Peter Greenaway

After his wife dies, 55-year-old businessman Philip Emmenthal, at the prompting of his playboy son Storey, populates his Geneva villa with eight and a half concubines. Three are from Kyoto, where Storey manages Pachinco palaces. Each has a distinctive personality: a nun, a child bearer, a gambler, a student of Kabuki, a horsewoman with a pet pig, a maid. Philip throws off his strait-laced and repressed attitudes, immersing himself in pleasure... (imdb)

An American architect arrives in Italy, supervising an expedition for a French architect, Boullée, who is famous for his oval structures... (imdb)

The wife of an oafish restaurant owner becomes bored with her husband and considers an affair with a regular patron. (imdb)

Tired of her husband's philanderous ways, the mother of two daughters drowns her husband. With the reluctant help of the local coroner, the murder is obscured (imdb)

Oliver Deuce, a successful doctor, is shattered when his wife is killed in a freak car accident involving the car being driven by Alba Bewick colliding with a very large rare bird (imdb)

An English noblewoman employs a haughty artist to paint portraits of her husband's estate in exchange for sex... (imdb)

As a young girl in Japan, Nagiko's father paints characters on her face, and her aunt reads to her from "The Pillow Book"... (imdb)

An exiled magician finds an opportunity for revenge against his enemies muted when his daughter and the son of his chief enemy fall in love in this uniquely structured retelling of the 'The Tempest'. Intricate staging, graphic nudity, and lavish art production are part of this lurid spectacle. Shakespeare has never seemed quite the same. (imdb)

Tongue-in-cheek, early Greenaway short reflects the incredibly meticulous encyclopedic nature of his early films. An attempt is made to "reconstruct" a proposed, but never made, film according to some reasonably vague directions. The attempt is made over and over because of conflicting interpretations of the instructions. (imdb)

The world has been affected by a mysterious occurrance known as the Violent Unknown Event or VUE. It has caused immortality and disability. Sufferers have learned new and peculiar languages. Some firmly believe in the responsibility of birds. In this 3-hour long film, 92 biographies are presented of sufferers whose surnames begin with the letters FALL... (imdb)

A movie about the corruption in all levels of society. A baby is born from a supposed-to-be virgin woman, so a chain of hysteria about divine intervention in the birth takes place. (imdb)

A short film which has its emphasis on back street walls with peeling posters and the constant pedestrian traffic in the foreground. It has a static camera positioned in front of the walls; experimental editing techniques, no dialogue-just background music, and quick edits of blackness throughout. (imdb)

A woman who lived in the country watched and awaited for the approach of the city. She was convinced they would come directly from the north and only in the afternoon... (IMDB Comments)

A sort of documentary on the people known to have fallen out of windows in a certain time frame in a certain geographical location. One of Greenaway's early short films. (imdb)

With the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt's birth in 2006, NIGHTWATCHING is truly a feast for the senses. Extravagant, suspenseful and sensuously beautiful, the mystery behind the extraordinary artist's infamous painting is perfectly explored by one of the most iconic Directors of our time - Peter Greenaway... (imdb)

An anonymous narrator outlines a bizarre journey taken through "H", aided by a series of extraordinary maps, and his previous dealings with the mysterious Tulse Luper and the keeper of the bird house at the Amsterdam Zoo. (imdb)

The first eight Cantos, interspersed with commentary and effects.

Hypnotic photography of swirling rivers and misty ponds and droning music (not Michael Nyman for a change) form the backdrop to a documentary-style narration about the history of a fictional tribe in the distant past (or is it the far future?). (imdb)

The first of three parts, we follow Tulse Luper in three distinct episodes: as a child during the first World War, as an explorer in Mormon Utah, and as a writer in Belgium during the rise of fascism. Packed with stylistic flourishes, it's a dense, comic study of 20th century history, revolving around the contents of one man's suitcases. (imdb)

A narrator relates a variety of peculiar stories involving characters with the initials HC and their dealings with telephones. These are interspersed with artistic shots of telephone boxes in a variety of locations. (imdb)

Peter Greenaway presents this "Commentary in one hundred parts" on Drowning by Numbers (1987), discussing and analyzing many of the film's more intriguing features. (imdb)

This one is a 4 minute long tribute to a 4 minute long handshake between Greenaway and Hubert Bals.

