A long time ago, Peter Greenaway burst into his unheated production office in a backyard of London in a Jean Paul Gaultier coat sewn together from brightly colored patches, collapsed into a desk chair, and immediately started ranting about cinema.

Most people, he said, have an idea that amounts to "total illusionistic masturbation massage."

And what people like Stephen Frears put together was "awful crap".

In any case, the medium is finished, the future belongs to television.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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It was the year Greenaway released his most expensive widescreen film to date, a four-person drama bristling with ostentatious sets and props: "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover."

But the contradiction between his theses and his work did not interest him;

his designer coat also consisted of contradictions.

Thirty-three years have passed since then.

Cinema is not dead, television has its future behind it and colleague Frears is still making films.

Only Peter Greenaway has become quieter, although he continues to pursue his many projects, here an exhibition, there an installation, there a feature film – his last one to date, “Eisenstein in Guanajuato”, screened in the Berlinale competition seven years ago.

Like “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”, it was a series of theatrical scenes, tableaux vivants, this time about the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein’s stay in Mexico in 1931 and his homosexual coming-out there .

The film did not attract much attention.

He does not skimp on images of nudity and violence

You can also put it this way: Greenaway was a phenomenon of the time, so time forgot him.

When his debut feature film came out in 1982, Europe was looking for an alternative to aging auteur films, and Greenaway's elaborate mental cinema seemed the ideal candidate.

"The draftsman's contract" combined a classic murder case with an analysis of the painting technique and social order in the English Baroque.

In addition, the camera did not skimp on images of nudity and violence.

Both the obscene and the cultivated have remained dominant in Greenaway's work.

In "A Z and Two Zeros", "Women's Conspiracy" and "The Architect's Belly" he pursued the combination with different accents, in "The Cook, the Thief .

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.” taken to extremes and repeated in later films in ever weaker variations.

The virtuosity of his staging and his handling of the possibilities of digital image processing is never in question.

But just as Greenaway never developed a special relationship with his actors, his cinema no longer came into contact with the further development of the medium.

It remained and remains for itself.

One reason for this solipsism lies in Greenaway's early days as an autodidact.

After being rejected as a film student by the Royal College of Art, he worked as an editor and director for the UK Government's Central Information Office for twelve years.

He used the techniques of categorizing and sampling of image content practiced there in his early experimental films, which some consider to be Greenaway's actual contribution to world cinema.

And perhaps one actually gets closer to the individual Peter Greenaway in these picture puzzles born at the editing table with their number puzzles, word games and quirky nomenclatures than in his major directorial works.

Cinema was always a game for him, not a job.

And like all players, Greenaway had his lucky streak.

Today he is eighty years old.