Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice

Clive Myer: I know you have lectured at film schools and you have an active relationship with the Netherlands Film and Television Academy and the International Film School Wales so Peter, can you imagine why so many film schools are actually propagating entertainment rather than ‘ideas’ as a way of making films?

PG: Well we have a subject here which we could take ten hours couldn’t we and I think it is related to general education around the world and through our perceptions of what we think is necessary. We educate very much within a capitalist, money-based system which in the some senses, in practical terms, make a huge amount of sense. The necessities of first of all finding a way to live. Whether you look at that as a series of jobs or career, or a vocation is highly problematical and I don’t really think our education system can deal with it very well. So what do they do, they teach us how to be economically successful, isn’t that the point of most western education and the far reaches of philosophical import and the meaning of life etc, largely is either an autodidactic pursuit which we do because we are fascinated about living per say, but I don’t think our educational system has really taken enormous amount of account for that. But then again, on the other hand, that is how 99.999 per cent of the world population lives anyway. You and I are part of an extraordinary privileged minute minority who can engage in intellectual pursuits, can associate ourselves with the rarefied areas of philosophical examination and to life; you can’t possibly expect the whole world to think in the way that we do. I am always very much aware that all the high points of civilisation of which I cherish, have basically created the situation of 3 per cent of the population supported by 97 per cent of everybody else. I spent a lot of time looking at the Heian dynasty in Japan, I made a film several years ago called The Pillow Book (1996) and was fascinated by the recherché nature of that civilisation. It was one of the most sophisticated civilisations that’s ever existed. The population of Japan then was about five million and it really supported an elite of about three hundred thousand. Look at Versailles, at the Weimar Republic or the Han Dynasty in China, it’s always the same so I am always aware of this incredible dichotomy about privilege and not privilege. You might say that we’ve found our own particular ways to be where we want to be by hard work, but there is always an awful lot of good luck in it. I used to believe that once upon a time that talent will out, but that’s absolutely not true, totally not true. If you think about it, 51 per cent of the world’s population are females, and there is an enormous pool of talent, and has it come out, hardly ever. So the notion that talent will out is not true at all. But also I believe in the maxim that fortune favours the prepared mind, and again you know and I know that there are huge numbers of paper films that exist in the world which are vastly disproportionate to the production of film making material. I have I suppose three careers now, I still am a filmmaker and we are busily making films, but I am also deeply interested in my first love which has always been painting and I have a second career, which could be described as curatorship, so I am associated now with many collections and galleries all over the world and I am putting on lots of exhibitions, and I am always aware that every museum we have contains about 3 per cent of what man has ever made, so 97 per cent has entirely disappeared. Maybe it’s a good thing, because where would we keep all this work? But it always seems to be the same. Gore Vidal said that the population of America is some 360 million people but there are only about twenty thousand people who read books. So ever since I was 17 and saw the Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman and decided to be a film director, I knew right from the beginning that I was going to have to be associated with a huge amounts of contradictions and paradoxes but I had to accept the notion of being a highly privileged, elitist, overeducated Englishman, white, a member of no minorities whatsoever, in a very privileged position and see if I could plough a furrow through all that, so when you ask me general questions about the notion of filmmaking education, in some curious way I’m nonplussed because I can’t possibly give you any answers. I can only talk to you about my personal experiences.

My central bug is visual literacy. We have a text-based culture; we have a text-based cinema. I think that’s very, very unfortunate. We ought to have an image-based cinema. Every time you see a film you can see the director following the text. Cinema knows this; cinema knows it is deeply impoverished because it always goes back to the bookshop. What are the big things of the last ten years – Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings – these aren’t films, these are illustrated books, but this is a very obvious thing to say because the books and the films are out in the world at the same time, but you look at the 99.9 per cent of all filmmaking, that it’s basically illustrated text, so I would say to you, you probably have never seen cinema all you have seen is 113 years of illustrated text, which is something completely different. But faced with those dilemmas there are a lot of problems and I think you have to negotiate where you think your intellectual position is in all this. I am now 66; I hope to live till I’m 80. I have, what, 15, 14 years left; I make a film once every 9 months, human gestation period, so if I’m lucky I can make 12 more films. I’m going to stick to that. I know my audiences virtually don’t exist anymore, I know the cinema that I’m interested in virtually doesn’t exist anymore; I know that the European art cinema is dead. I give you a date, it is 31 September 1983 when the zapper or the remote control was introduced into the living rooms of the world. Cinema’s a passive entertainment, you sit in the dark, what the fuck are you sitting in the dark for, man is not an nocturnal animal, you have to sit still if you’re watching a feature film for 120 minutes, and you’re looking in one direction. Godard famously said, ‘The world is all around you why on earth are you looking in one direction?’ So we’re living paradoxes, it is a totally artificial phenomenon that really makes no sense at all. One ray of light, I do believe that the modern technologies are opening doors and windows, and political doors and windows and social doors and windows which will radically transform the notions of what we think are cinema. But I think probably it won’t necessarily help me, because I think the notions of where people want to take cinema are not particularly, and have never really been, apart from one or two Belgians and one or two Parisian French, the direction that I would like to take it, so I plough a very narrow furrow I think with a vastly diminishing audience and really I don’t think would like to imagine that I was just a product for a film museum, though it is interesting, the film museum have taken me over here now and everything is being archived here. There is still a trickling of extraordinary intense appreciation, but to be counted in thousands and not tens of thousands. So all the questions you asked me, again I feel in themselves are deeply paradoxical.

