Greenaway, Peter

The Pillow Book

Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Drowning by Numbers) continues to delight and disturb us with his talent for combining storytelling with optic artistry. The Pillow Book is divided into 10 chapters (consistent with Greenaway's love of numbers and lists) and is shot to be viewed like a book, complete with tantalizing illustrations and footnotes (subtitles) and using television's "screen-in-screen" technology. As a child in Japan, Nagiko's father celebrates her birthday retelling the Japanese creation myth and writing on her flesh in beautiful calligraphy, while her aunt reads a list of "beautiful things" from a 10th-century pillow book. As she gets older, Nagiko (Vivian Wu) looks for a lover with calligraphy skills to continue the annual ritual. She is initially thrilled when she encounters Jerome (Ewan McGregor), a bisexual translator who can speak and write several languages, but soon realizes that although he is a magnificent lover, his penmanship is less than acceptable. When Nagiko dismisses the enamored Jerome, he suggests she use his flesh as the pages which to present her own pillow book. The film, complete with a musical score as international as the languages used in the narration, is visually hypnotic and truly an immense "work of art." --Michele Goodson

The Belly of an Architect

Writer/director Peter Greenaway (The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover) puts the art back into the art film (The Hollywood Reporter) with this work of pure visual poetry (Boston Herald) that celebrates Rome and its architecture with elegance and discernment (The New York Times) and boasts Brian Dennehy s best performance of his screen career (LA Weekly)!American architect Stourley Kracklite (Dennehy) can t see the beauty in Rome through his pain. Intense stomachaches are crippling him and worse he believes his pregnant young wife is having an affair with his archrival! As his suspicions turn to paranoia and obsession and his marriage health and reputation begin to unravel this once-respected man becomes consumed by his own self-torture from the inside out!System Requirements: Running Time 119 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: R UPC: 027616906885 Manufacturer No: 1006502

The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover [Region 2]

Spain released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada. Languages: o Arabic (subtitles) o Danish (subtitles) o Dutch (subtitles) o English (subtitles) o Finnish (subtitles) o French (subtitles) o German (subtitles) o Hebrew (subtitles) o Italian (subtitles) o Norwegian (subtitles) o Portugese (subtitles) o Russian (subtitles) o Spanish (subtitles) o Swedish (subtitles) o Turkish (subtitles) o English (Dolby Digital 2.0) o German (Dolby Digital 2.0) o Italian (Dolby Digital 2.0) o Spanish (Dolby Digital 2.0) Synopsis: This is probably Peter Greenaway's most famous (or infamous) film, which first shocked audiences at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival and then on both sides of the Atlantic. A gang leader (Michael Gambon), accompanied by his wife (Helen Mirren) and his associates, entertains himself every night in a fancy French restaurant that he has recently bought. Having tired of her sadistic, boorish husband, the wife finds herself a lover (Alan Howard) and makes love to him in the restaurant's coziest places with the silent permission of the cook (Richard Bohringer). Though less cerebral than Greenaway's other films, featuring deadly passions reminiscent of Jacobean revenge tragedies of the early 17th century, the picture still offers the director's usual ironic and paradoxical comments on the relations between eating and sex, love and death. The film is at once funny and horrific, and those who are not used to Greenaway's peculiar style might be even disgusted or shocked; however, one might mention Sacha Vierny's brilliant camerawork, Jean-Paul Gaultier's gaudily stylized costumes, and Michael Nyman's somber, pulsating music, which will haunt the viewer long after the film's end. Special Features: o Interactive Menu o Scene Access o Trailer(s) o Uncut

Few directors polarize audiences like Peter Greenaway, a filmmaker as influenced by Jacobean revenge tragedy and 17th century painting as by the French New Wave. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is both adored and detested for its combination of sumptuous beauty and revolting decadence. A vile, gluttonous thief (Michael Gambon, The Singing Detective) spews hate and abuse at a restaurant run by a stoic French cook (Richard Bohringer, Diva), but under the thief's nose his wife (the ever-sensuous Helen Mirren, Prime Suspect) conducts an affair with a bookish lover (Alan Howard, Strapless). Clothing (by avant-garde designer Jean-Paul Gaultier) changes color as the characters move from room to room. Nudity, torture, rotting meat, and Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs) at his sleaziest all contribute the atmosphere of decay and excess. Not for everyone, but for some, essential. --Bret Fetzer

