Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway has gained a cult following producing a string of visually striking and often highly experimental arthouse films. Having trained as a painter, an impressive use of colour and composition is very apparent in his often lavish films.

Greenaway's entry into film-making was slow. He didn't make The Draughtsman's Contract, his first feature, until he was 40. After completing art school, the director spent 11 years working at the Central Office of Information, where he edited three-minute programmes on topics such as the declining sheep population in Wales and the rising pollution levels in Newcastle. It was while there though that he began to make short films, which included Train (1966), Tree (1966) and Windows (1975).

He later gained a reputation for originality with such works as A Walk Through H (1978) and The Falls (1980), which contains brief biographies of 92 people who have fallen victim to a Violent Unknown Event involving birds.

Strange topics and themes have been prevalent in many of Greenaway's films. The place of death in the evolutionary chain, for example, was dealt with in his feature film A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), which tells the tale of twin brothers who grieve for the wives they have lost in a car crash caused by an escaped swan. Meanwhile, in The Belly of an Architect (1987), an American architect's physical and spiritual decline is contrasted with his wife's pregnancy.

In Drowning By Numbers (1988) three generations of women, all called Cissis Colpitts, kill their male companions by drowning them in a tin bath, the sea and a swimming pool respectively. A series of numbers from one to one hundred run throughout the course of the film; hence the title.

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), followed a saga of betrayal and revenge and came complete with plenty of sex and nudity. It ends with a cannibalism scene.

John Gielgud starred in Prospero's Books (1991), which dealt with themes from Shakespeare's The Tempest, while the shapes and tones of early Renaissance high art are captured in The Baby of Macon (1993), which depicts a shocking medieval world.

The Pillow Book (1995), was an adaptation of an erotic 10th century Japanese literary classic called The Pillow Book of Sei Shonogan. Greenaway set his version in contemporary Japan and Hong Kong and tells the story of an aspiring writer who attempts to win over her publisher by sending to his offices a series of men whose bodies she has covered from head to toe with calligraphy.

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