know nothing about you, but I do know two things – two people f*cked to make you and I’m sorry, you’re going to die,” smiles fi lmmaker Peter Greenaway. The recipient of this year’s BAFTA for Outstanding British Contribution To Cinema has always been a forthright, singular artist, a Welsh-born iconoclast known for his painterly cinematic style and penchant for pushing boundaries. Indeed, his to-the-point analysis of all of us reflects his ongoing fascination with sex and death – the twin forces of Eros
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The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982)
and Thanatos from Greek mythology – that permeates his work. Even a cursory familiarity with his fi lms – with the prime example being The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover (1989) – exposes Greenaway’s examination of what he refers to as the very beginning and the very end. “We’re all extremely, deeply fascinated – whether you’re a nun or a serial killer – with these issues,” he explains. “A novelist like Balzac might have said that money was important, but money’s only there to manipulate the sex and the death anyway. You could say that Shakespeare’s plays are about power, but that power is circulating around notions of beginnings and ends, starts and finishes.” Going back to his own start, Greenaway hails from Newport in Gwent, and began his artistic life as a painter before branching out into film in 1966, making his striking debut, The Falls, in 1980, followed by his first traditional narrative feature, The Draughtsman’s Contract, in 1982. What followed was a run of richly creative, visually arresting and thematically challenging films that, he says, “push the edges”, from A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) and The Belly Of An Architect (1987) through to Nightwatching (2007) and Goltzius And The Pelican Company (2012). Plenty of sex and death is explored to be sure. “Somebody once asked me, ‘Why, Mr Greenaway, did you move from painting to cinema?’ and rather cheekily I said, ‘Paintings don’t have soundtracks,’” he laughs. “That’s a simplification because cinema has so many elements, but it’s basically true. I was often criticised in England for being far too concerned with form and not content, but for a long time the French have said there’s no such thing as content anymore – the language is the content. I always have this eye for the emotion of the pictorial image and try very, very hard to use all the contemporary gizmos I can – there’s practically a new one every afternoon now – to expand fi lmmaking language.” Receiving an award like the Academy’s Outstanding British Contribution To Cinema can be misconceived as the bell tolling at the end of a career – or even a life, given Greenaway’s obsessions – and this immediately occurred to him upon hearing about the award.