CM: I’m going to keep bringing you back to film education yet at the same time move off into film philosophy and try and interweave them so that the questions of what kind of film theory and practice film students might get involved in begins to makes more sense. Going back to what you said earlier, that film schools probably teach the way they do because people have to live, points to a paradox for you, assuming that you are living off the filmmaking work that you are doing, not just the curating.

PG: John Cage said it normally takes 15 years for a passionate desire to promote a certain body of work to actually take off and become independent, and it worked perfectly. I made a film called The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), after 15 years from when I’d seen Bergman’s The Seventh Seal almost to the month and since then I have been totally, totally independent, I have never made a commercial, and never ever compromised as far as I can see. Again it has to be a position of extraordinary privilege. There is a secret to this again. When I showed my films for the first time not in this city but in Rotterdam who used to have the best film festival, I’m quite convinced, in the 1980s I was discovered by a man called Kees Kasander, he was the pupil of an extraordinary famous film cineaste called Hubert Bals,¹ who was the most extraordinary film cineaste I have ever come across. There is a famous anecdote about him, he spent his entire life in cinemas, lived in the dark, ate junk food, and he knew absolutely everybody in the filming world at that time, and he had some minor operation, I think it was an in-growing toenail, and had to spend three days away from the cinema in a hospital, had a heart attack and died. It was like massive dose of cold turkey. His funeral was extraordinary, practically everybody was there – from Scorsese to Godard, to Rivette, to Hollis Frampton; the entire breach from top to bottom – as they just realised that this was the number one cineaste probably, the most extraordinary, amazing man. And I think he made the Rotterdam film festival extraordinary, but his pupil was a man called Kees Kasander, and Kees Kasander came to me and gave me this extraordinary offer, he said provided I didn’t want to use Elizabeth Taylor in a Hollywood movie he would basically support me for the rest of my film career. Can you imagine, a desperately, struggling filmmaker given such an offer, I couldn’t possibly believe it, rubbish, go away. How could you offer me this extraordinary resource? I met him again three years later and he made the same offer, so we tried and then we went away and we made a film in Rotterdam zoo called A Zed and two Noughts (1985) and he and I have been together ever since. He finds all the money, creates all the logistics, all I have to do is come with the ideas and make the movies. I can think of only one better relationship in the world, Raúl Ruiz, you know the ex-Chilean filmmaker, he had a producer probably Columbian which explains a lot, who said you only make films for me; I don’t want the films you make for me to be seen by anybody else. So that really is Pope Julius II and Michelangelo, there’s the ceiling, go for it, you have as long as you like, as much money as you like, do it. So this relationship again puts me in an extraordinary privileged position.

CM: Very simply, finding partnerships that work?

PG: But they’re so rare aren’t they? If you think of all the producer/director partnerships you can image, you know, Woody Allen had a long standing relationship with his producer, then Wim Wenders, Godard occasionally, but after 3 or 4 films they break up, the nature of human relations, etc. But we are now about to embark upon our sixteenth feature film and we must have made about 300 other films of other descriptions, so it’s extraordinary, so you come to me worrying about film education about this most privileged business and I just throw this back in your face it’s so curiously, I don’t know, so distant from my preoccupation.

CM: You see, on these questions, the way film education has changed and universities have changed in the UK, I should imagine everywhere else as well, so many more film courses, so many media courses.

PG: So many more graduates, so many more film festivals than there are days in the year. All this is very bad for the health of the cinema. The balance has gone completely wrong, which is another indication to me why basically cinema is dead and we shouldn’t really worry about it any more.

CM: On the other hand, you know, it opens up many more possibilities because if people are thinking in different ways.

