This is the original typescript of what became:

Missingham, Greg, 1994, Ideas of Film & Architecture: Peter Greenaway's

Films, Films & Architecture, Architecture Quarterly, The Architecture
Society, Sydney, (5), pp. 28-36

As far as I know there was very little change to it in what was printed.

Its original title was:

QUESTIONS OF RELEVANCE:
Is that all there is? What else could there be?
Films, Films of Peter Greenaway, and Architecture

as this was the title of the text it was for the talk I gave to the Architecture
Society at Tusculum, Sydney, on the evening of 1992 October 15.

30.4.96
Questions of Relevance: Is that all there is? What else could there be? 2

Ideas of Film & Architecture:

Peter Greenaway's Films, Films & Architecture

"The questions in all my films irritate some people enormously, which I find

preposterous maybe that is one of the prime purposes, to establish a kind of

counter-argument. Art historically was the medium of asking questions, now it

is science that has been asking why can't art begin to ask again?"

(Greenaway, in Crawford 1986?: 24)

1 INTRODUCTION

Collectively, not being able readily to provide convincing justifications for your actions
is, unfortunately, a substantive basis for suspecting they might be meaningless.
Architects are unable to say what is the value of their work in their own terms, the
meaning of architecture for architects, in a way that will convince. They do not have a
reliable basis for defending the choices of form that they make. They cannot say
satisfactorily how the meaning of a work relates to its form which is to say that
architectural designers do not have a moral basis for their actions. And, to have a
moral basis for your actions is a deeply important sense in which we could describe
them as 'meaningful'. This has been the case, especially, since the 'refutation' of
functionalism for, despite evident faults

" functionalism, no matter what its pretense, continued the idealist ambition

of creating architecture as a kind of ethically constituted form-giving."

(Eisenman 1980: 231)

That is, to say not only what is the meaning in architecture but to say what is the
meaning of architecture in everyday life is important which entails, for example,
answers to the questions: what is it for, why is it valued, and what is expected of it in
everyday life?

There are many ways in which to seek answers to such questions. One of them, for
me, here, is in considering what can be learned about architecture through considering

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Questions of Relevance: Is that all there is? What else could there be? 3

films (and film-makers).1 Fredric Jameson (1991: 125) suggests that we can think of
'architecture as a way of thinking and philosophizing, of trying to solve philosophical or
cognitive problems', as a tool for thinking with in its own particular ways. In his work,
and in the things he says about it, Peter Greenaway suggests this is true of film.
Greenaway is intrinsically interesting to me for a number of reasons: for his
gameplaying, for his interest in heterarchic polysemy, for his interest in architecture2
and other features of the history of European culture, and because some central
themes in his work are central to perrenial concerns in debates concerning architectural
design.

2 APPARENTLY OBVIOUS SIMILARITIES

"You can hide paintings, you can avoid literature, you can if you're ingenious

avoid listening to music, but you cannot avoid architecture. Architecture is the

least perishable of the arts and the most public. Architects (perhaps like film-

1 I am not the first to do this in writing on architecture in Australia, nor will I be the last.
For instance, Tom Heath wrote reviews of Modesty Blaise, Barbarella, and Alphaville in
Architecture in Australia in the late 1960s.

2 " architecture arguably the most significant, and certainly the most enduring, of all
the arts." (Greenaway 1987)

I have seen the seven feature films and two television programs. These works may be divided
according to the following scheme:

C Category game films

N Narrative films
S Setting films
T Image-as-text films

CT 1978 The Falls

SNt 1982 The Draughtsman's Contract (also known as Murder in an English Garden)
C 1985 Zed & Two Noughts (also known as Zoo of Venus)
SN 1987 The Belly of an Architect
C 1988 Drowning by Numbers (originally conceived in 1982)
T 1988 A TV Dante (directed by Tom Phillips and Greenaway a slightly longer version
of Canto 5 was originally made in 1984)
N 1989 The Cook The Thief His Wife & Her Lover
CT 1989 Death in the Seine
TN 1991 Prospero's Books

Greenaway's new film, Fifty-five Men on Horseback, is expected to be released at next year's
Cannes Film Festival.

