Greenaway in his own words

On Painting and film

Painting does not characteristically embrace music, though I do remember a Rauchenberg painting that had built-in transistor radios. And painting does not, other than manipulating a few visual symbols treating text essentially as image, on the whole deal in texts, though it might readily illustrate them. And painting does not embrace sequence-through-time, unless that time is very long and the painting begins to decay. And these things - music, text and temporality - I confess, I had as much interest in, as making painted images. So the cinematic vocabulary was attractive to me, since, in theory at least, it seemed to be able to contain all these characteristics. But the prime agenda had always to be the manufacture of the image, and that meant, for me, that the processes I wanted to deal with, utilised the thought, practices and aesthetics of painting rather than of cinema. And still does. I feel happier talking about cinema through the experience of five thousand years of Western painting, than I do considering it through some 100 years of cinema critique. Painting after all will stay, and the local aesthetics of cinema will fade, are indeed already fading, since the media is so dependent on its technology, and cinema technology is fading fast.

So, the vocabulary of carefully constructed largely-static images (the maps in A Walk Through H are essentially small paintings), the traditions of English landscape painting, (Windows, H is for House, Vertical Features Remake), the mid-twentieth century habit of serial painting, (Intervals, Dear Phone, Vertical Feature Remake), the acknowledgement of the screen as a screen and not a see-through window on the world, (Dear Phone) and the numerous conceits, visual puns and provocative self-conscious, non-illusionistic devices which are so contrary to the cinema of illusion we have ended up with after 108 years, take their cue and reference from painting familiarities which have preceded the local technology of cinema by more than five thousand years, and will, without a doubt, persist long long after it.

On Artistic influences and the COI

In the mid-sixties and early seventies the current painterly interests were Land Art, Minimalism and Conceptualism. My fascinations within this local contemporary cultural baggage journeyed around the work of Richard Long, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Walter De Maria, Robert Morris, Frank Stella, R.B. Kitaj, and, as with everyone else, Marcel Duchamp, and their visual overspill into a cinema language somewhere between and including Hollis Frampton and Alain Resnais. I took what I wanted from these influences, aided by the literary experiments of Borges and all the acolytes (and precursors) of Magic Realism, and all the musical experiments of Cage and all his acolytes (not so many precursors), and certainly the direct-use of landscape materials, maps, diagrams, photographic recording, stripped down list-making, the economic cataloguing, the excitements of mock equivocal theorising, and personal desires to make limitless dictionaries and directories, but always being aware of using the boundaries of those systems to indicate their short-comings.

Behind all this, I was anti-narrative in picture-making, and therefore in cinema (if you want to tell stories be a novelist). I was not so smitten with the exhibitionism and presumption of actors who are trained to behave that they are not being watched, and there had to be a very very good reason indeed to move a camera; paintings did not move, why should a film-frame? If these ideas covered some of the intellectual ambitions, then the practical limitations were no less stringent and certainly even more constricting. Not at all surprisingly, these films were primitively manufactured, with very low budgets.

With the exception of A Walk through H, Vertical Features Remake and The Falls, they were all self-financed from a salary as a documentary film editor working in the broom-cupboard cutting-rooms of Soho, London, for various now long-vanished film companies, but including Thames Television, the BBC and most significantly the COI, the Central Office of Information, whose name at least, I wish I had invented. There is a name that covers everything in the world with authority. Its methods were to employ an understanding (or misunderstanding) of the world through statistics, unbounded naive optimism - 'all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds', and propaganda techniques inherited from its war-time predecessor, the Crown Film Unit; and it had an accredited audience of at least a sixth of the world's population

For a time, I had access to the British Film Institute Film Library and a key to their projector-rooms. Over two years of night-time viewing, I crash-coursed in world cinema history, mostly with obscure films that few people had heard of, and came to realise that big money, impressive net-working and a union card, in any combination, was never a guarantee of quality, excitement, and certainly not cinematic intelligence. It was both very dispiriting - where was all the image sophistication and image intelligence I had so easily experienced in the world of painting - but also encouraging, for in such a world it might not be so impossible to make some sort of a contribution. Variously, with naive optimism, but also with trepidation because where were the models I could use to legitimise what I wanted to do, I started making films.

Truffaut and the catalogue movie

Truffaut once said that a film-maker always gives himself away with his first film, and my early films certainly set up all the leitmotivs, recipes, agendas, obsessions and fascinations of all the subsequent years of film-making. Certainly here are the beginnings of a singular characteristic trope - the catalogue movie. Most of the subsequent movie-making for me is structured around a list or a catalogue - where the items or events or ideas are approached, ticked off and moved on - using narrative if necessary, using chronological time if necessary, but always essentially fulfilling the obligations of completing a list that is introduced in some form of originating prologue, with the unspoken but clear declaration that what you are about to see is more of the condition of how than what. Here too, in embryonic form, are the birds and the flying and the water, casual death, the neutrality of Nature, the numbering, the listing, the equivocations of statistical information, the melodramas defused by irony, the mockery of dogma and the absence of consolation for life's slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the equivocal humour, the disrespect for cinema narrative and the contempt for cinema manipulation, and the persistent aura of 'passionate detachment' that perhaps has always been more the way painting operates its relationships with a viewer, than the traditional way that cinema manoeuvres its audience.