Peter Greenaway

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In this previously unseen backstage documentary, Peter Greenaway responds with great generosity to the open-ended questions posed by an off-camera Gideon Bachmann about the process which led to the creation of one his most important films, The Belly of an Architect, giving contemporary audiences an insight into his ideas, the rigour of his reflections and the development of the project.

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A short ironic film about a missing nail in the iconography of Christ and his depiction in da Vinci’s painting of The Last Supper.

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Five hundred years after his birth, the life and career of the Italian Renaissance's last great painter is explored.

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The fascinations of filmmaker Peter Greenaway, whose motto is "art is life and life is art,"are captured like butterflies and arranged in an alphabet, a form that suits him perfectly as an encyclopedist. In intimate conversations with his perceptive 16-year-old daughter Zoë, we discover the whos, whats and whys about Greenaway.

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Exhibition on Screen's latest release celebrates the life and masterpieces of Hieronymus Bosch brought together from around the world to his hometown in the Netherlands as a one-off exhibition. With exclusive access to the gallery and the show, this stunning film explores this mysterious, curious, medieval painter who continues to inspire today's creative geniuses. Over 420,000 people flocked to the exhibition to marvel at Bosch's bizarre creations but now, audiences can enjoy a front row seat at Bosch's extraordinary homecoming from the comfort of their own home anywhere in the world. Expert insights from curators and leading cultural critics explore the inspiration behind Bosch's strange and unsettling works. Close-up views of the curiosities allow viewers to appreciate the detail of his paintings like never before. Bosch's legendary altarpieces, which have long been divided among museums, were brought back together for the exhibition and feature in the film.

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A short film by Peter Greenaway. It depicts the painting The Wedding Feast at Cana by Paolo Veronese, through mixed media and shows different perspectives.

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J'accuse is an 'essay-istic' documentary in which Greenaway's fierce criticism of today's visual illiteracy is argued by means of a forensic search of Rembrandt's Nightwatch. Greenaway explains the background, the context, the conspiracy, the murder and the motives of all its 34 painted characters who have conspired to kill for their combined self-advantage. Greenaway leads us through Rembrandt's paintings into 17th century Amsterdam. He paints a world that is democratic in principle, but is almost entirely ruled by twelve families. The notion exists of these regents as charitable and compassionate beings. However, reality was different.

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Close to Greenaway takes us behind the scenes of the first part of the trilogy The Tulse Luper's Suitcases in Barcelona and Almeria. In this film, for the first time we get close to the unique vision of the controversial Welsh director Peter Greenaway. The intense rehearsals with the actors, his meticulous method of shooting and his thirst for the new audiovisual and technologies are revealed in this documentary.

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This critically acclaimed DVD contains 16 of the best classic and award winning British short films and delivers a snapshot of British cinema past and present. It includes films from Britain's most exciting new talent alongside early shorts from it's most successful filmmakers' amongst them Chris Nolan (Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins), Ridley Scott (Gladiator, Alien), Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies) and Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Hours). 01 About a Girl - Brian Percival 02 Boy & Bicycle - Ridley Scott 03 Dear Phone - Peter Greenaway 04 Doodlebug - Christopher Nolan 05 Eight - Stephen Daldry 06 Gasman - Lynne Ramsay 07 Girl Chewing Gum - John Smith 08 Home - Morag McKinnon 09 Joyride - Jim Gillespie 10 Inside Out - Tom & Charles Guard 11 Je T’aime John Wayne - Toby Macdonald 12 The Sheep Thief - Asif Kapadia 13 The Short & Curlies - Mike Leigh 14 Telling Lies - Simon Ellis 15 UK Images - Martin Parr 16 Who’s My Favourite Girl? - Adrian J. McDowall

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Peter Greenaway discussing a variety of topics, with each segment ranging in length from 6s to 2m47s.

