directors' bios

Cafe Society
1

Seeking input again, for this video-book project. Deadline is way loomy, so any suggestions or corrections are extremely (and urgently) welcome.

To start:

Peter Greenaway
Born: Newport, Wales, 1942

“There are basically only two subject matters in all Western culture: sex and death. We do have some ability to manipulate sex nowadays. We have no ability, and never will have, to manipulate death.”[sup][1][/sup]

Peter Greenaway was born in Newport, Wales, 5 April 1942. Like many film directors, his background is in two-dimensional art: he trained as a painter at the Walthamstow College of Art. In 1965 he took a job as a film editor in England’s Central Office of Information. In 1966, he began making his own films (one presumes on his own time). These were experimental shorts for the most part: images of trains, seemingly choreographed to a musique concrete soundtrack, became his first short film, “Train” (1966). “Windows” combined lovely English landscapes, shot through window frames, with narration about the statistics of death by defenestration.

His first feature film, “The Draughtsman’s Contract,” premiered in 1982 to international critical acclaim. Since then, Greenaway has built one of the most eclectic–and eccentric–bodies of work in modern cinema.

Characters that never seem so much fully human as literary constructs–puppets–are made use of by Greenaway to examine his favorite subjects–or, really, subtexts; things are rarely what they seem in Greenaway’s universe–literature, death, sex, and nudity. (And yes, with Peter Greenaway, sex and nudity are not necessarily related: “[N]udity is the natural state, but in most cinema people take their clothes off . . . as a prelude to sex. . . . the embrace ought to include us all. . . .”[sup][2][/sup])

In 1985’s “A Zed and Two Naughts,” twin doctors simultaneously lose their wives in an auto accident of dense and elaborate visual and textual symbology, and subsequently become obsessed with the notion of putrefaction. Images from their experiments–time-lapse films of decay, up the evolutionary ladder from plant to animal to human–become dense little allegories touching on death, life, symmetry, and of course cinema itself. 1989’s most notorious film, “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover,” a savage indictment of either rapacious modern consumerism and greed or of Margaret Thatcher, is an orgy of violence, sex, gluttony, and color, and is perhaps the least intellectually detached of Greenaway’s films, which all bear a chill, to one degree or another, of intellectual detachment. His take on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” 1991’s “Prospero’s Books,” frames the magnificent voice and presence of Sir John Gielgud within multple layers of breathtaking images of human bodies and written texts, creating a bewildering amalgam of flesh and intellect that is at once bizarrely compelling and coldly offputting. He explores similar themes, blending flesh and text into a single symbolic whole, in 1996’s “The Pillow Book.” “Eight and a Half Women” (1999) explores death and incest, age and exploitation, through meditations on Fellini and pachinko. The still-unreleased (at least in the U.S.) “Baby of Macon” (1993), an explicitly stagey exercise in theatricality, tells the story of a 17th century woman who was sentenced by the Church to be raped 113 times.

Along the way, Peter Greenaway has also produced works on the stage–”Rosa, a Horse Drama,” an opera created in collaboration with composer Louis Andriessen, features a soprano who remains nude throughout the entire opera. Greenaway: “I wanted to celebrate the Horse.”[3] He’s also written several books and curated the occasional art exhibition.

  1. Peter Greenawy interview, Cineaste, 1991. (Found several places on the internet, including http://www.amk.ca/quotations/peter-greenaway.txt)
  2. “Flesh and Talk, the Salon interview with Peter Greenaway.” Christopher Hawthorne. http://www.salon.com/june97/greenaway970606.html
  3. “Peter Greenaway in conversation with Joshua Cody.” http://www.sospeso.com/contents/articles/greenaway_p3.html
2

You seemed to have missed The Falls. Surely the quitessential Greenaway film. Possibily even his masterpiece.

3

Meant to be an overview; not exhaustive. I haven’t seen the falls, but I’ll check on it; thanks for the suggestion.

According to IMDB, The Falls predates his “feature debut,” The Draughtsman’s Contract, even though at 185 minutes it sounds like a feature to me. In any case, it looks to be pretty hard to track down, and might possibly be considered juvenilia, i.e., for completists only. Probably not crucial for an overview limited to 500 words.

4

Paul Verhoeven

Paul Verhoeven might the most controversial film director to achieve mainstream commercial success. Many serious critics consider him a dirty-minded hack; others, equally serious, would have you believe he’s the postmodern lovechild of Alfred Hitchcock and Jonathan Swift. Count me among the latter.

