Peter Greenaway's Map to Paradise from Ljubljana: CATALOGUE / about
CATALOGUE
2001
Peter Greenaway's Map to Paradise from Ljubljana / Peter Greenaway-Zemljevid
v paradiž iz Ljubljane
ISBN 961-90830-2-4
exemlares: 1000 /the number of the copies still available : 200
engl/slo hardcover
buy at: Muzeum, Ljubljana, Ljubljana Castle, Vale-Novak Bookshop, Mladinska
knjiga Bookshop Konzorcij
19x28,5cm, 192pp
editors: Barbara Novakovič, Helena Pivec
video document: Žiga Koritnik
photos by: Miha Kerin, Igor Omahen, Egon Kaše
translation into english: Borut Cajnko, Helena Pivec, Klementina
Jurančič
proof reading: Alvina Žuraj, Vanessa Rusk
translation into slovene: Borut Canjko, Helena Pivec
design: Vlatka Ljubanovič
layout: Primož Poljanšek
printed by: Tiskarna Trebotič, Zagreb
november 2001
muzeum & authors
photo credits: Egon Kaše, Igor Omahen, Miha Kerin
video document: Žiga Koritnik
foto The Pillow Book: Stephen Pyke
Graham Matthews
muzeum serendipity edition
DOCUMENTS
International Muzeum projects
Peter Greenaway in Ljubljana
A tripartit project: visual arts-film-theory
Berlin
February 12, 2002
Peter Greenaway for the occasion of launching the book A Map to Paradise
from Ljubljana he could not attend in Ljubljana on 19th February 2002
(Minimal at 6pm)
" I think the experience of Ljubljana, obviously to me was a good one. We initially thought about making a map. And I remember the proposition was basically that I need a bucket of ink and a brush in the dungeon in the castle in Ljubljana, something which involved many people from Ljubljana, Borut Krzisnik who wrote the music, local electricians, artists, architecs and so on, it became a kind of semi-cultural project which involve people which would for me try to encourage the fact that it was just be a one of events in Ljubljana that would not be just site specific architecturally but site specific in terms of personalities.
A general idea was to use Ljubljana maybe as an introduction, as a beginning to make initially an atlas, book of maps simply called 10 maps to paradise.
My particular interest was also related to see if I could go to places and contrive the maps at places I have never been to. And also I was in general fascinated.
I hope my audiences would not be in any way disconcerted by what me as an Englishman now living in Amsterdam would call Eastern Europe.
We got invitation from Vilnius when we still are supposed to make a map and I am sure the invitation is still open - in the monastry which will be under renovation - which is also for me the opportunity to allow me to make marks on the wall that cannot be eradicated but they can do renovation
Then there is an opportunity to make a map to paradise in Malmo, in Sweden, where I had the exhibition at the Kusthall about Icarus and Deadalus and have the invitation to make a map in a chocolate factory that was built in 1920s, heavily retailed but rebuilt five years ago, so I thing the place is a sort of disarrayed being partially vandalised. I am sure you can still smell a chocolate in the air. These are connotations to food and children, luxury products that are all a part of the process of making the map. It is interesting that there are lots of ovens, hotwater plates, and ceilings very difficult to light
Again the invitation is open and I need space and time to go up there and organize it. I think the problem is that both with the Vilnius convent and Malmo the problem is with the superstructure, with organisation or security, as it was the case with the castle of Ljubljana, where the whole place was secured and looked after so we can tabulate the procedure, it was a social structure which helps a lot.
However, I am sure that in Malmo and Vilnius also something could be arranged. Then quite close to Ljubljana we have the invitation, and it sounds very attractive - to Trieste - in association with the local Museum of Fine Art, and the offer came from a group of people who are associated with an abandoned hospital. So I was exciting about working a map to paradise in an abandoned surgery. You can see and understand the connotations there about life and death on a disecting table, where the soul, we can use the word soul, makes its departure from hospital. Walls are extremely white and the glass roof, so it is extremely difficult to make it completely dark. But I am prepared to use that.The invitation is still open but we have created a space to manouvre in that action.
Then I was offered a gallery which was maybe a kind of too conventional since I look for more interesting spaces, in Helsinki, in Finland, then there were some rooms, considered stores in a hermitage St. Petersburg and I am going to go to Moscow in two weeks time in preparation for a new film, so I will go to St.Petersburg where I was invited to go and look if we can use those places.
