peter greenaway Tagged Articles at Cinematical

This fascinating piece in the Guardian details British filmmaker Peter Greenaway's (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover) plans to bring to life Leonardo DaVinci's The Last Supper. The effort will be part of a series of projects the director and painter plans to animate classic works of art. Greenaway, according to the article, will use "dramatic lighting, projections, and recordings of actors' voices" to transform The Last Supper into "something close to a film." He plans to expand the moment DaVinci captured into his painting into a larger story stretching from Christ's birth through his crucifixion, and will include "raw and heavy images of Christ's genitalia and naked crucifixion" from other DaVinci works.

Greenaway doesn't plan to stop with The Last Supper -- future plans for bringing works of art to life include works by Veronese, Velázquez, Picasso, Monet and Jackson Pollack; he's even asked the Vatican for permission to project onto Michelangelos' Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. He's already done one project, animating Rembrandt's The Nightwatch in 2006.

The project is not without its critics -- some feel DaVinci's work stands on its own and doesn't need improving. Personally, I think this could be really cool. It's not like Greenaway proposes to deface or destroy classic works of art, he's basically just looking to reinterpret them with the help of media that wasn't available when they were painted. What do you think? Should great works of art be left alone, or could a project like this actually help the art world by exposing people to works of art from a perspective they might otherwise not have considered?

Eating has become more and more difficult in the 21st century. Food isn't always the wondrous, romantic thing depicted in most movies. Recently we have learned about MSG, GMOs, polyunsaturated fats, trans-fats and the presence of the horrid "high fructose corn syrup" in just about everything. (It's in bread. Bread!) Sales of organic foods have increased drastically, and everyone has become an ingredient-reader and an amateur foodie. Now multiply this by about fifteen and you've got Thanksgiving dinner. Who's a vegetarian? Who's a vegan? Who's on the Atkins diet? Does putting the stuffing inside the turkey actually make it poisonous? Were those slivered almonds made on machinery that also processed peanuts? Who's allergic? What's the difference between yams and sweet potatoes? To get yourself prepared, I've assembled a chronological list of food cautionary tales, or hard culinary lessons learned.

Soylent Green (1973)
Is there anyone out there who doesn't yet know the secret component of everyone's favorite future foodstuff? If not, watching this film, directed by Richard Fleischer, will make you want to read the ingredients more often.

The Phantom of Liberty (1974)
The key scene in Luis Bunuel's film takes place at a dinner party. Guests gather around the table, pull down their pants and sit on toilets. They talk, rifle through magazines and otherwise engage in casual conversation. One guest rises, politely excuses himself and shyly asks for the dining room. Once inside, he shuts the door and begins eating. That's really funny, and in the joke, Bunuel asks why we perform one bodily function with great dignity in public and another with shame in private. As humans, our beliefs and behavior are utterly arbitrary. Try not to think about that at the dinner table.

The death of cinema has been blamed on many things, a lot of them related to home viewing. First it was the television, then it was the VCR, now it's the internet. Somewhere in between the latter two, though, is the real killer: the remote control. This is what filmmaker Peter Greenaway (The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover) believes, anyway, and he's talking specifically about linear storytelling in cinema (or, "old fashioned ideas of a narrative, sit-in-the-dark, Hollywood-centered, narrative book-shop cinema"). In an interview with Dutch TV he gives the exact date as September 31, 1983, when the couch potato aid was introduced into homes.

Wait a minute, there is no 31st day in September. What is Greenaway trying to pull here? To tell you the truth, I have no clue what the filmmaker is talking about. Something about his current interest in non-linear, interactive multimedia, such as "the VJ/DJ phenomenon" (you can see him VJing here). If you want to attempt to understand the interview, check out the YouTube clip after the jump ...