PG: It’s a bit like art school, I went to art school and the number of people going through art school who actually justify their promise is miniscule, absolutely miniscule. First of al1, the arts schools even then would say forget all the women, they’re not going to make it, the difficulties simply of being a woman in a patriarchal society, the problems of distribution and organisation, of the canon of good taste is probably going to predicate against it. I’m thinking back to the 300 art students I knew, there was only one who broke through and he didn’t even break through as a painter, he came through as a musician, Ian Dury. But where have all these amazing talented people gone? How did art school help them? What did they do? Did it just make them better people? Did it just open their eyes to a more exciting, visual vocabulary? Where do these people go? In a curious way, though people were very derogatory about the females, there was a way that the females by being educated, would at least be in good position to pass on their education to their children if they should have some, which wouldn’t exist in the male’s orientated phenomenon. So I’m deeply, deeply critical of the point of making film schools or art schools anyway.

CM: I remember when I was at film school in the early 1970s and a Spanish student friend said that the universities in Spain were opening up and huge numbers of people were now being educated, The negative side being there wouldn’t be the jobs for them but the positive side was that there would be very well educated lorry drivers and in one sense that’s a wonderful thing, because there will be a more educated audience.

PG: OK where is it? The promise, apart from maybe Almodovar just did not manifest itself did it. It’s a bit like Russia’s now open free market enterprise. Have you seen any Russian films? I go the Moscow film festival regularly and its crap, absolutely crap, they might cover the Red Square now in artificial snow for three days, you might be able to borrow the Russian army, but that doesn’t improve anything.

CM: But things only last a short period of time before they move somewhere else or on to something else, like the New Wave, like Dogme.

PG: But we are talking about a little tiny minority talking to another little tiny minority aren’t we. I mean, one doubts about major cinema now, because happily that’s collapsing all over the place isn’t it. It’s petering out everywhere seemingly, even Hollywood suggests now with the price of tickets that people just simply are not going to the cinema anymore. From 100 per cent of people I suppose something like 90 per cent probably watch their movies on television. Maybe, I don’t know, another 5 per cent probably buy the DVD’s, but that’s collapsing as well now. There’s only about 5 per cent of people in the world who actually go to those funny places called cinemas. I’ve just come back from Brazil. I thought all Brazilians went to the cinema; not true, I’ve been prostheletysing Nightwatching (2007) in Japan, I thought at least Japanese young people go to the cinema, not true. People just are not going to the cinema anymore. Mind you I would say that with a big shout that cinema really is dead. It’s really brain dead. There is a whole phenomenon which I think is much more interesting which is a simply the notion of the screen and the screens are around us, there’s probably five cameras in here looking at us anyway; were all on screen all the time, so I think that the mobile phone in my pocket is the phenomenon that’s going to be really interesting. I’m now a devotee of Second Life ² and I’m making movies now on Second Life so I think apart from the sheer excitement of handling a new material, the whole digital revolution, the phenomenon of the cinema high street really is either a totally fossil phenomenon or such a minority that it’s irrelevant. People just are not going to the cinema any more.

CM: But cinema is a different experience to watching a film at home or in an art gallery.

PG: But you’re going to have to change, you’re going to have to manoeuvre. They said this about cinema in the beginning didn’t they in 1905.

CM: Didn’t they say this about theatre as well. Theatre still has an audience. OK, what’s on in theatre may be problematic, we’re not talking about that at the moment. But you know the 1970s when there was an independent cinema there was a kind of independent theatre as well.

PG: Yes but you know, what’s your bug? What are you trying to say? What do you want? What are you visioning about? What are you prosthelytising?

CM: I’m trying to give something of a hope to people who are going to film schools or are having a film education or are independent filmmakers who can actually begin to bring, I will talk to you about theories of representation and your own work in a second, but who can bring theory and practice together and actually work on projects which remain dialectical, remain something which the audience can actually participate in thinking through.

PG: If you don’t have a canon of appreciation if you don’t have educated people who are going to be fascinated by this you are farting in the wind aren’t you?

CM: But as there is such a large educational flow and OK one can be as critical as you like of Media Studies, Film Studies, Cultural Studies, but there is an educational awareness going on and yes of course it’s still a minority.

PG: It was Giacometti who said that your grandmother probably knows nothing about Picasso but be certain Picasso knew everything about your grandmother. But again we are talking about the top three per cent the Gore Vidal twenty thousand people who read.