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"Rosa", with a libretto by Peter Greenaway and score by Louis Andriessen, is the first in a projected series of 10 operas, each dealing with the death of a famous composer - some real, others fictional. "Rosa" falls into the latter category; it tells the story of Juan Manuel de Rosa, a Brazilian who went to study music in America but spent most of his time in the cinema instead, becoming particularly entranced by Westerns. Now 32 years old and residing in an abandoned Uruguayan slaughterhouse, Rosa has become one of Hollywood's foremost composers, specialising in Westerns. He also has a beautiful 19-year-old fiancee, Esmeralda, but he pays her little heed, instead lavishing his attentions on a black mare named Bola. One day, a group of men attired as cowboys arrive at the abattoir and kill both Rosa and Bola; an investigation is conducted, with particular suspicion!

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After his wife dies, middle-aged businessman Philip Emmenthal, at the prompting of his playboy son Storey, populates his Geneva villa with eight-and-a-half concubines. Three are from Kyoto, where Storey manages Pachinco palaces. Each has a distinctive personality: a nun, a child bearer, a gambler, a student of Kabuki, a horsewoman with a pet pig, a maid. As a year passes, the women begin asserting their own power.

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Searching for the roots of Peter Greenaway in his films, this artful documentary begins with a workshop from 1991 in which Peter Greenaway discusses his film career, from his early short Revolution (1968) to The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989). Including a rare and exclusive behind-the-scenes featurette "A Walk Through Prospero's Library", with Greenaway discussing the inspiration for his classic film, Prospero's Books (1991).

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Peter Greenaway presents this "Commentary in one hundred parts" on Drowning by Numbers (1987), discussing and analyzing many of the film's more intriguing features.

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Peter Greenaway remembers his first meeting with Rotterdam Film Festival director Hubert Bals.

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Told in the form of a mock documentary in 92 short parts, nineteen million people are left obsessed with birds and flight following a strange occurrence. A documentarian analyses the lives of all the survivors whose surnames begin with FALL to uncover the truth behind the event.

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A narrator relates a variety of peculiar stories involving characters with the initials HC and their dealings with telephones. These are interspersed with artistic shots of telephone boxes in a variety of locations.

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A sort of documentary on the people known to have fallen out of windows in a certain time frame in a certain geographical location. One of Greenaway's early short films.

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Ostensibly, a film about a child's pictorial alphabet stuck on the letter H.

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Can a dog still be man’s best friend if that man is the Führer? Blondi explores the bizarre bond between Hitler and his beloved German Shepherd. From eating the crumbs under the table at the Führer’s birthday, to living in the confinement of the bunker, this film presents intimate glimpses of the dog’s daily life intertwined with the realities of war, depicting the oblivious pet's surreal impact on the Reich.

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Gazing out at her garden, a woman recounts the tale of an exile from Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship, who settled in Felixstowe on England’s east coast but found the grey skies and suburban sterility a poor substitute for his homeland of Chile. [This original piece by Peter Greenaway and cinematographer Curtis Clark was produced in 1981 as a camera test for the pair's feature film collaboration The Draughtsman's Contract, but was not released to the public until 2022.]

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A short ironic film about a missing nail in the iconography of Christ and his depiction in da Vinci’s painting of The Last Supper.

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Five hundred years after his birth, the life and career of the Italian Renaissance's last great painter is explored.

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In 1931, following the success of the film Battleship Potemkin, Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein travels to the city of Guanajuato, Mexico, to shoot a new film. Freshly rejected by Hollywood, Eisenstein soon falls under Mexico’s spell. Chaperoned by his guide Palomino Cañedo, the director opens up to his suppressed fears as he embraces a new world of sensual pleasures and possibilities that will shape the future of his art.

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A triptych of short stereoscopic films by Peter Greenaway, Jean-Luc Godard and Edgar Pêra. Includes "The Three Disasters" by Godard, "Cinesapiens" by Pêra and "Just in Time" by Greenaway.

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Goltzius and the Pelican Company tells the story of Hendrik Goltzius, a late 16th century Dutch printer and engraver of erotic prints. A contemporary of Rembrandt and, indeed, more celebrated during his life, Goltzius seduces the Margrave of Alsace into paying for a printing press to make and publish illustrated books. In return, he promises him an extraordinary book of pictures of illustrating the Old Testament’s biblical stories. Erotic tales of Lot and his daughters, David and Bathsheba, Samson and Deliah and John the Baptist and Salome. To tempt the Margrave further, Goltzius and his printing company will offer to perform dramatisations of these erotic stories for his court.

