Brisbane Festival 2009 in association with the Queensland Art Gallery presents a major survey of acclaimed British director Peter Greeanway at the Australian Cinémathèque. The film program includes a retrospective of the director's feature films, alongside a selection of early short films, documentaries, and works for television, illustrating the director's ongoing experiments with cinema.

Born in Newport, Wales in 1942, Greenaway studied at the Walthamstow College of Art (now University of East London) where he trained as a painter. During these years he also developed a strong interest in European cinema, in particular the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alain Resnais, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Ingmar Bergman. In 1965 he joined the UK Government's Central Office of Information where he worked for 15 years as an editor and director, a formative experience that lead to the development of his own short films during this period. Greenaway's first narrative feature, The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), received great critical acclaim upon its release and established him internationally as one of the most original filmmakers of his generation, a reputation consolidated with films such as Drowning by Numbers (1988), The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), Prospero's Books (1991), The Pillow Book (1996), and most recently Nightwatching 2007.

The Australian Cinémathèque program coincides with Greenaway's visit to Australia for the Brisbane Festival 2009 where he will present Tulse Luper VJ Performance at the Gallery of Modern Art. In this special multi-screen VJ performance, Greenaway edits and mixes in real time imagery from his elaborate Tulse Luper Suitcases film trilogy to the music accompaniment of DJ Serge Dodwell (aka Radar), blending avant-garde cinematographic imagery with a heavy electronic music score.

Greenaway will also present The Rembrandt Fascination Lecture at the Gallery of Modern Art, a lecture based on his recent documentary project Rembrandt's J'Accuse (2008), in which the director asserts a fierce criticism of contemporary visual illiteracy by means of forensically investigating Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn's masterpiece De Nachtwacht (The Night Watch, 1642).

Featured Works:

Intervals (1969); Windows (1974); Dear Phone (1976); H is for House (1976); A Walk through H: the Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (1978); Vertical Features Remake (1978); Water Wrackets (1978); The Falls (1980); The Draughtsman's Contract (1982); A Zed & Two Noughts (1985); The Belly of an Architect (1987); Drowning by Numbers (1988); The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989); Prospero's Books (1991); The Baby of Mâcon (1993); The Pillow Book (1996); 8½ Women (1999); The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1: The Moab Story (2003); The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 2: Vaux to the Sea (2004, pictured); The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 3: From Sark to the Finish (2004 ); Tulse Luper ‘A Life in Suitcases' (2005); Nightwatching (2007); Rembrandt's J'accuse (2008)

Program information:

Peter Greenaway

Related Articles:
The Nightwatchman by Leo Goldsmith posted Oct. 15, 2009