I don’t know how in a curious way a cinema can sustain itself on that phenomenon. You might deride Hollywood and I might, but my god they are sustaining the world’s industry. They’re providing the cinemas that stay open for fifty two weeks of the year of which maybe if I’m very lucky I can squeeze in ten days somewhere. My cinema could never keep us and my filmmaking practice can never keep a cinema open. I am a total, total, highly privileged parasite.

CM: OK, I’ll bring you back to that in a minute let me take you somewhere else. You talked about the first twenty films you made being about representation, I’m not sure what happened after those twenty, but can you talk a little bit more about that and what your thoughts are.

PG: Well I suppose again without going into massive detail I’ve always thought that my film career would have been organised in three parts, that sounds very manipulative and its only by hindsight I can say that. I wanted from a very early adolescent age to be a painter, I am absolutely convinced that painting is the supreme visual communication. I think the first mark the first notion of anything man made was probably a painting and when civilisation goes down the tubes as it surely will, the last mark will be a painting. Deridda famously said “the image always has the last word”, but maybe that does not go far enough because after all the written word is an image anyway, so I am all for the notion of communication through the notions of visual representation. So I think all my early films certainly up to The Draughtsman’s Contract are really the films of a painter. They are about all the things that makes painting so exciting, about notions of form, about notions of shape and colour, notions of abstraction all the things that basically you can’t manoeuvre into a cinematic world which makes their differences. But I began to find that it was an extremely lonely world, full of practitioners who were often enormously hidebound. I was generously supported in the early days by the British Film Institute, but I could see how fashions changed every eighteen months. So I can see how these sorts of notions effect the educational institutions and practices as well, I suppose here too it’s often the singer not the song, it’s the person who manipulates the education and its systems. I was very lucky, Peter Sainsbury, a name you know, really went out on a limb to support me. He decided to leave and go to Australia, a guy who really set me on my feet, incredible.

CM: He also funded our first film JUSTINE, by the Marquis de Sade (1976). It was really the first narrative deconstructive feature film in the UK, which I suppose was being developed at the same time that Wollen and Mulvey were working on their films. But that period came crashing down for various cultural and philosophical reasons, I think, as well as commercial reasons. The BFI Production Board went through a series of changes and then was disbanded which was unfortunate for independent filmmakers.

PG: At that time I was dead lucky, because Channel 4 had just started. My first feature film The Draughtman’s Contract ran out of money and Channel 4 came along and bailed us out. Still extraordinarily profitable for me I had an amazing contract; an association which still earns me money from way back when. The second part of my career, then, I was fed up sitting in an ivory tower, being so incredibly privileged and my movies going to all the film festivals in the world, patted on the back, no money, still living on carrots and chips, not finding an audience I wanted to talk to. Then of course we’re talking about middle period Nouvelle Vague and the great middle period of Italian cinema. I thought my next ambition I must get a film at the Cannes Film Festival, I must find some credence here, I can’t go on making the same movies over and over and over again, which only a very, very small number of people are looking at, but you know about that, most cinema, underground cinema never becomes above-ground cinema, and the number of juries I have sat on year after year and seen the same goddamn films over and over and over again. Because there’s no knowledge, there’s no understanding of the underground before. This is terribly unlike painting, underground painting always becomes over-ground painting. Think of Picasso, think of any well known painter, this is a phenomenon that just doesn’t exist in the cinema. Then again I became very, very cynical. I can write scripts very easily, I’m highly literate but all the time I want to be highly visual but as you know I cannot go to a film studio or a producer with four paintings, three lithographs and a book of drawings they want know what the fuck I’m talking about as most people are visually illiterate and we have text based cinema. And if that text you present them with already has succeeded in the marketplace well even better, I mean how many Jane Austin movies are we ever going to have to stop seeing? So I became very disillusioned by that and in the early 1990s I virtually gave up. I didn’t want to do it anymore, there was no purpose in it. But then at the same time I started doing a huge amount of museum curatorship and we had a whole series of big exhibitions all over Europe about different aspects of notions of what I thought the connections were between general ideas about art with a capital A and cinema and I began to discover the excitements I suppose of the new digital technology and slowly I crept back in again. So now I think the main push of my excitements really is an old filmmaker playing with new toys and I have an enormous following all over the world who are interested and want me to be some sort of a flagship video performance artist – this grey-haired old man who now has huge career as a VJ. We were in Moscow last week giving a big VJ show, I am in Bari next week, we go to Montevideo in three weeks time, so I am now a VJ for my sins so why is that, because I argued you know we need to change cinema and this is one of the ways to change cinema. There’s a way in which the recapitulation of the audiences now are attaching themselves to the notion not of cinematic cinema but of notions of the screen and the screen outside the cinema. It is like cinema outside of cinema where I think things should really be now.