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J'accuse is an 'essay-istic' documentary in which Greenaway's fierce criticism of today's visual illiteracy is argued by means of a forensic search of Rembrandt's Nightwatch. Greenaway explains the background, the context, the conspiracy, the murder and the motives of all its 34 painted characters who have conspired to kill for their combined self-advantage. Greenaway leads us through Rembrandt's paintings into 17th century Amsterdam. He paints a world that is democratic in principle, but is almost entirely ruled by twelve families. The notion exists of these regents as charitable and compassionate beings. However, reality was different.

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An extravagant, exotic and moving look at Rembrandt's romantic and professional life, and the controversy he created by the identification of a murderer in the painting The Night Watch.

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Maverick British director Peter Greenaway launched his career capitalizing on off-the-wall, intricate themes and stylistic panache. This compilation of shorts, spanning the years 1969–1978, is a superb introduction to the obsessions that run through his later work. Films included: Intervals, Windows, Dear Phone, H Is for House, A Walk Through H, and Water Wrackets.

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Calligraphy on water. The first joint work of director Peter Greenaway and composer David Lang.

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A comic study of 20th-century history, reconstructing the life of writer, creator and professional prisoner Tulse Luper. Born in 1911 Newport and last heard of in 1989, Luper’s life is pieced together from the evidence found in 92 suitcases scattered across the globe. A Life in Suitcases condenses the six-hour trilogy into a single two-hour feature, and in doing so, accentuates the project as a filmic essay in multiple narratives, listings, sidebars, footnotes, commentaries and anecdotes; a project for an Information Age ready to understand that there never is a phenomenon called History, there can only be Historians, gatekeepers to vested interests.

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A comic study of 20th-century history, reconstructing the life of writer, creator and professional prisoner Tulse Luper. Born in 1911 Newport and last heard of in 1989, Luper’s life is pieced together from the evidence found in 92 suitcases scattered across the globe. In the final installment, Luper continues his adventures as a professional prisoner during the later years of the Second World War and the Cold War.

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A comic study of 20th-century history, reconstructing the life of writer, creator and professional prisoner Tulse Luper. Born in 1911 Newport and last heard of in 1989, Luper’s life is pieced together from the evidence found in 92 suitcases scattered across the globe. In the second of three parts, we follow Luper as he works in a cinema, giving him ample opportunity to cross paths with virtually every artistic device and dramatic character known to man.

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Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.

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A comic study of 20th-century history, reconstructing the life of writer, creator and professional prisoner Tulse Luper. Born in 1911 Newport and last heard of in 1989, Luper’s life is pieced together from the evidence found in 92 suitcases scattered across the globe.An interstitial bridging the first and second parts, repeating the last hour of Part 1 and appending it with material covering Luper's time in Antwerp.

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A comic study of 20th-century history, reconstructing the life of writer, creator and professional prisoner Tulse Luper. Born in 1911 Newport and last heard of in 1989, Luper’s life is pieced together from the evidence found in 92 suitcases scattered across the globe. In the first of three parts, we follow Luper through three distinct episodes: as a child during the First World War; as an explorer in Mormon Utah; and as a writer in Belgium during the rise of fascism.

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"Rosa", with a libretto by Peter Greenaway and score by Louis Andriessen, is the first in a projected series of 10 operas, each dealing with the death of a famous composer - some real, others fictional. "Rosa" falls into the latter category; it tells the story of Juan Manuel de Rosa, a Brazilian who went to study music in America but spent most of his time in the cinema instead, becoming particularly entranced by Westerns. Now 32 years old and residing in an abandoned Uruguayan slaughterhouse, Rosa has become one of Hollywood's foremost composers, specialising in Westerns. He also has a beautiful 19-year-old fiancee, Esmeralda, but he pays her little heed, instead lavishing his attentions on a black mare named Bola. One day, a group of men attired as cowboys arrive at the abattoir and kill both Rosa and Bola; an investigation is conducted, with particular suspicion!

