Peter Greenaway - Nederlands Film Festival

credentials, their pedigree and their idea of cinema as a preface to every public statementthey made - thus putting into some perspective what came after.Such advice should be made applicable to me now.Accordingly, before discussing each of those twelve aspirations for a personal cinema - Ishould make twelve bold declarations - six of these declarations are historical, four socialand two temperamental - an obsession with numerology should not disturb anyone -numerology, classification and taxonomies are my cinema-practice's secound majorsubstance.....So ... I am English ... I am a product of the 1960's, I had a literary education, I wastrained as a painter, I entered the film industry by way of the documentary cuttingrooms,I believe the Western World's greatest thousand movies have all be made cheaply... and made by individuals and not committees. I believe that all films have equalrepresentation in the great cinema in the sky. I believe cinema is an artform and do notthink that cinema is still the great popular medium of the twentieth century. Myfavourite contemporary author is Borges and my favourite contemporary painter is RBKitaj.H.I am English and therefore allied - and associated - and an heir to a long tradition ofinterest in Natural History ... some ecological responsibility and ... certainly a romanticnotion of landscape. A celebrated English constribution to European landscape is "theEnglish garden" - whereas the French contrived a garden with mathematical precision -frank and candid in its artificiality - the English garden - rolling parkland, theatricallyplaced groups of trees - rivers damed to make ornamental lakes... was an artificial affairbut constructed to look natural - designed with studied negligence to look real - ratherlike the tradition of English film-making - the manufacture of artifice arranged in thepursuit of naturalism.Although it is said that the English landscape has been more painted, drawn - and nowfilmed - than any other landscape in Europe - it is true that English culture has alwaysbeen - and still is - more literary than painterly - on account of wich - maybe - Trauffautwas right - if a little ungenerous - in saying that "English cinema is a contradictory term".I am English - and the English - genarally - do not feel comfortable with an "intellectual"approach to the world ... maybe the anti-intellectual" stance would be more easilycomprehensible if the English were not also allied to a tradition of phlegmaticunderstatement and irony - wich are decidedly cool attitudes ... and to a reticence todemonstrate feeling - but both the anti-intellectualism and the reticence probably cometogether to explain why the English are supposedly good at games wich convenientlymask and conceal demonstrative emotion under rules and regulations ....... yet - it is amark of their irony that, having invented the gamesmanship, they then say that what'simportant is not winning - but taking part .... but that could again be an attidute thatprevents disappointment on losing .... another concealment...I am a product af the 1960's .... history makes the decades too tidy - for me the sixtieswas only five years long - 1963 to 1968. I had discovered European cinema withBergman's Seventh Seal some six years before and I virtually stopped going to thecinema six years after - about the time when Godard went into self-imposed ideological