CM: Does it matter where the screen is? Can it be anywhere?

PG: Not at all, preferably not in a cinema.

CM: Why are you so against traditional cinema?

PG: Because they are small included, occluded places which have a reputation and a taste which I’m not very interested in anymore, because I think they still fulfil the same function. Martin Scorsese makes exactly the same films as D. W. Griffiths, the only big difference is the publicity value. We still play with the same tropes the same paradigms, the sort of narrative insistence of continuity with beginnings, middles and ends, psychologically based characters which are already predicated in reel one, Christian mythologies again moving from a position of negativity to positively – a very simple way of saying happy endings, or let’s say endings with some sense of resolution. So I still think you know cinema has not moved at all its been pathetic its always been slow its always been lazy and I don’t think it’s advanced. If you really believe cinema began in 1895 look how far literature has travelled, look how far music has travelled, look how far painting has travelled, Van Gogh to Andy Warhol, where is that comparison to be made in the cinema? I mean H.G. Wells was writing in 1895 and now we’re post-Perec, post-Borges, post-Márquez. Huge changes, when you think of music Strauss was still alive in 1895 and now we are post-Stockhausen so where has cinema travelled in that same period?

CM: Let me get you away from cinema as an entity and get you back to cinema as a kind of philosophical relationship with an audience, with a viewer, with a thought system, with ideas, because really I’m interested in a more sophisticated understanding of what representation is. It’s not to do with whether it’s visual or whether it’s literal but actually the way knowledge is transmitted and perceived and in a sense the way we interpret the world, so I want to talk to you a bit more about your notion of the relationship between film and philosophy and that if cinema is based on the notion of the idea and is a form of philosophy, which I think you would probably suggest it is, that the viewer would implicitly use the equation, philosophy over imagination is equal to representation over understanding.

PG: Yes well, how shall I answer this big question? There is generally in the world now a feeling isn’t there post-digital revolution the last eight thousand years our civilisation has been organised by the text masters. He, or she, can handle texts which created our culture, created our laws, created our holy books, created the whole way we perceive ourselves. But maybe there is a feeling now that these textual gatekeepers have to move aside, they really have to move aside and we are now seeing the very beginnings of notions of a visual communicative world. If that were to be the case, I am not saying anything new here, Umberto Eco aimed primarily for the same phenomenon, then we are faced with a dilemma because if I believe that most people are visually illiterate who are now going to be the highly sophisticated organisers of the phenomenon of the primacy of the image? You see there is an important notion about English culture which is very, very un-visual. We have a very strong literary culture we can probably offer the best literature in Europe. But who could we export as a painter? There are many, many English painters but maybe Constable, Turner and if you’re lucky Francis Bacon but that’s about it and then if you do a return phenomenon and think of what France, Italy and Holland can offer in terms of painting it’s huge and they do manage in this city especially, I think they say in the golden age of Dutch painting, which is about 1600 to about 1670, there were probably a million paintings painted in this city by at least twenty thousand painters. Extraordinary heritage you can’t find that. You know, was it Truffaut who said that English cinema was a contradictory term what he was really saying was English visual imagination is a contradictory term, where is it? It is very, very little on the ground. You know when Reynolds actually wrote his discourses everybody thought this man’s a painter he can’t possibly write, he must have had a ghost writer and you know the terrible way the English establishment attacked R. B. Kitai which eventually drove him out of the country this extraordinary painter and they dumped down on him because he was too clever because he was too much associated and too articulate with actually what he was doing as a visual phenomenon. So there is an enormous amount of, I can’t really say its anti-visual because it is an enormous amount of ignorance and I think that permeates English cinema which is very, very un-visual and notions I think probably of English art education which is also highly problematical so we have some really, really serious problems here. What am I saying? Let me try and wrap it up. I believe that all of us are experiencing some sort of cusp of an educational phenomenon which is basically moving now from the primacy of the text to the primacy of the image. I hope even consciously or subconsciously that I am somehow wishing to be associated with that so my products would be relevant to that phenomenon. There is a way that those people who command text are highly respected because of the traditions and the 8,000 year backup but now we really seriously have to consider the notions of philosophical discourse being a phenomenology that is associated with visual communication and it has not been in this country and I rather suspect, which I can associate myself with in educational terms, I can do a lot of teaching in Belgium, I am off in three weeks time doing Harvard university lectures, everywhere I go I give lectures in film and I constantly meet educationalists like yourself who feel all this sort of change, this cusp, this confusion, this deep dissatisfaction with the notions of the status quo. I will argue and constantly argue that the notion of cinema has not realised its potential. You listen to Bazin in 1921, it hasn’t become the great twentieth-century medium, cinema has not become the medium of intense philosophical discourse, it’s somehow lost it’s way, it’s missed the point. If you think about the last great splurge of philosophical consideration it’s French, and it’s basically textual again. It is so semantically textual it’s really only about text talking about text, so we haven’t made any serious notions of ontological research into this new phenomenon but, and I think everybody says the digital revolution has touched us and is touching us in ways we don’t even remotely understand yet. If you think it began in September 1983 that’s not so long ago, so maybe we are in a massive, massive learning curve.

