PETER GREENAWAY
The generally accepted consensus is that the feature film – a 100-minute moralistic tale based on narrative in relation to wrongdoing or dissatisfaction or disorder played out up to a redeeming closure – is the consummation of cinema. What a shame. Over the last 105 years of the so-called history of filmmaking the feature film has offered us a tiresome, strangled illustration of the 19th century novel. We have seen 105 years of illustrated text. We have not seen any cinema yet. And now it is too late. Because filmmaking – or what is known as filmmaking – the 105 years of illustrated text – is over. No need to grumble. What comes next will satisfy our renewed imaginations for a considerable period of time, and perhaps now, with the proper visionaries, using the proper contemporary languages, we can finally see something which we can truly call autonomous filmmaking.
However, to date the best possible use has often been made of an imperfect job, the highest expression of image in movement and its potential, by means of presentations in a format other than that of a feature film – and this also often means, consciously or unconsciously or subconsciously, by means of television project productions – images in movement with sound, certainly, but with no desperate ambition to illustrate the 19th century novel or, for that matter, any other text, or to regale ego-stricken actors with awards for their virtuoso skills or mimicry, or to pack the 100 minutes with psychologically motivated personages moving along short Freudian rails. Shorter formats, non-narrative ambition, indirect acknowledgement of other media, the deliberate search for experimentation, and all that sought under the name “multimedia”, form a legitimate part of this agenda. I have searched for these alternatives throughout my entire filmmaking career, and I have often had the privilege of finding them. Here are the results of four of these satisfactions in finding alternatives. They are all jobs I was asked to do. But when you ask an artist to do a job, he usually turns the job into an excuse to do what he wanted to do anyway.
ZINEBI
