Quote

The pretence that numbers are not the humble creation of man, but are the exacting language of the Universe and therefore possess the secret of all things, is comforting, terrifying and mesmeric.

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
Creation
Numbers
Exacting
Secret
Pretence
Universe
Terrifying
Language
Comforting
Things
Possess
Men
Humble
Therefore

More quotes by Peter Greenaway

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Investigation is never complete.
Peter Greenaway
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We are all united by the phenomenon that we have a body and that body is universally the same, more or less. If we lose sight of that perspective, everything can desperately suffer.
Peter Greenaway
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In a world where we can all be our own filmmakers, the old elites are disappearing and there is no desire to look at somebody else's dream anymore because you can go off and make your own.
Peter Greenaway
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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.
Peter Greenaway
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Works of art are never finished, just stopped.
Peter Greenaway
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Words reproduce themselves pleasurably too.
Peter Greenaway
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It seems so tragic to me that so many filmmakers are making movies up against this extra-ordinary revolution with one eye closed and two hands tied behind their backs.
Peter Greenaway
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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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Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.
Peter Greenaway
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I don't think we've seen any cinema yet. I think we've seen 100 years of illustrated text.
Peter Greenaway
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I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it.
Peter Greenaway
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The best painting is totally non-narrative. It doesn't have to tell you a story.
Peter Greenaway
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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.
Peter Greenaway
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Continuity is boring.
Peter Greenaway
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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.
Peter Greenaway
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Eisenstein was a good editor. I was trained as a film editor, and I've no doubt that the editor is key to a film.
Peter Greenaway
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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.
Peter Greenaway
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There are basically only two subject matters in all Western culture: sex and death. We do have some ability to manipulate sex nowadays. We have no ability, and never will have, to manipulate death.
Peter Greenaway
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A really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter. For painting requires a certain blindness, a partial refusal to be aware of all the options.
Peter Greenaway
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You should be allowed to rub out and start again, it means that you are human. The purists are tedious, they tell you a mistake is like an enduring black mark. Nonsense -- better to be human than some infernal machine never going wrong.
Peter Greenaway