CM: What about if you draw a line from say John Berger who was looking at images not words in Ways of Seeing and cross over to France where you’ve got Godard and writers/academics like Jacques Aumont, back to the UK with filmmakers like Sally Potter and yourself, then there is what one might call a body of work. You are putting over this very pessimistic view and I am constantly pushing back to you this optimistic view that says actually it is possible to work and it is possible to do it in not quite such an elitist grand English gentleman manner that you are suggesting in your discourse. And where you talk about technology this could be seen as democratised access to knowledge in the form of the internet. You asked me what my bugbear was and I think it would probably be better if I tell you more directly, which is that I’m not sure if it’s about image or text or whether actually it matters that much because what it is about is the position of ourselves as subjects in the world, subject to a knowledge which has, what Althusser used to call dominant ideology, the dominant knowledge and therefore how can we think outside of that perspective. My own work is about collective consciousness and the idea that it’s very difficult, because of notions of representation and philosophy, to actually think and behave and make films and watch films outside of that collectivity. My interests in Noel Burch was about something I am trying to redefine at the moment both academically at conferences and in writing but also in my films which is the notion of diegesis, the notion which is not to do with Plato and Aristotle which it was originally, the narrating, the telling of a story which you know a lot about and you’ve addressed that in lots of different ways. But actually it’s about the way we understand ourselves inside that narrative or that space or that reflection of the world and that if one tries to open up that diegetic space and make it more amenable, whether it’s through formal intervention or whether it’s through even the content of what is within a piece of moving image. Let us call it moving image and let us assume for a moment that moving images are more relevant to our discussion than still images or even paintings because moving images actually address that notion of our consciousness in every dimension.

PG: There is another argument but I doubt that because there is very little contemplative value.

CM: Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma for me is probably the best example. Godard has managed to open up questions of consciousness by taking images and sounds apart and sowing them back together in order for new meanings to come out of them. Jacques Rancière writes about the concept of re-figuration, of taking images and sounds and adding further meanings to suggest there further readings, not in a postmodern, ‘anything goes’ way but in a way which is quite fixed politically and culturally yet provocatively opening up areas where we can begin to think again. I believe that’s been a problem in recent European cinema.

PG: So you are really arguing for cinema as thinking medium.

CM: Very simply put, absolutely yes.

PG: Well of course I am not going to disagree with you remotely, but you must also be aware of all the contradictions and all the paradoxes? Are you sufficiently happy with cinema as a thinking medium if you are only talking to one person?

CM: Well I am not sure anymore whether it’s necessary to think like that because yes I used to make films where only one person might remain in the audience, but not anymore. Peter Gidal was once the only member of my audience to stay and watch my film and he didn’t like the bits that were actually in focus because it distracted from the purely cinematic qualities and interfaced with meaning. It is exactly meaning that needs to be brought into the world and extrapolated but, thankfully, that idea of one person is no longer inevitable because of the technology that you are working with. The internet has a worldwide audience and there may well be a small audience compared to that of a Hollywood film – but it is by no means only reaching one person.

PG: Yes but when I examine my fascination, I made a painting once which said if only cinema could do what painting can. Cinema can’t even approach this. How do I explain these extremely rarefied areas of excitement? Do you understand the excitement of putting one pink tone against another pink tone? What has that got to do with my grandmother? What’s it got to do with the people in the street? You know it’s almost imperceptible for me to celebrate and become excited and communicate that notion. Who am I talking to? So in the end it becomes a form of excessive intellectual masturbation.

CM: Of course this question of jouissance is very important. If you visit the Picasso museum in Barcelona, you will see 58 of his reproductions of Velásquez’s Las Meninas. You’d think every one would be the same but it’s a completely different painting every time. The intellectual pleasure he must have experienced and the pleasure he gives to others is enormous.

