Peter Greenaway - Nederlands Film Festival

Her mother is hung and the father commits suicide, the two sisters are taken intoprostitution. The baby lies in state in the cathedral until rival townspeople strip thecorpse and dismember it for trophies.Within weeks, the town withers, the wells dry up, the crops burn, the steeple fals killingthe priest, the militia die of cholera. And the wet-nurse retires to a nunnery.ZZZ.It has been said that photography was the best thing that could have happened topainting because it cleared the ground to allow painting to get on with what it did best -it is no accident that the growth in the popularity and significance of photographycoincided with the European move towards non-figurative experiments wich have goneon in painting throughout the whole of this century - and therefore gone on in design andtherefore entered into every single part of our lives .... perhaps television, by the same orsimilar means, can clear the ground to allow and encourage cinema to do what it is bestat. Wich means that by no longer shouldering the reponsibilities of being a popularmedium, cinema can become investigative and vigorous again - going places where it hasnever been before, exploring new ground, rethinking the whole relationships of image tosound to narrative.However, I think that the world's public will not give up the sensation of a big screen inthe dark very willingly - though you might not have to leave your home to experience it -and what I look forward to - already it is beginning to happen - is the making of amarriage - not a fixed financial marriage of convenience - but a true technological - andfor me - most importantly - an aesthetic marriage - between the big screen and television- using both languages and visions to create something entirely new, rich and strange. Itwas a brand-new technology that created the cinema in the first place.It is impossible to reserve technoloical change allied to social habit - the nostalgics arewasting their time - but the demise of the cinema doesn't matter in the end - whatmatters is the long continuity of the desire for the visual expression of ideas and dreamsand visions - and nobody is going to suppress, destroy or lose that. It is always going toleave evidence.The Cinema Militans Lecture 1988 was delivered by Peter Greenaway on ...September1988, in St. Pieters Church in Utrecht, The Netherlands.