Scripta 9_2_link_final.pdf - Uniandrade

Peter Greenaway belongs to a group of filmmakers who do not
adhere to the conventional forms of cinematographic discourse. To his
education as a painter at the Whalthamstour School of Arts, he added other
accomplishments such as the production of videos for television, the staging
of operas and plays and the organization of exhibitions and installations,
which, fused in his cinematography, reveal the director’s hybrid vocation.
Ivana Bentes points out this vocation when she affirms that
the cinema appears in Greenaway as a virtualization of all the arts, especially
painting, a kind of post-cinema from which the filmmaker/paintervideoartist-installer
looks backwards to a 2500-year-old heritage of images,
painted, drawn, photographed, decorated in sgraffito or decalcomania,
finding in the cinema and in the new technologies not a rupture with what
has been done but a continuity. This structuring and encyclopedic eye
surpasses any narrative desire. (2004, p. 17) 1
In Motivações pictóricas e multimediais na obra de Peter Greenaway (Pictorial
and Multimedial Motivations in Peter Greenaway’s Work), Rosa Cohen, discussing
the filmmaker’s aesthetic universe, corroborates Bentes’s words, showing
that it “has been characterized by the dynamics of the images escaping
delimitations, willing to cross boundaries […], to transpose elements across
films”(2008, p. 24), 2 weaving a network of references among films, stages,
art galleries and museums, by means of different languages, transmitted in
different ways.
Those who watch the film Prospero’s Books (1991), a cinematographic
re-creation of William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest (1611), without having
a previous knowledge of English director Peter Greenaway’s other works,
will find it difficult to immediately apprehend in all its complexity this
product that blends art and technology.
Eschewing the literary bias of several directors in the process of
adaptation of classic literary texts, Peter Greenaway does not reconstitute
imagetically the narrative thread of the Shakespearean matrix, but, instead,
transfigures it, creating a mosaic of images, voices and texts. Our aim in this
brief study is, thus, to demonstrate the imbrications of this mosaic, enriched
with elements from other semioses, media or hypermedia, in their dialogue
with the Shakespearean text.
The Tempest, the last play written by Shakespeare before he accepted
the collaboration of John Fletcher, was performed for James I’s court at
Scripta Uniandrade, v. 9, n. 2, jul.-dez. 2011
98