Peter Greenaway
Welsh-born English film director.
This book has neither the virtue of irony nor deserves the sympathy reserved for the truly mad.
The penis -- if you think about it -- is the most enterprising engineering feat imaginable -- a cantilevered structure, hydraulics, propulsion, pistons, compression, inflation, heat sensitive -- practically every engineering characteristic -- towers, draw-bridges, rocket-ships -- no man-made engineering structure to match it.
Now, at this very minute, another thing is happening which we cannot hear because most paintings do not have a sound-track. Peter is inventing the word "simony" to explain ecclesiastical purchase-power, for which, since his Church later exercised it so expertly, Simon Magus ought to be revered as a patron not a rogue.
The Romans are very equivocal about this building. They call it the typewriter or the wedding cake... But whatever you think of it -- it gives you the most amazing views of Rome. It's like a box at the theatre at which Rome is the play.
It's precisely on the Internet that the majority of the writing is terribly bad and uninteresting.
It seems to me that the comprehension and enjoyment of the reader, as opposed to the viewer, is best served in printing this version rather than a slavish definitive transcription. Besides, what film is truly definitive? By the time you see the film it may very well be sub-titled, re-edited, shortened, even censored, and every film is viewed at the discretion of the projectionist, the cinema manager, the architect of the cinema, the comfort of your seat and the attention of your neighbour.
All this takes many clumsy and inexact word-descriptions to describe, but if we read paintings like we read books, it would not be such a hidden language for painting can effortlessly produce such elegant solutions.
I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable; so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it.
In the film The Belly of an Architect, an architect from Chicago organizes an exhibition of his favourite architect Etienne-Lous Boullée (1728-1799). I wrote an account of this hypothetical exhibition as though it had been seen by an unlikely Boullée contemporary -- Jane Austen (1775-1817). She made a prim but perceptive account of her progress through the corridors and halls of the Vittoriano in the centre of Rome -- a building constructed long after both of these eminent personages were dead.
Imagine a world where nothing is stable. In the West, we have three moving elements -- Air, Fire, Water -- but at least we can depend on the fourth.
"What good are all these books to you? You can't eat them! How can they make you happy?"
I like a lot of glasses about -- it highers the tone.
"A long white dress that starts under the breast and travels on interminably down -- so their legs are entirely mysterious -- they could have one leg or two inside that dress... A Jane Austen woman could be incredibly passionate inside that dress."
Farewells can be both beautiful and despicable. Saying farewell to one who is loved is very complicated.
The book to end all books. The final book. After this, there is no more writing, no more publishing.
<smiling> "It was only a film."
No Albert -- it's not God -- it's Michael. My lover. You vowed you would kill him -- and you did. And you vowed you would eat him. Now eat him.
I've always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you've been, where you are, and where you're going -- in a sense it's three tenses in one.
That comes from most people having an American film model in their heads which is nothing but a total illusionary masturbatory massage.