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After his wife dies, middle-aged businessman Philip Emmenthal, at the prompting of his playboy son Storey, populates his Geneva villa with eight-and-a-half concubines. Three are from Kyoto, where Storey manages Pachinco palaces. Each has a distinctive personality: a nun, a child bearer, a gambler, a student of Kabuki, a horsewoman with a pet pig, a maid. As a year passes, the women begin asserting their own power.

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Nagito has a fetish for calligraphy on the human body and meets her ideal soulmate Jerome, an English translator sent to Japan. However, once Nagiko's father's gay publisher rejoins the scene, the story is overtaken by treachery and bloodlust.

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In 17th-century Tuscany, a church play is performed for the benefit of young aristocrat Cosimo. In the play, a grotesque old woman gives birth to a beautiful baby boy. The child's older sister is quick to exploit the situation, selling blessings from the baby, and even claiming she's the true mother by virgin birth. However, when she attempts to seduce the bishop's son, the Church exacts a terrible revenge.

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A revisionist biopic on Charles Darwin, illustrated via 18 tableaux covering details from Darwin's birth, his defining voyage on the HMS Beagle, the publication of his seminal Theory of Evolution and his ultimate death and consequent burial at Westminster Abbey.

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Dutch composer Louis Andriessen collaborates with director Peter Greenaway on a commissioned short film to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the death of Mozart. Gods create Man, Music and Mozart.

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An exiled magician finds an opportunity for revenge against his enemies muted when his daughter and the son of his chief enemy fall in love in this uniquely structured retelling of the 'The Tempest'.

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When churlish mobster Albert Spica acquires an upscale French restaurant in London, he dines there nightly, effectively scaring off the clientele with his bad manners. His wife, Georgina, is especially disgusted by him, and soon begins an affair with regular guest Michael. Despite their best efforts to keep it secret, Spica learns about their trysts, and he plots a terrible revenge.

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Cissie Colpitts drowns her cheating husband and, in the ensuing cover-up, enlists the help of lonely coroner Henry Madgett, an old friend with a longstanding weakness for her charms. But when Cissie's daughter and granddaughter—both also named Cissie Colpitts—decide to resort to the same methods for solving conflicts with their own frustrating husbands, the women and their repeated appeals for help begin to wear on Madgett's conscience.

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Stourley Kracklite, a driven, detail-obsessed architect, travels from America to Rome with his much younger wife, Louisa, to oversee an architectural homage to a personal hero, 18th-century master builder Etienne-Louis Boullée. En route by train, Stourley and Louisa conceive a much-wanted child — but Stourley's obsession with his wife's expanding belly, her perceived infidelity, and his own recurrent bouts of abdominal pain reach epic and dangerous proportions.

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Identical twin zoologists lose their wives in a car crash caused by a white swan. They become obsessed with the death and decay of animals, and develop a strange and unusual relationship with the driver of the car, a woman who is now an amputee.

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A television documentary produced for British Television directed by Peter Greenaway.

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A television documentary produced for British Television directed by Peter Greenaway

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A television documentary about John Cage and his music.

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A film made for the Central Office of Information concerning Britain's coastline, with music by Michael Nyman.

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A television documentary produced for British Television directed by Peter Greenaway about Phillip Glass that is a recording of a performance of the Phillip Glass Ensemble in 1983 with interviews that go in depth of his style and music theory of his signature minimal sound.

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R. Neville, a brash young draftsman, is hired to make a dozen landscape illustrations at the estate of Mr Herbert and his wife Virginia. Aside from monetary compensation, the arrangement includes a sexual liaison offered to Neville by Virginia while her estranged husband is away. But when the murdered body of Mr Herbert is discovered at the estate, mysterious clues found in Neville's drawings point to the identity of the killer.

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Told in the form of a mock documentary in 92 short parts, nineteen million people are left obsessed with birds and flight following a strange occurrence. A documentarian analyses the lives of all the survivors whose surnames begin with FALL to uncover the truth behind the event.

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Commissioned by the COI, Peter Greenaway made a biographical short film about fashion designer Zandra Rhodes.

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