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

Few directors polarize audiences like Peter Greenaway, a filmmaker as influenced by Jacobean revenge tragedy and 17th century painting as by the French New Wave. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is both adored and detested for its combination of sumptuous beauty and revolting decadence. A vile, gluttonous thief (Michael Gambon, The Singing Detective) spews hate and abuse at a restaurant run by a stoic French cook (Richard Bohringer, Diva), but under the thief's nose his wife (the ever-sensuous Helen Mirren, Prime Suspect) conducts an affair with a bookish lover (Alan Howard, Strapless). Clothing (by avant-garde designer Jean-Paul Gaultier) changes color as the characters move from room to room. Nudity, torture, rotting meat, and Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs) at his sleaziest all contribute the atmosphere of decay and excess. Not for everyone, but for some, essential. --Bret Fetzer

The Draughtsman's Contract

"I try very hard never to distort or dissemble," says Mr. Neville (Anthony Higgins), a draughtsman of considerable talent contracted by a certain Mrs. Herbert (Janet Suzman) to make 12 drawings for her absent husband of their English estate. Part of that contract involves Mr. Neville taking his pleasure, and that pleasure is Mrs. Herbert. While Mr. Neville aims for fidelity in his drawings, infidelity in private is quite another matter. Then the film becomes a cerebral puzzle when objects start appearing mysteriously in the subjects of Mr. Neville's various drawings: a ladder that wasn't there before, a pair of boots standing in a field. Mr. Neville's penchant for realism is stymied by these clues, which may or may not suggest the murder of Mr. Herbert. Peter Greenaway seems to have directed this, his first art-house success, with the aim of exploring the failings of perspective in art and casting his doubtful eye on the possibility of "faithful" drawings such as those by which Mr. Neville makes his living. Greenaway was, after all, an art student, and must have known that drawing machines like the one Mr. Neville uses in the film (which is set in 1694) led not only to the invention of photography, and therefore of film itself, but also to the renouncing of perspective that informs so much of 20th-century painting.

In the film, Greenaway overlays the story's mysterious elements with highly mannered tableaux, making each scene like a realistic, though sumptuous, painting, while having his actors spout witty and complicated sentences. While this is very entertaining, it has a dual purpose, which is to depict the falseness of surfaces. Mr. Neville's faith in the same is his downfall, and Greenaway's triumph is in his distortions and dissemblings, the narrative lie that gets closer to the truth than any architectural drawing could. --Jim Gay

Greenaway - Early Films

This second DVD installment of British avant-garde director Peter Greenaway's collected Early Films journeys into Greenaway's peculiar nerdy humor, which takes absurd satisfaction in cataloguing and bureaucracy. The two films on Early Films 2: The Falls, The Falls and Vertical Feature Remake, are both exhaustively thorough visual catalogues. The Falls features 92 citizens whose surnames begin with the letters FALL, who have suffered through a fictitious event known as the VUE (Violent Unknown Event), and have consequently become obsessed with birds. At three-and-a-half hours long, certain case studies stand out, such as that of Appis Allis Fallabis, who, speaking in Pig Latin, describes how he is "nightly obliged to lubricate himself with Spanish oil" in order to eliminate the ticks, termites, lice, and tapeworms that plague his body as if he were truly avian. The ridiculousness of the characters is carefully balanced by a more serious soundtrack including the divine Brian Eno song, "Golden Hours." Vertical Features Remake, on the other hand, finds common vertical threads throughout the British landscape such as tree trunks, dandelion stalks, telephone poles, and rakes, then re-catalogues the shots into four separate shorts, as though an imaginary bureau called the IRR Records Archives is searching for a way to structure and organize this pointless information. Both films have a sci-fi quality, utilizing their own logic to make sense of invented worlds. Also on the DVD are interviews with Greenaway, in which he discusses not only how and when the movies were made, but also their concepts. Don't let the epic length dissuade you from viewing these clever dips into that giant pool of Greenaway's weird mind. --Trinie Dalton

Before he wowed audiences with such stunning and controversial international arthouse hits such as THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER, THE PILLOW BOOK and PROSPERO'S BOOKS, Peter Greenaway concocted a series of seven witty and inventive short films (A WALK THROUGH H, H IS FOR HOUSE, WINDOWS, INTERVALS, DEAR PHONE, WATER WRACKETS and VERTICAL FEATURES REMAKE), as well as his first spectacular feature magnum opus, THE FALLS. These eight cinematic gems are now available for first time in the US in a gorgeously-packaged two-disc box set. Both are packed with additional content—including hundreds of original paintings by Greenaway, original video pieces and tons of archival material. The two discs are also available separately as GREENAWAY: THE FALLS and GREENAWAY: THE SHORTS.

