Film-maker and painter, born in Newport, SE Wales, UK. Trained as a painter, he first exhibited at the Lord's Gallery in 1964. Employed at the Central Office of Information (196576), he worked as an editor and began making his own short films, gaining a reputation on the international festival circuit with such works as A Walk Through H (1978) and The Falls (1980), before The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) won him critical acclaim and a wider audience. His later works explore such preoccupations as sex, death, decay, and gamesmanship, and include The Belly of An Architect (1987), Drowning By Numbers (1988), The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), Prospero's Books (1991), The Baby of Macon (1993), and The Pillow-Book (1996). 8 ½ Women appeared in 1999.
| Peter Greenaway | |
|---|---|
| Peter Greenaway | |
| Born |
April 5, 1942 Newport, Wales |
| Occupation | Filmmaker, Painter |
Peter Greenaway (b.
In 1962 he started studying at the Walthamstow College of Art, where amongst his fellow students was musician Ian Dury (whom Greenaway would later cast in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & There, Greenaway would spend the next three years training to be a mural painter and making his very first film, Death of Sentiment, an essay of church yard furniture filmed in four large London cemeteries.
A hallmark of many of Greenaway's films is the heavy influence of Renaissance and, in particular, Flemish painting in his scene composition and lighting, with its concomitant contrasts of costume and naturalized nudity, nature and architecture, furniture and person, sexual pleasure and painful death.
Greenaway has often worked with composer Michael Nyman, who has scored a number of Greenaway's films.
In 1980 Greenaway delivered The Falls (his first feature-length film) – a mammoth, fantastical, absurdist encyclopedia of flight-associated material all relating to 92 victims of what is referred to as the Violent Unknown Event (VUE). The 1980s would see some of Greenaway's best known films, The Draughtsman's Contract in 1982, A Zed & Two Noughts in 1985, The Belly of an Architect in 1987, Drowning by Numbers in 1988, and his most successful (in the mainstream) film in 1989, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & The 1990s brought the visually spectacular Prospero's Books in 1991, the controversial The Baby of Mâcon in 1993, The Pillow Book in 1996, and 8½ Women in 1999.
Greenaway has finished an ambitious film project, The Tulse Luper Suitcases, a multimedia extravaganza featuring innovative film techniques which resulted in 5 films.
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