Greenaway

Nagiko's father was a calligrapher, and when she was a little girl he would write his birthday greetings on her face. Her mother would read aloud from a 1,000-year-old manuscript, (italics) The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, (unital) which dealt among other things with the arts of love. Because children invest their birthdays with enormous importance, it's no wonder that when Nagiko grows up she finds a powerful link between calligraphy, human flesh, poetry, and sexuality.

Tulse Luper is a 20th century everyman whose collection of 92 suitcases intersects with every person, event and movement in history. Here in the second of a three part story, we find him working in a cinema, which gives him ample opportunity to cross paths with virtually every artistic device and dramatic character known to man.

A woman with a body writing fetish seeks to find a combined lover and calligrapher.

A woman with a body writing fetish seeks to find a combined lover and calligrapher.

An 'essayistic' documentary in which Greenaway's fierce criticism of today's visual illiteracy is argued by means of a forensic search of Rembrandt's Nightwatch. Greenaway explains the background, the context, the conspiracy, the murder and the motives of all its thirty-four painted characters who have conspired to kill for their combined self-advantage. Greenaway leads us through Rembrandt's paintings into seventeenth-century Amsterdam. He paints a world that is democratic in principle, but is almost entirely ruled by twelve families. The notion exists of these regents as charitable and compassionate entities. However, reality was different.

The first of three parts, we follow Tulse Luper in three distinct episodes: as a child during the first World War, as an explorer in Mormon Utah, and as a writer in Belgium during the rise of fascism. Packed with stylistic flourishes, it's a dense, comic study of 20th century history, revolving around the contents of one man's suitcases.

The always elliptical Peter Greenaway once again creates a beautiful film-as-puzzle. This tale concerns twin zoologist brothers whose wives are killed in a freak car crash involving a rare swan. The brothers form an unusual and strangely close relationship with Alba, the woman who was driving the car, now an amputee. Preoccupied with death and decomposition, the brothers organise elaborate studies on the decomposition of animals, making time-lapse films of dalmatians and zebras to chart the decay. Cue the scurrying hoards …

The wife of a barbaric crime boss engages in a secretive romance with a gentle bookseller between meals at her husband's restaurant. Food, colour coding, sex, murder, torture and cannibalism are the exotic fare in this beautifully filmed but brutally uncompromising modern fable which has been interpreted as an allegory for Thatcherism.

A movie about the corruption in all levels of society. A baby is born from a supposed-to-be virgin woman, so a chain of hysteria about divine intervention in the birth takes place.

The story of Tulse Luper, whose life is reconstructed through the evidence from 92 suitcases. He is the author and project manager, and constantly end up in prisons around the world.