex and crime. It’s not Greenaway’s best film, but it might be the clearest distillation of his artistic obsessions.
4 The Falls
BFI
The faux-documentary that launched Greenaway’s career, The Falls purports to be interviews with 92 people in the wake of a “Violent Unknown Event” that has left large numbers of people obsessed with birds and flight. The surnames of these interviewees all begins with the letters Fall-, and it is soon revealed that the VUE has left them mutating into bird-like forms, inexplicably understanding new languages, and ceasing to age. The strange, dreamlike reality revealed through the deadpan, straight-faced, BBC-styled interviews make this one of Greenaway’s most unique and enduring pictures.
3 A Zed & Two Noughts
Curzon Artificial Eye
1985’s A Zed & Two Noughts follows twin zoologists, Oswald and Oliver Deuce, whose wives die in a mysterious car crash instigated by a swan. In the wake of the accident, the twins become increasingly obsessed with death and decay, and fall into a relationship with a prostitute who works as the zoo named Venus de Milo.
As the twins film the decomposition of larger and larger animals, the movie itself revels in longtime Greenaway collaborator Sacha Vierny’s gorgeous cinematography, fittingly for a film obsessed with the dualities of life and death, black and white, art and science, and more.
2 The Tulse Luper Suitcases
A-Film Distribution
According to Greenaway, “Tulse Luper is a sort of alter ego created many years ago,” and the centerpiece of the Tulse Luper Suitcases, a sprawling multimedia project taking in CD-ROMs, books, websites, Flash games, and more, including three extremely fascinating experimental films. Luper is a collector who catalogs unusual artifacts.
At the center of the project is a collection of 92 suitcases abandoned by Luper on his travels. 92 is the atomic number of uranium (a common motif in Greenaway’s work) and the locations of the suitcases, from Moab, Utah to the Berlin Wall, present it as a sort secret, driving force behind the events of the 21st century.
1 The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
Miramax
The artistically gorgeous and coldly intense 1989 crime drama The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is perhaps Greenaway’s most conventional project, though its graphic violence and nude scenes caused controversy at the time of its release, earning an NC-17 rating. Regardless, its lavish, highly stylized cinematography, incredible lighting, hauntingly beautiful music, and elaborate set sedign distinguish it as a truly singular film. Much like A Zed & Two Noughts, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover explores how love and sex can lead characters to break social taboos in shocking and ultimately devastating ways.