PG: When you say that I recall what we were saying earlier. You were actually implying that the moving image is more important than a still image. I would disagree with you. A moving image allows very, very little space for contemplation. The particular excitement about a painting is this iconic notion of contemplation. Wordsworth’s definition of poetic creation was “recollection in tranquillity”, that I translate as a profound ability to communicate with a still image which is very rare in cinema, very rare in emotions. I have tried very hard to encompass that and to demonstrate it, you know sometimes my shots are ten minutes long because I want you to look, to look for Christ sake look, don’t be disengaged by movement, don’t be disengaged by the ephemeralities of notions of narrative and anecdote, just look. But it’s very, very difficult to get people to do that, you never make a film ever again because nobody ever gives you money because nobody knows what you’re on about.

CM: If you are passionate about that, which you are, you can make films anyway. Actually you don’t need a lot of money to carry on making films. If no one funded Peter Greenaway ever again I know you would carry on making films. This is happening to Ken Russell at the moment, you know that he is now a professor at the International Film School Wales. He makes films in his garage now with a small digital camera and he’s making them because the notion of work and the ‘pink next to the pink’ is vitally important. It is what gets you up in the morning and it’s what I was trying to say about the Picassos and Las Meninas or the Godard film in the Rancière way, taking something that already exists and refocusing its meaning.

PG: Let’s talk about Las Meninas because we are going to go and tackle that. It contains the most exciting piece of painting in the whole history of Western art. There is an area in the top right hand corner which is a painting of air and nobody has ever managed to paint air so convincingly. That’s extraordinary, then when you talk to people about the painting of the air they ask what on earth are you on about? You know, how recherché, how elitist can you get?

CM: Turner painted air. There was an English moment when he was moving potentially I guess towards a cross between Expressionism and Impressionism in some ways but I think these things have been attempted.

PG: It all came from this man over here, Rembrandt.

CM: Rembrandt’s brushworks are incredibly painterly. The first time I came to Amsterdam and had a look at Rembrandt I was shocked at how in a sense ‘deconstructive’ his works are, they are not at all the illusionistic images that art school had taught.

PG: There’s this phenomenon called the Stendhal syndrome you know when you finally see a work of art like Stendhal did in Florence at the Uffizi gallery. He fainted. There was something about seeing the natural phenomenology of the real thing. Once upon a time we had Vivienne Westwood who was going to do the costumes for Nightwatching, it didn’t happen in the end but she came and did her homework here and I took her around and she came and saw Rembrandt’s The Nightwatch for the first time. She didn’t faint like Stendhal but she burst into a series of uncontrollable giggles which she couldn’t stop, it was something to do with the sheer presence of that extraordinary painting.

CM: Yes, absolutely. Lynda³ burst into tears watching Godards’ Histoire(s) du Cinéma. All that was happening on screen were a few dissolves going from one painting to another. But the emotional impact was immense. I know you have spoken elsewhere about the idea that commercial cinema is this kind of pretentious attempt to extract false emotions, or put another way, the emotions which are present in the viewer are being induced to be exploited. So I would still argue that the moving image today is more important than the still image. I know it is a very, very difficult argument because Barthes wrote his essay about stills from an Eisenstein film not about moving image scenes themselves. But the wonderful thing about the VCR recorder when it was invented was that you could stop a film and you could go back and look at it, scenes, shots, frames again and again. So you can contemplate on moving and still images. You know we have come much further than that, but the point philosophically seems to me, and I think your work is doing this overtly, the affront that the moving image has on our sense of understanding the world is similar to photography when it first arrived. This whole idea that from that moment painting was dead was a realisation of the quest for similitude, the production of false consciousness. Your suggestion that cinema is dead is contradicted by the inevitability that painting is indeed still alive.

PG: The basic six media of the ancient Greek forms of communication will never perish, but my criticism about cinema is that it’s a little local technology which is very much dependent upon sophisticated machines and if you pull the plug out on the wall it all goes, but you wouldn’t say that about theatre. But I don’t think we should think about theatre in an English way, I think we should think about theatre in a much more open way. We have a very text based theatre here but the rest of the world doesn’t. Go to South Korea or China, their theatre doesn’t operate like that, but that will be there for ever. I think also that our notions of literature will always stay but it is the local technologies like cinema which arise virtually from nothing, become highly evolved in a very sophisticated way but their sophistication is their own downfall in a curious way. And I think for all the reasons and we have talked about twenty of them here, the notion of the cinematic as an art form this pretence of it being the seventh art, sorry it’s not going to work. You’ve made deconstructive films, all cinema could be deconstructed down to something else and the condition, species driven, of a new art form surely must be it cannot be deconstructed down to any other art form, it must surely be autonomous. It’s a bit like the evolutionary comparison that zebras and horses can’t fuck to produce any decent offspring but cinema can fuck with anything so therefore it has no autonomy.

