Peter Greenaway
Welsh-born English film director.
Each word is pumped up with consonant cholesterol. It's full of fat words. The pages cream with subcutaneous fat. New letters are gilded like showy teeth, making comprehension constipated and exorbitantly metalled.
Painting: Once upon a time a painting was a two-dimensional representation; now it is anything its author thinks is appropriate.
If a player in the game of Deadman's Catch drops a skittle, he is obliged to suffer a succession of handicaps. First to catch using one hand, then to catch kneeling on one knee, then on two knees, then with one eye closed. If a player finally drops a catch with both eyes closed, then he is out and must take his place in the winding-sheet.
Smut is a target for reconstructed cricketing accidents -- he is the Cricket Saint Sebastian.
"Too many stupid people have it."
Go on. Treat me like the page of a book. Your book.
I don't know what to say really -- except that you look immortal and I look bereft.
Gonzalo threw many books into the bottom of the leaky vessel that took Prospero out on to the sea away from Italy and Europe into exile. Shakespeare does not, of course, elaborate what these volumes were. Prospero's Books speculates. There would need perhaps to be books on navigation and survival, there would need to be books for an elderly scholar to learn how to rear and educate a young daughter, how to colonise an island, farm it, subjugate its inhabitants, identify its plants and husband its wild beasts. There would need to be books to offer solace and advise patience and put past glory and present despondency into perspective. There would need to be books to encourage revenge.
The major sweep of this book's living is too often marred by qualifying. It is hedged about with ifs and buts and if onlys and howevers, excuses for a life that is about to shut its covers for the last time and then crumple into dust in an unseen and never-to-be-remembered library.
It could be said now that all animals live in zoos, whether it is a zoo in Regent's Park, London or a Nigerian Game Reserve. Perhaps what's left to argue is only the zoo's quality.
Perhaps, sadly, in the end, cinema is only a translator's art, and you know what they say about translators: traitors all.
Roy, this is my wife, Georgina Spica -- she has a heart of gold and a body to match... and I am Albert Spica and I have a heart of gold and a great deal of money to match.
... Sir Isaac Newton, the subject of this cake, is in every Englishman's wallet... he's on the English one-pound note. I always carry one on me for good luck. A man who discovered gravity and thus successfully secured our feet on the ground is a good companion. In fixing us to the earth, he enabled us -- with equanimity -- to permit our heads to remain in the clouds.
Titus... he started well... soon became greedy... disembowelled on the Tiber steps... he's dead, died screaming...
"I was completely absorbed as to what would happen because anything was possible."
I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a "message", but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world.
Men are so shit scared of female activities, especially if they are clandestine.
Atlas, the man who carries the world, becomes the book of the maps of the world. An example of man, or God, into book. Few have that honour.
It is a most unexpected Earthquake in Geneva.
There is another earthquake in Kyoto. We appreciate it lyrically. A slide of dust slips along a roof gully. A large tree of golden petals shakes and the petals drift to the floor. Birds fly up. Bottles of clear liquid in a shop quiver on a shelf. The water in a puddle shimmers reflections up a wall. A collection of grey roof tiles shift and -- ever faster -- begin to slide down a roof slope.