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He has long been sceptical about the restrictive boundaries of cinema, and you could not say that his films were obsessive about the traditional characteristics of cinema. His films are very distinctive and stray well off the beaten path. Some commentators have said that his films are anti-cinematic and that he is not a filmmaker at all. He might not disagree with that. He is disquieted by the inability of the cinema that we now have, to give us all the rich potential excitements of the early 21st century world. No touch, no smell, no temperature, short duration. Passive, sedentary audiences, no real audience dialogue, overloaded technical specifications in set piece High Street architecture, limited to a single frame at a time, visible from only one direction. Excessive desire for reality, temporary sets, actors trained to pretend, flat illusions, little comprehension of a screen as a screen. Omnipotent financial vested interests, and the tyrannies of the frame, the actor and the text. And most disturbing of all, subject to the tyranny of the camera.

The list of disenchantments is long. He is far from being alone in holding these views. His present particular strategy to investigate and change these shortcomings, as he sees them, is to invest much time in extra cinema activities, if only in the hope of bringing those activities back in to cinema to find ways to reinvent it. For reinvention in the cinema is surely long overdue and very, very necessary. A medium without constant reinvention is doomed to perish. Many say now that there are no great inventors working in cinema any more. They have gone elsewhere. Perhaps they are right.

Even though Peter Greenaway grew up in England, he was actually born in Newport in Wales (his mother is Welsh). The family left Wales when Greenaway was three years old and moved to Essex, England. At an early age he decided he wanted to be a painter. He developed an interest in European cinema, focusing on the films of Antonioni, Bergman, Godard, Pasolini and Resnais. In 1962Events January January 1 Western Samoa becomes independent from New Zealand January 3 Pope John XXIII excommunicates Fidel Castro January 4 New York City introduces a train that operates without a crew on-board January 8 Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is e he started studying at the Walthamstow College of Art , where amongst his fellow students was musician Ian DuryIan Dury ( May 12, 1942 March 27, 2000) was a rock and roll singer, songwriter, and bandleader. He is best known as founder and lead singer of the British band Ian Dury and the Blockheads though he began his musical career in pub rock act Kilburn and the (who Greenaway would later cast in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover ). Greenaway would spend the next three years there, and at the time of arriving there he made his first film, Death of Sentiment. It was about church yard furniture, crosses, flying angels, typography on grave stones, and was filmed in four large London cemeteries. In 19651965 was a common year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1965 calendar). Events January-February January 4 United States President Lyndon Johnson proclaims his " Great Society" during his State of the Union address. January 14 Prime Ministers of N he joined the Central Office of Information (COI), where he remained for the next fifteen years as a film editor and then a director. In 1966Events January January 1 In a coup, Colonel Jean-Bedel Bokassa ousts president David Dacko and takes over the Central African Republic. January 2 Strike of public transportation workers in New York City ends January 13 January 3 First Acid Test at the Fil he made a film called Train, composed of footage of the last steam train arriving at Waterloo stationWaterloo is a major train station and transport interchange located in the Waterloo district of London, which was itself named after the Battle of Waterloo in which Napoleon was defeated near Brussels. Somewhat ironically, it is now London's gateway for t (directly behind the COI), structured into an abstract Man RayMan Ray ( August 27, 1890 November 18, 1976) was an American Dadaist photographer and film director. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia, while also being a painter, object-maker, and avant-garde film maker, he is best known as a surrealist photograph ballet mécanique, all cut to a musique concrete track. He also made a film called Tree in 1966Events January January 1 In a coup, Colonel Jean-Bedel Bokassa ousts president David Dacko and takes over the Central African Republic. January 2 Strike of public transportation workers in New York City ends January 13 January 3 First Acid Test at the Fil, the tree in question was surrounded by concrete outside the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank in London. The 1970sMillennia: 1st millennium 2nd millennium 3rd millennium Centuries: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s Years: 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 Events and trends would see Greenaway getting much more serious with his filmmaking. In 1978Events January January 1 The Copyright Act of 1976 takes effect, making sweeping changes to United States copyright law. January 1 Air India's Boeing 747 explodes near Bombay 213 dead. January 4 Referendum in Chile supports policies of Augusto Pinochet. he made Vertical Features Remake and A Walk Through H . The former is an examination of arithmetical structure and the latter a journey through various maps. In 1980 Greenaway delivered his most ambitious and extraordinary film of his career, The Falls - a mammoth, fantastical, absurdist encyclopedia of flight-associated material all relating to 92 victims of the Violent Unknown Event (VUE). The 1980s would see some of Greenaway's best films, The Draughtsman's Contract in 1982, A Zed & Two Noughts in 1985, The Belly of an Architect in 1987, Drowning by Numbers in 1988, and his most successful (in the mainstream) film in 1989, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover . He collaborated with the artist Tom Phillips (also in 1989) on a television mini-series called A TV Dante , dramatizing the first few cantos of Dante's Inferno. The 1990s brought the visually spectacular Prospero's Books in 1991, the controversial The Baby of Mâcon in 1993, The Pillow Book in 1996, and 8½ Women in 1999.

Greenaway is currently working on his most ambitious film project, The Tulse Luper Suitcases , a multimedia extravaganza featuring innovative film techniques. In Greenaway's mind we have not seen any cinema yet. His ambition (as stated above) is to try and reinvent it. The world of cinema would be a duller place without him.