Tulse Luper is a 20th century everyman whose collection of 92 suitcases intersects with every person, event and movement in history. Here in the second of a three part story, we find him working in a cinema, which gives him ample opportunity to cross paths with virtually every artistic device and dramatic character known to man. (imdb)

The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 3: From Sark to the Finish is the last part of Tulse Luper's adventures. Greenaway ended the story with a surprise.

Greenaway's documentary short shows us...well, 26 bathrooms, some in use by their owners while we visit. Whee! (imdb)

J'accuse is an essayistic documentary in which Greenaway's fierce criticism of today's visual illiteracy is argued by means of a forensic search of Rembrandt's Nightwatch. (imdb)

Documentary film by Peter Greenaway made for Thames Television, in which people who have survived being struck by lightning relate their experiences against a typically Greenaway backdrop of lists, black humour, 'collated statistics', bizarre camera angles and Michael Nyman music. (imdb)

Historical drownings in the Seine are catalogued, dissected and elaborated, with multilayered visuals and 'documentary' asides. (imdb)

Follows Tulse Luper as he is swept into the ill-fortuned tides of the 20th century and forced to spend his life in a succession of imprisonments.

This short is a profile of the designer, showing her at work in her studio, traveling, and socializing.

The film tells the story of Hendrik Goltzius, a 16th century Dutch engraver of erotic prints, who convinces the Margrave of Alsace into paying for printing two illustrated books, one of them a version of the Old Testament. To further enhance the deal, Goltzius and his company staff offer to perform dramatisations of six Old Testament erotic stories, symbolising the six sexual taboos: fornication, incest, adultery, paedophilia, prostitution and necrophilia. (iksv.org)

The three directors explore the future of film and the limits of 3D: Godard's "The Three Disasters" is a challenging blizzard of images, sounds and texts; Greenaway's "Just in Time" explores each corner of Guimarães while Pêra's "Cinesapiens" is a playful sci-fi set in a movie theatre. The closing film of the Critics' Week sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival, 3X3Dis three times cinema in 3D, looking back at cinema itself. (IKSV)

The venerated filmmaker Eisenstein is comparable in talent, insight and wisdom, with the likes of Shakespeare or Beethoven; there are few - if any - directors who can be elevated to such heights. On the back of his revolutionary film Battleship Potemkin, he was celebrated around the world, and invited to the US... (imdb)

Pictures of a protest supplemented with some spirited rock music.

Peter Greenaway's celebration of water, and the human relationship with it, choreographed to Michael Nyman music and culminating with a synchronised swimming sequence! (imdb)

This is an astounding documentary film showing (and describing to us) what it is like to be beside the sea in Britain. The film was started in 1976 and shelved for a while, then completed in 1983. Greenaway offers us an eclectic array of images related to the sea - boats, slides of fish, photographs, huge waves crashing against the rocks, piers, Blackpool Tower, lighthouses - while a narrator describes a mind-boggling set of statistics and information of the British Coastline. (petergreenaway.org.uk)

This is an entertaining mix of animation, theatre and dance from Greenaway, accompanied by the music of Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. The film is staged on a set based on a 17th century Theatre of Anatomy. (petergreenaway.org.uk)

Short documentary on retailer Terence Conran.

4 American Composers offers startling and intimate insights into the music and ideas of four very original American composers: John Cage, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, and Robert Ashley. Incorporating performance and conversations with and about the artists, these programs create an experience that extends beyond the music alone, that explores each composer's concepts and expresses their personalities. (philipglass.com)

A short made for TV with director Peter Greenaway discussing the dazzling 3.5 minute opening sequence from his film, 'Prospero's Books (1991)'. As Prospero (John Gielgud) walks through his library Greenaway comments on the 100 historical, mythological, biblical & fictional characters occupying the library. (imdb)

A profile of stunt entertainer Eddie Kidd.