The cinema is dead, says Peter Greenaway
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Your support makes all the difference.Peter Greenaway, the only British director entered for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, has pronounced the age of cinema "dead", claiming he cannot think of a single truly great movie made in the past 40 years.
"Genuflecting" in front of Shakespeare and churning out endless movies based on books and plays, stars such as Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh had, he said, turned UK cinema into "an extension of a bookshop".
Greenaway, whose new film, The Tulse Luper Suitcases Part One: The Moab Story, will be premiered at Cannes next Saturday, said: "Cinema is the ideal place to bring image and text together, but there's this orthodoxy that the text has to come before the image.
"Force these directors into going to art school and throwing that goddamned pen away. Concentrate on what people see – that's what cinema is all about. I have to go right back to Powell and Pressburger to find multi-layered visual cinema and films that explore the cinematic language."
Greenaway studied painting at Walthamstow Art College before diverging into film-making. "Cinema seems to have ceased to be radical, really experimental, at around about the time the real push for interactivity began – on 31 September 1983, when the zapper was introduced and people started demanding an instant choice in everything they viewed," he said.
Greenaway also warned that snobbery about the new digital technologies threatened to hold back innovation which should be leading cinema into exciting new waters.
Ewan McGregor, whose latest film, Young Adam, about a 1950s beat poet, struggled to find funding in the UK, endorsed some of Greenaway's views about the British film industry. "We still have this terrible hankering to make films for the American market, which I thought we'd changed with Shallow Grave and Trainspotting," he said
A UK Film Council spokesman said: "Powell and Pressburger or Fellini put tremendous emphasis on scripts, as well as imagery.
"The world is not built on Peter Greenaway films, however interesting a film-maker he is. That's one way of making films, and there are many others."
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