A Zed & Two Noughts

In Peter Greenaway's 8-1/2 Women (1999), a woman's death propels a bereaved widower and his son into carnal questing, via a harem of idiosyncratic ladies. Similarly, 1985's A Zed and Two Noughts follows the Deuce brothers, zoologists and former Siamese twins, who lose their wives in a bizarre collision--a great swan crashes into a car driven down Swann's Way by one Alba Bewick (translates as "white swan"). The brothers become obsessed with photographing and measuring decay ("by degrees of grief"), from Apple to Zebra, and equally obsessed with voluptuous Alba, who, having lost one leg in the wreck, later has the other removed... perhaps for the sake of symmetry. Greenaway's funny, gruesome, gorgeous "zoo" also features hooker Venus di Milo, arbiter of the monetary value of everything; an amputation-happy surgeon who'd like to make Alba fit into a Vermeer painting; a sinister Phantom of the Zoo who offs black-and-white animals; and other assorted, often twinned, exotics.

Sacha Vierny, who shot Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad and Buñuel's Belle de Jour, visualizes Zed in richly erotic detail, every frame a feast for the eyes. Evoking melancholy pavane or stately funeral march, Michael Nyman's music marks the inexorable progression of a fever dream celebrating the power of artifice and nature. Trained as a painter, educated in linguistics and philosophy, Greenaway deftly weaves an exquisite pattern of puns, colors, images, words, ideas, and music into a cinematic meditation on life, death, and sex. Weird to the max, mesmerizing, and some kind of masterpiece. --Kathleen Murphy

"Two legs look so good together, don't you think?" A masterpiece of modern cinema, A Zed and Two Noughts is Peter Greenaway's beautifully disturbing and darkly humorous take on erotic obsession and death. The film opens with an automobile-swan accident in front of the Rotterdam Zoo; two women die and a third, Alba (Andrea Ferreol), loses her leg. The two widowers, twin zoologists Oliver and Oswald (Eric and Brian Deacon, in roles originally offered to the Quay Brothers), fixate on their wives' bodies, and slowly become obsessed with evolution and decomposition even going as far as meticulously crafting exquisitely morbid time-lapsed films of decaying corpses and creatures. Meanwhile, a mad surgeon plots to use Alba as a subject in his experiments with animal symmetry and Vermeer homage.

With this follow-up to his acclaimed The Draughtsman's Contract, Greenaway intensifies his already striking visual style by collaborating with legendary French cinematographer Sacha Vierny to create a masterpiece of motivated light. Full of surprises and magnificent conundrums, A Zed and Two Noughts is a perversely comic and teasing treat for the mind and senses.


SPECIAL FEATURES
- Restored anamorphic transfer, created from Hi-Def elements
- Peter Greenaway commentary and video introduction
- Behind-the-scenes footage from ?O, Zoo!, by Philip Hoffman
- The complete "Decay" sequences
- Snail sketches by Peter Greenaway
- English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired
- Original theatrical trailer

The Early Years of Greenaway: The Shorts

Boundaries between visual art and film vanish in this painterly collection of short movies, made between 1973 and 1978, by avant-garde British director Peter Greenaway. The Shorts, disc one of a two-disc series, contains six of Greenaway's early films: Water Wrackets, H Is For House, Windows, Dear Phone, Intervals, and A Walk Through: The Reincarnation of An Ornithologist, as well as Greenaway on Greenaway, in which the director discusses his beginnings. Each ranging in length from 10 to 30 minutes, these films clearly foreshadow Greenaway's trademarks such as his use of the still shot to transform an active moment into landscape, recurring absurd or obsessive characters, and plots confused by scripts full of decadent or bureaucratic language, but they still contain their own conceptual merit. Viewers who find Greenaway irritatingly intellectual may even enjoy these quick glimpses into his work. Water Wrackets, for example, pits narration about an invented army sergeant strategizing to conquer bodies of water against shots of wild rivers and lakes to show how a voiceover changes the perception of filmed imagery. Intervals, Greenaway's very first film, makes a virtual photo album out of still shots taken in Venice's streets, sans canals, implying that even the most romantic city can seem generic or dingy. H Is For House finds ultimate fantasy in the British countryside. And A Walk Through, Greenaway's most direct reference to his life as a visual artist, features a bird-loving narrator who walks the viewer through a gallery exhibiting his paintings (actually Greenaway's) of aviary migratory routes. Greenaway's approach creates intimacy between the camera lens and the viewer, making us feel that his lens is actually our eye. --Trinie Dalton

