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I think my films are always quite self-reflexive and always question 'why am I doing this, is this the right way to do it, what is cinema for, does it have a purpose?

Peter Greenaway

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Peter Greenaway
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: April 5
Actor
Cinematographer
Experimental Artist
Film Director
Film Editor
Painter
Screenwriter
Television Director
Theatrical Director
Writer
Newport
South Wales
Cinema
Right
Films
Way
Question
Always
Quite
Think
Purpose
Thinking
Film
Doe
Reflexive
Self

More quotes by Peter Greenaway

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Anybody who writes a diary insists it must be read by someone else.
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I like a lot of glasses about - it highers the tone.
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Cinema is dead, long live cinema.
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I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic I don't have a 'message', but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world.
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The game Flights of Fancy or Reverse Strip Jump is played from as high a jumping-point as a competitor will dare. After each successful jump, the competitor is allowing to put on an article of clothing. Thirteen jumps is normally more than enough to see a competitor fully dressed for the day.
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Imagine a world where nothing is stable. In the West, we have three moving elements -- Air, Fire, Water -- but at least we can depend on the fourth.
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I am certain that there are two things in life which are dependable: the delights of the flesh and the delights of literature. I have had the good fortune to enjoy them both equally.
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I also think that everyone has an elitist approach to his own art, a complex knowledge of it, whether he is a clockmaker or an engineer. And I think it's perfectly legitimate to make use of this knowledge because it enriches the overall texture of life.
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I have always had severe problems with Austrians. ... Musical, churchy, uptight... nice legs... hypocritical... authoritarian... always insist their dustbins are very clean.
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I don't think we've seen any cinema yet. I think we've seen 100 years of illustrated text.
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I think it is really important to be in some way provocative -- either intellectually or viscerally -- in the films one makes.
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I don't believe in the deplorable notion of realism in the cinema: you can over-reach it, and it becomes as false as convention.
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The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.
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I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.
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Words reproduce themselves pleasurably too.
Peter Greenaway
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Life is full of a thousand red herrings, and it takes the history of a civilisation to work out which are the red herrings and which aren't.
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In practically every film you experience, you can see the director following the text. Illustrating the words first, making the pictures after, and, alas, so often not making pictures at all, but holding up the camera to do its mimetic worst.
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I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.
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Whispering can be a rest from a noisy world of words.
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I do indeed think that cinema is mortal. There is a lot of evidence already that it is dying on its feet.
Peter Greenaway