Auteur Peter Greenaway is being celebrated in the fourth edition of the Valletta Film Festival as a Master of Cinema. Several of his films are being screened throughout the festival, and the documentary The Greenaway Alphabet, by multimedia artist Saskia Boddeke (the director’s wife), was screened last night. This morning, Greenaway is giving a master class entitled ‘Water’. Interview by Paula Fleri-Soler.

You started your professional life as a painter, and you never abandoned the art. What did you see in cinema as an art form that allowed you to integrate your love of painting?

Created in 1895, cinema is barely more than 120 years old, compared to at least 20,000 years of painting – if you go back to Lascaux – or, more pertinently, to the Romans in 79AD, with the wall paintings at Pompeii. So, 120 years compared to 20,000 – or even 2,000 years – is illuminating, especially so since we are now seeing the beginning of the end of cinema.

Painting was one of the six basic original art forms – painting, sculpture, architecture, music, dance, literature – created many years ago. They defined their characteristics very early on and have not changed since – essentially simple to undertake and essentially inexpensive.

I stand in the corner of a room and weep – I have theatre. I stand in the corner of a room and sing – I have music. I take a little grease from the corner of my nose and trace my finger on a flat surface, and I have a painting. Subsequent, so-called, art-forms are subsidiary to these basic six and, almost certainly, require technologies like electricity – pull the plug and you have nothing.

Painting probably will be the last human activity. Cinema is supposedly a visual art form – though the way we have made it and are still making it, its essential syntax, grammar and vocabulary is literary. 

You never see a film that did not begin its life without a text. What we have, essentially, are 120 years of illustrated text – hardly cinema – a sort of sad disappointment.

Peter Greenaway.

Text is well-served by poetry, the novel, and certainly the theatre which hands down its existence as text. Why can’t we have a medium that has the confidence to stand alone as an image-medium? We should have a cinema made by painters not writers. I hope one day that might be true – but not I suspect based on how we make cinema now.

Everything man-made has to be designed and at the back of all designers are painters. Painting will never die. Yet my great grandchildren will soon be saying: “Cinema – what was that?”

Your extensive resumé catalogues numerous features and short films, documentaries, TV, art exhibitions, installations and other media. Could you pinpoint some important milestones?

I hope to be able one day to say that something worthwhile was made, but time is running out. There are some paintings and, maybe parts of some films, that still make me stand and stare a little. They would need to have a true self-consciousness and a true self-reflection that might say these were truly paintings and these were truly cinematic excitements. But they would be rare.

It is impossible for a film-maker to excite, satisfy, stimulate and pleasure every single member of an audience

Does cinema still excite you as a medium?

I am certainly aware that my fascination of putting an idea forward by way of an image connected to a sound that encompasses an activity that might contain a performance, and a colour preference, and a metaphor that resonates, and a memory that is stimulated – all this is what I continually search for and hope to realise. I am sometimes mightily surprised and delighted when it happens. All else must truly be peripheral.

It is impossible for a film-maker to excite, satisfy, stimulate and pleasure every single member of an audience. But I am certain that, in the global village of the world, in the Information Age where all knowledge is shareable, it is not impossible. And I do know that – for me – painting is far more likely to supply that experience than cinema, any cinema.

You are fascinated by water – where does this stem from?

Over the years, first unselfconsciously and then with growing consciousness, I made films about water. Water is extremely photogenic – whether as cloud, fog, mist, snow, hail, rain, ice, lake, stream, river, sea or ocean. Or tears. Drip, splash, roar, trickle…

The earth is called The Blue Planet and its water is evident from outer space. Our bodies are 60 per cent water. Seventy-one per cent of the earth’s surface is covered in water. The first thing we search for in our desire to contact aliens is the presence of water. We can anticipate the coming Water-Wars. The seas are rising, parts of the world are already newly-flooded.

 Water can be a legitimate reason to take your clothes off, to be naked, to be clean, to bathe and to swim… but also, to drown.

The biblical flood wiped out Creation. It could do so again.

What are you working on right now?

We (I cannot make a film entirely on my own) have many projects cooking – many on a back-burner which have been simmering and bubbling for 30 years or more. 

Various circumstances may suddenly occur that spring them to the front of the cooking-stove. Some could be ready within two days’ notice to be made into a film. With some others, a week’s notice could build them into an exhibition. There are projects that at a month’s notice could be published as a book.

Currently top of the list is a feature film about the sculptor Brancusi; a film about the marriage of Christ; another film about Eisenstein in Hollywood; then a film about a writer who is looking for a way to find a happy death.

What are you looking forward to in Malta?

I have never been to Malta and am intrigued. I am a great reader of history, and am much stimulated by travel. Historical enquiry and the surprise and delights of travel stock up the infinite spaces of memory. And, who knows, maybe one day – perhaps elaborated and developed and transposed – the experience might add yet another project to the long list of yet unmade projects.

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