Paul Verhoeven was born July 18, 1938, in Amsterdam. (His childhood memories of Nazi occupation inform his work on many different levels.) While earning a doctorate in mathematics and physics, he became interested in making films. His later work as a documentary filmmaker for the Marine Film Service of the Royal Dutch Navy provided him with opportunities to learn the craft of filmmaking. After a stint in Dutch television, he began directing feature films in 1973 with “Business Is Business,” an awkward sex comedy with a prostitute as protagonist. (He would rarely–though with a couple notable exceptions–stray far from such subject matter as his skills matured and his themes solidified.) Over the next 12 years, Verhoeven became the Netherlands’ most successful director with the critically and commercially successful films “Turkish Delight,” “Keetje Tippel,” “Soldier of Orange,” and “Spetters,” culminating with the explicitly Hitchcockian and feverishly stylish thriller “The Fourth Man,” which features a beautician named Delilah (get it?) who has a frightening flair with scissors. The international (read: American) success of this film put Hollywood onto him, and all of his subsequent features have been American productions with wildly variable critical and commercial reception.

Like Hitchcock, Sirk, and Fassbinder, most of Verhoeven’s films are about the power of female sexuality. And, also like them, he seems by turns–and sometimes concurrently–fascinated and appalled by this awesome power; many of his heroines are more like superhuman fertility goddesses than like real human women. Explicitly or not, the central image of much of Verhoeven’s work is the Freudian concept of the vagina dentata. This combined with the other pillar of Verhoeven’s artistic vision–an overwhelming misanthropy (see childhood, Nazi occupation)–serves to make much of Verhoeven’s work problematic for many viewers. Like Lars Von Trier, the most frequent target of Verhoeven’s viciously gleeful anger is the film audience itself, an approach which warms very few cockles. In “Flesh and Blood” (1985), an abducted medieval maiden siezes control of her rapist by pretending to enjoy it; in his homage to Hitchcock, 1992’s “Basic Instinct,” and in the 1995 vicious satire “Showgirls” (a highly controversial film which some critics, myself included, consider Verhoeven’s masterpiece and one of the most grossly underappreciated films of all time), Verhoeven’s mythology of the vagina dentata is fully–almost literally–realized, with two of the fatale-est femmes since “Diabolique” or “Mademoiselle.” (In “Basic Instinct,” Verhoeven pays sly tribute to Sirk by casting Dorothy Malone, Oscar winner for Sirk’s “Written on the Wind” and an obvious foremother to “Showgirls”’s Nomi Malone, as murderer-mentor to Sharon Stone.)

In his science fiction movies, the femme fatale tends to be less in evidence (though never completely absent), but Verhoeven’s guiding misanthropy remains in the forefront. “Robocop” (1987) is a satire of corporate greed (as is “Showgirls,” on one of its many levels); but it’s also a special-effects thrill ride with lots of explosions. “Total Recall” (1990) is probably his most straightforward blockbuster, but with a story taken from Phillip K. Dick Verhoeven still manages to ridicule the government. “Starship Troopers” (1997) is a twisted homage to Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” and a vicious satire of jingoistic patriotism, but it’s also got some very cool giant bugs in it. “Hollow Man” (2000) is a meditation on voyeurism and personal responsibility, but it’s also a pretty cool special-effects vehicle about an invisible mad scientist.

Paul Verhoeven, by working well within the visual vocabulary of the Hollywood blockbuster but upending the audience’s expectations at every opportunity, is at the same time one of the most commercially polished and politcally (and sexually) subversive directors working today.

5

No, it’s hardly juvenilia, though I don’t think it ever got a commercial release, having been funded on a non-commercial basis by the likes of the BFI. The Draughtsman’s Contract was different in that it always intended by its backers as a potential art house hit. Which it was.
I haven’t checked the film’s availability recently, but it was easily found in the UK on video a few years back, along with most of his early shorts.

Any summary of his career ought to at least touch on what I suppose can be called his Tulse Luper mythology. Particularly since, after many years of talking about it, his current major project is The Tulse Luper Suitcases. Luper is a shadowy character, possibly an ornithologist, who’s mentioned repeatedly in Greenaway’s early work, starting in his experimental shorts like A Walk Through H and Vertical Features Remake. The Falls is this sort of material worked up into a feature. Of his mainstream releases, the only feature that hitherto falls into the same category has been Drowning By Numbers (which was written before Draughtsman), though IIRC Luper is never mentioned by name. But the central trio of women, all named Cissy Colpitts, together with some of that film’s obsessions, had all previously been linked to Luper. There’s also a Cissy Colpitts who appears to be a major character in the new film.
From the little I know about The Tulse Luper Suitcases, everything does seem to link back, at least indirectly, to The Falls and his other early work.

Personally, I find The Falls by far the funniest of his films. It’s also one of the purest workings though of his desire to replace narrative with structure. By presenting a faux documentary that assumes the audience knows the background, the random sampling of victims forces us to try to peer behind the arbitrary form of the film to figure out what may or may not have happened. All done in a brilliantly deadpan manner.

6

THanks again, bonzer. I’ve discovered that many of his titles are available in England–PAL–but very few are available in the US–NTSC. But I’ll keep looking, and hopefully be able to catch up eventually.