"He has other reputations as well—as an academic, as a maker of curious artifacts, as a cataloguer of the bizarre and as a librarian of the absurd." Peter Greenaway might well have been describing himself in this thumbnail sketch of Canton Remodell, a character in an unmade project. Before his international arthouse hits THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER and PROSPERO'S BOOKS, Greenaway made a series of highly inventive films that established all the obsessions that run through his later work. The content of the six playful shorts featured on this disc varies widely—from the condensed, wry history of 37 people who have fallen to their deaths from windows (WINDOWS), to a sequence of 92 maps to guide a dead ornithologist on his way into the afterlife (A WALK THROUGH H) set to a thrilling score by award-winning composer Michael Nyman (THE PIANO). All of these quirkily delightful works—which also include INTERVALS, WATER WRACKETS, H IS FOR HOUSE, and DEAR PHONE—take great pleasure in outlandish detail, fake erudition and corkscrew narratives. This disc is also available as part of GREENAWAY: THE EARLY FILMS box set.

The Early Films of Peter Greenaway: The Falls

This second DVD installment of British avant-garde director Peter Greenaway's collected Early Films journeys into Greenaway's peculiar nerdy humor, which takes absurd satisfaction in cataloguing and bureaucracy. The two films on Early Films 2: The Falls, The Falls and Vertical Feature Remake, are both exhaustively thorough visual catalogues. The Falls features 92 citizens whose surnames begin with the letters FALL, who have suffered through a fictitious event known as the VUE (Violent Unknown Event), and have consequently become obsessed with birds. At three-and-a-half hours long, certain case studies stand out, such as that of Appis Allis Fallabis, who, speaking in Pig Latin, describes how he is "nightly obliged to lubricate himself with Spanish oil" in order to eliminate the ticks, termites, lice, and tapeworms that plague his body as if he were truly avian. The ridiculousness of the characters is carefully balanced by a more serious soundtrack including the divine Brian Eno song, "Golden Hours." Vertical Features Remake, on the other hand, finds common vertical threads throughout the British landscape such as tree trunks, dandelion stalks, telephone poles, and rakes, then re-catalogues the shots into four separate shorts, as though an imaginary bureau called the IRR Records Archives is searching for a way to structure and organize this pointless information. Both films have a sci-fi quality, utilizing their own logic to make sense of invented worlds. Also on the DVD are interviews with Greenaway, in which he discusses not only how and when the movies were made, but also their concepts. Don't let the epic length dissuade you from viewing these clever dips into that giant pool of Greenaway's weird mind. --Trinie Dalton

Standing at a pivotal point in his filmography, poised between his earlier, witty shorts and the unique pleasures of Peter Greenaway's post-DRAUGHTMAN'S CONTRACT oeuvre, THE FALLS is arguably the most significant film of his prolific career. Shot as a pseudo-documentary, this magnum opus dazzlingly details 92 case histories of people who have been affected by the VUE (Violent Unknown Event)—a mysterious, apocalyptic phenomenon related to birds, flying, and bizarre invented languages. Perfectly paired with it on this disc is VERTICAL FEATURES REMAKE, in which a group of self-important academics argue about the work of Tulse Luper, Greenaway's best-known fictional character and cinematic alter-ego. Michael Nyman (THE PIANO) provided the score for both films, with back-up from the father of ambient music, Brian Eno. This disc is also available as part of GREENAWAY: THE EARLY FILMS box set.

Lumiere & Company

Some of the world's leading directors (David Lynch, Spike Lee, Wim Wenders, Zhang Yimou, John Boorman) use the original Lumiere picture camera to create short films all over the world. Interactive Menus, Production Notes, Scene access, Trailer, Languages: French, Subtitles: English