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Questions of Relevance: Is that all there is? What else could there be? 4

makers) are supposed to be accountable to art, to finance, to the specialist

critic, to the man in the street and perhaps to posterity."3

There are a number of what might be regarded as obvious similarities between films
and architecture. Three similarities immediately suggest themselves.

Greenaway's comment points out that both films and works of architecture require
collective, collaborative effort for a work's realisation. As with works of architecture,
(art) films are subject to the exigencies both of budgetry control and of artistic
genesis.

Secondly, in principle, both films and works of architecture are publically available for
scrutiny. They can be but are not usually private media. But, they are not exactly
alike as media. As a cultural mode, architecture is unavoidable but, with film, it is a
matter of choice whether we subject ourselves to it (despite the ubiquity of the
televsion).

Thirdly, both films and works of architecture are usually approached through an
intervening cloud of rhetorical framing. That is, any possibility of seeing a film or a
work of architecture untainted, 'of itself', is unavailable.
Rooms and buildings, the physical detritus of events and of collections of
events, are not appreciated directly for what they were intended to be, or for what
they have actually had to be, but are appreciated for what they are understood to be,
how they are comprehended. That is, if we wish to speak about the meaning of a room
or of a building we will rarely be concerned with 'truth'. We will be concerned with
more or less useful characterisations (or, with more or less tenaciously held ones)
and these provide rhetorical framings of the architecture, geared to particular ways of
understanding and appreciating the world or to particular ways of participating in

3 Form the rear cover blurb of the published script for The Belly of an Architect
(Greenaway 1988). This embellishes Greenaway's original remarks a little:

"It is a truism of this century that it's easily possible to avoid looking at painting
or even reading literature, but it is extremely difficult to avoid dealing in some
way with architecture. I like to think, if I may be so arrogant, that it's possible
to compare the work of a film-maker with that of an architect. We both have to
be accountable to our backers and to the man in the street, but we also have to
satisfy ourselves and our idea of culture."
(Greenaway, cited in Ranvaud 1987: 193)

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Questions of Relevance: Is that all there is? What else could there be? 5

everyday life.4 Even when they do pay attention to architecture, and are not 'simply'
participants in everyday life, people must approach it through rhetorical frames they
are tourists, this is the house where Granny lived, they might be thinking of buying the
building, or they are architecture students, perhaps.
This will be true for films, also. It is an uncommon thing to approach a work of
architecture or a film for the first time unprepared by someone else's comments, a
review, or extensive promotional material.

3. FIVE RECTANGULAR METAPHORS FOR FILM

" a lot of the ideas I dabble with concern a metaphorical use of cinema."

(Greenaway, cited in Ranvaud 1987: 196)

To illustrate what I mean, I can think of five examples of rhetorical framings in film
criticism that are based on 'rectangular' metaphors of the screen.5 Some of them are
relevant to architecture.

3.1 Window
In classical film theory, for Andr Bazin and other realists, the screen was a "window"
on the world, implying abundant space and innumerable objects just outside its border.
This metaphor leads to questions concerning the relation of cinema to reality, of
mimesis, of mimetic fidelity. (Andrew 1984: 134) Part of the metaphor's force is to
focus attention on the world that is represented, a fine thing for documentaries or for
social realist propoganda, perhaps.

This metaphor is explicitly denied by Greenaway.

The window displays meaning and effects. To think of the screen as a screen, as a
filter or mouchrabiyeh, for example, might be to adopt a version of this window
metaphor leaning slightly towards being a version of the next metaphor. It would be to

4 See, for example, the discussion in Wunderlich (197) of different schools of

archaeological thought concerning the 'palace' at Knossos.

5 "I would have to say here that a metaphor only points to a potentially fruitful
rapport with the semantic field, a rapport which it is up to the spectator to work
out."
(Andrew 1984: 169)

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Questions of Relevance: Is that all there is? What else could there be? 6

admit that the system intervening between the world and the viewer is not without
influence on what can be seen or understood through it.

