Peter Greenaway: cinema shaped by the visual arts

Peter Greenaway’s films invite the eye to do more than follow a story. Carefully composed images, striking contrasts and a pronounced debt to painting sit alongside complex structures and narrative puzzles. That approach took shape through an unusual route into cinema: Greenaway began by training as a muralist, then spent 15 years making and editing films at the Central Office of Information before becoming known for features including The Draughtsman’s Contract and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.

From Newport to the Central Office of Information

Greenaway was born in Newport, Wales, on 5 April 1942. His family had moved there before his birth to escape the Blitz, and returned to the London area after the Second World War, settling in Woodford, then part of Essex. He attended Churchfields Junior School and Forest School in nearby Walthamstow.

He decided at an early age that he wanted to be a painter. In 1962 he began studying at Walthamstow College of Art, where musician Ian Dury was a fellow student. Greenaway trained as a muralist for three years. He was also becoming interested in European cinema, particularly the work of Ingmar Bergman and the French New Wave. He later identified Alain Resnais’s Last Year in Marienbad as an important influence on his filmmaking.

Greenaway made his first film, Death of Sentiment, as an essay on churchyard furniture, filmed in four large London cemeteries. In 1965 he joined the Central Office of Information (COI), where he worked for 15 years as a film editor and director. The job gave him a sustained opportunity to make films while developing a style outside conventional feature storytelling.

His early work included Train (1966), assembled from footage of the last steam trains at Waterloo station and edited to a musique concrète composition, and Tree (1966), centred on a tree growing in concrete outside the Royal Festival Hall. In the late 1970s, Vertical Features Remake explored different arithmetical editing structures, while A Walk Through H followed a journey through maps of a fictitious country. These films made formal construction part of the subject: how images are ordered could be as important as what they depicted.

Features and a distinctive visual language

In 1980 Greenaway made The Falls, his first feature-length film: an elaborate, fantastical work organised around 92 people associated with what it calls the Violent Unknown Event. His best-known films of the following decade brought his interest in composition, structure and visual art to a wider audience. The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) was followed by A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), The Belly of an Architect (1987) and Drowning by Numbers (1988).

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) became his most successful film. Its story unfolds in and around a restaurant, and its force comes in part from the controlled use of colour and an opulent visual design. The film’s themes of power, corruption and revenge are expressed through a deliberately heightened, operatic style. The contrast between visual splendour and disturbing subject matter is characteristic of work that asks viewers to attend closely to the image as well as the plot.

Greenaway’s films draw on Renaissance, Baroque and Mannerist painting. Their compositions and illumination, and their contrasts between costume and nudity, nature and architecture, or pleasure and death, make the frame feel constructed rather than neutral. His cinema is not simply an illustration of a painterly sensibility: it tests how images can organise attention and carry meaning.

In the 1990s, Prospero’s Books (1991) brought Shakespeare’s The Tempest into a dense mixture of text, performance and digital imagery, with John Gielgud in the title role. Greenaway continued with films including The Baby of Mâcon (1993), The Pillow Book (1996) and 8½ Women (1999). During this period he also worked with artist Tom Phillips on the television serial A TV Dante (1989), dramatising the opening cantos of Dante’s Inferno.

Beyond the feature film

Greenaway’s practice has never been confined to cinema screens. His work spans short films, documentaries, television, writing and exhibitions. In the early 1990s he wrote ten opera libretti under the collective title The Death of a Composer, exploring commonalities among the deaths of composers. Louis Andriessen completed the sixth libretto, Rosa – A Horse Drama, in 1995.

His later projects continued to move between forms. The Tulse Luper Suitcases developed as a multimedia work encompassing three films, a website, two books and a touring exhibition; a shorter feature also reworked material from the films. Greenaway made two films on Rembrandt, Nightwatching (2007) and Rembrandt’s J’Accuse (2008), and continued the Dutch Masters project with Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012).

In 2006 he began Nine Classical Paintings Revisited, a series of digital video installations that included an exploration of Rembrandt’s Night Watch. In 2008 he staged a one-night digital projection performance based on Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. The following year, his exploration of Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana appeared as part of the Venice Biennale. In 2007, at the Royal Palace of Venaria in Italy, the installation Peopling the Palaces animated the building with 100 video projectors.

His continuing engagement with the moving image has also taken him into live visual performance. In 2005 he presented a VJ performance in Amsterdam, mixing images from the Tulse Luper project across multiple screens; the performance was later reprised at London’s Optronica festival. In 2014 he received the BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema. In 2016 the University of San Martín in Argentina awarded him an honorary doctorate.

Why Peter Greenaway deserves a place in British Legacy

Greenaway’s place in British film history rests on a career that connects formal experiment with an unmistakable visual intelligence. His early films, made while he worked at the Central Office of Information, tested how editing, lists, maps and systems could shape a film. Later features carried that willingness to experiment into works seen by a wider audience, from The Draughtsman’s Contract to The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. In them, painting is not merely a reference or decorative influence: composition, light and the arrangement of bodies and spaces become active parts of the storytelling.

His contribution also extends beyond feature films. Television work, opera libretti, documentaries and installations show an artist repeatedly asking what the moving image can do when it meets other forms. Projects such as Nine Classical Paintings Revisited and Peopling the Palaces brought digital imagery into direct conversation with paintings and historic architecture. The BAFTA award for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema recognises the importance of that sustained work to British cinema. Greenaway’s example matters not because every viewer must find his films easy, but because he expanded the possibilities available to filmmakers: the screen can be a site for visual argument, formal play and an encounter between cinema and the other arts.

Sources

Peter Greenaway — Wikipedia revision 1377916451

Adapted in part from Peter Greenaway by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.