CM: When I first started teaching filmmaking I would praise cinema for the fact that it contained the codes of all the other art forms. What you’re saying is that it is the death of cinema that it contains all the other elements and it contains nothing of itself.

PG: It has no backbone it can’t stand up.

CM: On the other hand, this is getting back to the point, I’m working with nonfiction work at the moment, I don’t like calling it documentary because I don’t think it documents, it does something else.

PG: It’s about text again isn’t it?

CM: Yes exactly but nonfiction, this is again getting close to my bugbear, the elements within let’s call it art, or philosophy, or imagination, but the elements which bring us as living people closer to that expectation of what life is about, and why cinema or whatever you want to call it, moving image, the capturing of live action - again there is no word which is not tainted, this is the problem, live action is impossible, there is no live action in cinema other than the prefilmic and the act of viewing.

PG: What we’re talking about is a visual world in words, how can we do it otherwise? How can we do it now, I mean that’s the whole point isn’t it? We need to be able to do that, we need to find the language to really open all the doors and windows and successfully communicate in a brand new way.

CM: Would this brand new way then, not be one that is still problematic because any form of communication is a form of representation. Any form of representation, in the equation that I put to you earlier, is a form of philosophy. Any form of philosophy has a form of bias to it and any form of bias therefore already has built within it something which is telling a viewer, to whom you are passing this knowledge, to think in a certain kind of way even if you are saying ‘I want you to think in your own way’. You cannot because they cannot, because they are trapped in that circular ideological conundrum. And any form of representation, whether it is theatre or a form of communication that hasn’t yet been invented, is lost and trapped in the sense that we are containing people in a certain ideological precept. The liberation of the pink next to the pink, the emotive subtlety, is the key which actually switches on a passion and that passion, if we go into one of your exhibitions, or if we go to a Warhol exhibition, turns on a certain switch in the viewer which says there is more to the world than the world I am given and the world I perceive. In a sense it gives people hope.

PG: Despite my little sort of tremor of I suppose you might say negativity I am a total, total optimist simply because there is no point in being pessimistic, we are beholden and we are obliged to be optimistic.

CM: Are you referring to human nature? In order to reproduce we must be optimistic?

PG: Well it’s why we don’t jump in the canal, there is no purpose, there is no reason to get up in the morning if you are pessimistic. But you can see my dilemma can’t you? How can I, advocate of notions of social communication of cinema, argue cogently because I keep falling back into positions of extreme privilege every time, there is no way that I can put my theory honestly, honourably, creditably, into practice is there?

CM: But that‘s a kind of excuse isn’t it? All great artists have said that they just do their thing in a garret and hope someone will see it.

PG: Yes but wait a minute, don’t accuse me of that because I hate people who refuse to try and explain themselves. I am what I am because I am doesn’t wash with me, I’m sorry it has to be something more prescient. I was in Lucerne a couple of weeks ago with urgent, urgent filmmakers, they were all architectural students as well, my cinema seems to have a particular excitement for architects, and I was saying, you know, forget cinema and concentrate on architecture, you can live your life without ever going to a picture house you’d be impoverished but you can do it but you cant live your life without architecture. You simply can’t, so if you want to work out where your social responsibilities are, where your aesthetic control is over people, worry about the architecture don’t worry about the cinema. You know we have apparently enormous amounts of aesthetic freedom now don’t we and that is the most difficult thing to handle. There is so much aesthetic freedom that often these poor students, you look at them with sort of angst on their behalf, they don’t know what to do. They can’t focus there are huge amounts of extraordinary floundering. YouTube is probably the greatest thing that has happened in the last four generations I really am convinced that it is an extraordinary phenomenon but in a way it’s opened so many doors and windows people don’t know how to handle it. Within six months there was more footage on YouTube than 200,000 people could see in 200,000 lifetimes. Isn’t that extraordinary? I really pity the archivists in a hundred years time. How on earth are they going to handle that? And it’s so instantaneous. I was showing in Milan on a Friday night and on Saturday morning it’s all over the world on YouTube. We had a VJ show in Moscow and I was looking at the audience and they were all holding up there mobile phones and there must have been 300 films on YouTube the following morning of our event. That’s amazing isn’t it. But here I am this English privileged bourgeois gentleman worrying about pink against pink and you have this phenomenon of YouTube. How do you match those two things? My question to you.