Two things maybe of greater import and more focused attention - one was the opportunity to make a map to paradise in Parma in Italy. Again it was a gallery situation. But this gallery used to be a stable. We created a map to paradise very much in relation to horses and carriages. In fact on the vernissage at opening night, we did bring in a beautiful brown horse that stayed with our guests during the whole evening performance. It gave us the parameter to indicate the uses of such a space.
And the other serious intention which I hope on 27th of February is to go to a small mining town in Munster in Germany to consider a possibility of making a map to paradise in an old abandoned coalmine. Presumably paradoxical and contradictory as the coalmines are indicated underworld, Hades, Pluto, Hell in some curious way we are making a map to paradise which starts, emanates from hell which might have very beautiful connotations.
I don t know if you are curious about some other things: I want to be able to relate to the Maps to Paradise. A major concern now - and I think now I go back to my filmic roots - is to get engaged in the project Tulse Luper s Suitcases.
Tulse Luper was an alter ego I invented many many years ago. A fiction personality that appeared in several of my films. We made a film called Drowning by Numbers which was in fact by a woman called Cissy Collpits who once upon a time was Tulse Luper s mistress and then became his wife and life-long companion.
In the film Drowning by Numbers Cissy Colpitts is played by three women, one is a young woman, one is a middle aged woman and one an elderly woman, a lot what concerns in this film was about other things but a lot goes to my private mythology.
So Tulse Luper appeared in the Waterfall Features Remake and The Falls where he as I suggested was as I suggest a sort of polyglott, polymap figure, some of autobiographical although his adventures are far more exciting than ever I will have. He is a primary creator and an ideas person, a person that comes up with the ideas that hopefully will fulfill.
I spent time making films I suppose in the late eighties and nineties about other subjects, but now I suppose is a stage in my life I would like to go back into my private mythology. I want to make a project which is large, which relates to the old characteristcs of cinema 1895-1995 and to make associations with all the new technologies which I think are far more entertaining and far more interesting. We have the project of which historical scope is 1928-1989 and whose geographical scope starts in Colorado and finishes in Manjuria. And takes large slaces of both Western and Eastern Europe and also a recollection of the Far East. The story is about man and his prisons.
Two metaphors for the general product: one is that we all need our prisons, notions of prisons, and a limit to find margins. The notion of complete freedom and liberty is the most terrifying notion to imagine. I would suspect that most people couldn' t handle it. We are often creatures of habit , we need to have paramaters and reference points .
I suppose the notion of memory is the biggest prison that we have. This will be a discourse, a dissertation, a filmic essay about these things.
But also perhaps more important is that there is no such thing as history, there are only historians. I would like to be able to tell that there is a whole series of many narratives based on the history from the greater part of the 20th century and associated with the Uranium.
I think that future historians will often feel that maybe the 20th century will be a century of Uranium. It is associated with atomic power and the atomic bomb, a very serious metaphor of civilisation where it is possible now that Armaggedon really destroying us. I do really sincerely think that dropping the bomb on Hiroshima has become part of the fabric of the 20th century history and was an extraordinary important point. Somehow the world civilisation appears to be innocent and naďve before that moment, but after we had to learn a rapid, self-reflexive sophistication very very quickly. It was a sort of a cast point when notions of responsibility and our own self control will become very very paramount.
But although these are big polemical ideas, I don/t want to make a polemical film, but an entertaining with several uses of the languages both past and the present, make a comedy about the idea of the nature of the recorded image itself. So we are not just making one feature films. We are making three features which cover the period I mentioned. The uranium you cannot dig out of the ground, it should be processed , so in 1928 in Colorado starts a fictive history of Uranium. And in 1989, of course we are talking here in Berlin, this very minute, and it was the year when Berlin wall came down.
Some suggested that this was the end of the East West antagonisms, the collapse of communism symbolise, coming down of the wall meant the easing of the tension, and now it is Uranium which has through the atomic bomb a control over the world. Unfortunately the atomic horror still goes on in the Pakistan-India new threats.
