Peter Greenaway: BOOK / contents
Majda ©irca
A Map to the Past
Etienne-Louis Boullée, "a Newton" Projet de cenotaphe,
1784
A drawing by Peter Greenaway "The Draughtsman's Contract"
Decay of one Belly and Growth of Another
The train is slowly stopping. The flowing landscape seen through the sleeping
carriage window takes a more and more visible shape in the background,
until it finally settles it Ventimiglia train station in a warm green
shot.
" What a way to enter Italy", comments the wife of the American
architect while he rolls off her, contented.
"Absolutely … ideal way", he murmurs. "The land of fertility
… nice women … venerable history... home of the dome and the arch... good
food and high ideals", the Chicago man in his fifties scratches his
rounded belly.
"High ideals? My father was Italian, and he was very sin... only
interested in money", adds the wife with seven years of marriage
probation.
The prologue of The Belly of an Architect (1987) summarises everything
that is to come in the following one hundred and fifty minutes: a happily
married, not highly creative American architect in his mature years and
his wife arrive in Italy. He is a bon vivant and devotee of the refined.
He is heading for the house of culture, where he is supposed to prepare
an exhibition about an architect of the past, Etienne-Louis Boullee. In
opposition to his own smallness and powerlessness, the great ideals represented
by the distant Roman culture break him into pieces; even more, the utopian
Boullee propels a recognition of the weakness of the American continent
which - non-historical, non-sedimentary and non-recollective as it is
- can do nothing with its atheistic body but redesign Europe. In the land
of fertility he begets a child after long years of waiting ("I think
it was on the Italian side, but I’m not exactly sure how fast the train
was going"). In the land of the beautiful - and therefore also of
the dangerous - he fritters away his wife and heir, for his opening evaluation
of Italy proves to be wrong: he identifies it only with beautiful women,
but overlooks gracious boys who court the architect's lady as to harvest
the crop of American fertility. In the land of good food he devours in
excess, he seeks ideals that his hot dog country lacks. During his nine-month
stay he also finds out that his young companion is as pragmatic as her
Italo-atheistic father is, and that culture for her does not have a cult
character ("She does not think, she is American"). In short,
their nine-month stay in Italy is a story about the decay of one belly
and a growth of another, a story about the replacement of one life with
another. The architect needs nine months to give birth to the exhibition.
And he also needs nine months to decompose. His belly decomposes as a
symptom of his inability to digest the world and his own self. In the
meantime, her belly is swelling, until it brings forts his substitute.
Majda ©IRCA
Graduated in art history from the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. She worked
for Ekran, a television and film magazine; Association of Cultural Organisations
of Slovenia; and RTV Ljubljana (later TV Slovenia, the national television
operator), first as a reporter and later as the editor of cultural and
documentary art programmes ("Blow-Up"). From 1997 to 2000 she
held the position of State Secretary at the Ministry of Culture of the
Republic of Slovenia.
She has written commentaries, criticism, essays and theory, and lectured
on the theory and history of film and other audio-visual fields at various
expert meetings, workshops and seminars.
Selected bibliography: Federico Fellini, Kinoteka Series, Ljubljana, 1986;
»N.R.«, in: Monta¾a (Editing) (ed. Z. Vrdlovec), Ekran, 1987; »Askeza
duha« (»The Ascesis of Spirit«), in: Filmska komedija (Film Comedy) (ed.
Z. Vrdlovec), Imago, Ljubljana, 1989; Bato Cengic (she organised a retrospective
of his films and edited the catalogue), 1997, contribution in: Slovene
Film Stars, 1993; contribution in: Audio-visual Media and Identitites,
a lecture at the International Colloquium on Film Theory and Criticism,
Ljubljana, 1994; Satira mundi, Celje, 1995; and articles in magazines
and newspapers (Ekran, M'zin, Casopis za kritiko znanosti, Mladina, Na¹i
razgledi).
