The works of Peter Greenaway are “total” experiences, in which painting, theatre, literature, music and new technology come together. Although his roots go back to the structuralism of the 1970s, his cinema has progressively opened itself to an interdisciplinary neo-baroque contamination with surprising results. In particular, his new cinematographic-multimedia phase, which began in 2000 with the launch of a major project about Tulse Luper and which continued with his film Nightwatching and the installation Peopling the Palaces, is based on a few simple, yet decisive, considerations. As spectators, our expectations of what images can give us have radically changed thanks to Internet, laptop computers, cell phones and YouTube, and the very nature of cinema is now facing a transformation that it is only partially able to confront. “By now cinema is dead. The future is digital.” And Greenaway wants to play a fundamental role in this new world. Thanks to a collaboration with the English director that goes back many years, Domenico De Gaetano traces Greenaway’s entire career in this pondered updating of the book that was first published in 1995.
D. De Gaetano, Peter Greenaway. Film video installations, Lindau 2008, € 24 (text in Italian).