Greenaway: Avatar of "Avatar"

Very interesting interview on the BBC with Peter Greenaway, available here for download for about the next week or so.

I had largely forgotten my earlier adoration of Greenaway. "The Falls" , "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover," and, especially, "Drowning by Numbers" (talk about unobtanium... try to find a copy of that) staggered me on release -- hitting me hard on that place where love of seventeenth century painting and eighteenth century music intersect with the narrative strategies of J.G. Ballard. (A larger place than you might imagine...) At any rate, he veered off into realms of non-narrative film making that didn't much interest me.

He's recently finished a movie about Rembrandt's Night Watch -- apparently a sort of highbrow Da Vinci Code, starring Martin Freeman as the painter.

The interview is mostly about movies constructed from densely layered images and motion -- not based on what he calls "third-rate nineteenth century novelistic forms". He makes huge fun of naturalistic movies and ebulliently calls for a cinema based on nothing but itself -- an artificial cinema of images and music.

He really wants to make a 3D film......