The story goes on but for my purposes I had have a beginning, middle and end. It also represent the paramaters for the life of my characters Tulse Luper. You might know the story about the figure of Raoul Wallenberg who in Budapest managed to save a lot of Jews from Hungarian Nazis party and Hungarian fashists. I was fascianted that he was a saint like figure who apparently when Russians moved to Hungary and Budapest disappeared, supposedly shot but many people think that he disappeared to prisons all over Russia, Sibiria
This is a phenomenon of a man who does an extraordinary lot of good, apparently from deeply philantropic reasons. Though I do have a problem with philantrophy because I dont think anybody gives anything away for nothing at all and I never believe that there is such a thing as a free smile. In every simple gesture is always something like a reward situation going on. Well as I said I doubt in it, maybe I still have to find this out
The figure of the saint who is punished for his saintliness is a sort of paradigm for my character Tulse Luper. He spends his life in prisons all over the world but he is very optimistic and very creative as we need to be in this world, post Hiroshima, post potential Armaggedon, and deeply creative person.
Always creating projects in association with ideas. And the project is not just 3 features but also 2 DVDs, couple of CD ROMs which is an aesthetic medium for the next three years, a couple of interrelated websites, very important and very informative. And certainly there will be a shelf of books and we want to make TV series. We shall create a very wide canvass, I wish to make a product of an information age. We need now some sorte of badge mark. There are many many people with great fasciantion making all sorts of products all over the world in association with the new languages, people in the pop, engaged in the post-TV culture, web masters, games masters, cyber masters, people dealing philosophically with the new languages, this is excellent.
But I think there is somehow some curious desire to make a unified object associated with all these new aesthetic technologies, not just to be an item of information but also aesthetic tool. And arrogantly maybe, and ambitously, as Woody Allen famously said: ťIf you are going to aim big make sure your ambitions are indeed big" - is to make some sort of badge mark work, a definite work by which I do not only can judge my work by, but to see how the parameters work.
This again is an act of cultural arrogance but I can think all the time how James Joyce Ulysses or Finnegans Wake where so many ideas about literary format and narrativ forms are brought into one place that he had to create a whole new language to make sure that this become a viable badge mark of a definite work.
I know and people have told me and I perfectly accept the fact that definitive works in a sense are not premade, they are only discovered in a hindsight. In all eastern and western culture it has to be true.
Did the people of Shakespeares own time know what an extraordinary giant he was,. was Dante' s Divine Comedy realised to be such a profound work as it was, or one really understands what Goethe was doing for German history or what we are making?
In association with the place where we are now making this film. I do not make comparisons with these giants but I would like to indicate that - in a self modest proposition - that these all become significant marks in cultural history and it is very much about language as well as about content.
I believe cinema is dead that really interesting people are not working in it any more and best people go somewhere else. I will give you the example: Scorsese is highly regarded and very important American filmmaker but his attitude, narrative structures are very genre based, so as in the cinema 60,70 years before. These films are not so basically different from films Griffith made in 1910s and 20's.
Ok maybe now publicity is better, the organisational substructure, but I would argue that the distribution system is worse, cinema has made itself peculiarily inacessible. How can you or I see, for example, Kubrick s 2001 in a way it was created. Technological changes have been so profound that , so we can t see works done 30, 40 years ago in a way they were intended to be seen. It is a good argument that you can' t see Casablanca on television.
It has made itself inacessible. It is easier for me to see a Carravagio in Assissi than a favourite cinematic epics. With this background I want to make a project which is very much with consideration of the language itself. Where and how the cinema need to be reinvented, where are we going. How the cinema is to be related to the notions of narrative storytelling , is it really about sequence, what is a profound excitement about cinema language or the way it is currently used.
Is it a narrative feature, psychological drama based upon the Christian ethics, the beginnings, middles and ends, and it is related far to much to the notions of 19th century novel. I also argue again very heretically that we have not seen any cinema yet but hudred and seven years of illustrated text. Now I think, ladies and gentlemen, it is too late. Cinema is a deeply passive medium, maybe we can argue that cinema finally decided to die. Or we push it over the cliff On the 1st of September 1983 when zippos or remote controls were introduced into the living rooms of the world.
Suddenly with incredible demands. Metaphorically, even a zippo can give you almost a button switch to the beginning to a huge revolution considered the choices now open to internet user or DVD user. Still a long long way to go but particular activity trying desperately to turn a caterpillar of cinema into a butterfly of the new languages. I dont think this metamorhoses can take place, we rapidly have to change our relationship to the notion of the moving image. We ought to bring to canvas what human imagination now needs and demands. As my photography director Sasha Vierny, now unfortunately dead, said: ťIt might has been enough for our fathers and forefathers but it is not enough for us now."