3.2 Frame
A historically older view, in classical film theory, for Sergei Eisenstein, Rudolf Arnheim
and other formalists, is that the screen is a frame whose boundaries shape the images
appearing on it, where the frame defines a field within which meaning and effects are
constructed. This metaphor leads to questions concerning the relation of cinema to
art. (Andrew 1984: 134) The cinema screen, considered as a frame, is "the place where
something special or extraordinary is taking place" (Carter 1990: 74). Under this
metaphor, it is the film-maker and the intention in the work that are the focus of
scrutiny.

This is the most obvious and persistent governing metaphor appealed to in discussion
of Greenaway's work. He would prefer to speak of a game (or game-board, pitch or
field) rather than a frame, perhaps, and, in this form, the metaphor can be taken to be
a structuralist one. This is most obviously true of what might be called the category
game films: The Falls, Zed & Two Noughts, Drowning by Numbers, and Death in the
Seine. For, as he says, himself

"It's true, these films are highly reflexive, they're artificial, very self-conscious

with a deliberate attempt to make an artifice I am determined to tell you that

you are only watching a film it's not real."

(Greenaway, in Carroll 1991)

Further, for example, of The Cook The Thief His Wife & Her Lover, Greenaway says
(almost incidently explicitly denying the window metaphor):

"This is still very recognizably a Greenaway film: the same sort of exterior

characteristics which make you feel as if you're always watching a film and not

doing anything else. It's not a slice of life, not a window on the world; it is

certainly an artifact."

()

"There is in my film a concern for picture making, for the formality and the

artificiality of it, which energizes what is happening on the screen. This may be

a little unusual in terms of the world cinema, but gives it an extra sort of

savagery, an extra strength "

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Questions of Relevance: Is that all there is? What else could there be? 7

(Greenaway, in McFarlane 1989?: 38 and 42, respectively)

And, more explicitly, of Prospero's Books, he says:

" it will be no surprise that it is an island full of superimposed images, of

shifting mirrors and mirror-images true mir-ages where pictures conjured by

text can be as tantalisingly substantial as objects and facts and events,

constantly framed and re-framed. This framing and re-framing becomes like the

text itself a motif reminding the viewer that it is an illusion constantly fitted

into a rectangle into a picture frame, a film frame."

(Greenaway 1991a: 12)

3.3 Mirror
In Prospero's Books, Greenaway plays with the metaphor of the screen as mirror, the
metaphor that in criticism superseded and subsumed both the metaphor of the window
and that of the frame. The adoption of this metaphor leads to questioning of cinema's
rapport with the spectator, the unconscious, and desire and to questioning the roles
of spectator as voyeur, or of film-maker and actors as exhibitionists. (Metz 1981,
Andrew 1984: 134 cf Berger et al 1972, Altman 1977, Carter 1990: 152-158)

This is the least obvious metaphor to be used in discussion of Greenaway's work, since
it depends on provision of psychological insight and, whilst characters in his films
remained figures in a landscape, rather than psychological beings also, it was not going
to change. After Brian Dennehy's performance as the postmodernist architect,
Stourley Kracklite, in The Belly of an Architect, it is an increasing feature of
Greenaway's work, in The Cook The Thief His Wife & Her Lover, and, particularly, in
Prospero's Books.

3.4 Package
Marxist (possession), capitalist (Andrew 1984: 22-24, Carter 1990: 95-123, and cf Baxandall
1985: 50-58)

3.5 Page of text

In theory and in critical writing, the metaphor of the world as text has taken on
hegemonic proportions in recent years. In Greenaway's work the importance of the
text has been ever present, but particularly in spoken word in The Falls, The
Draughtsman's Contract and Prospero's Books, and in visual form, as calligraphy in the

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Questions of Relevance: Is that all there is? What else could there be? 8

first and third of those, and in printed text in the same two, together with A TV Dante
and Death in the Seine. Of Prospero's Books, Greenaway says

" a project that deliberately emphasises and celebrates text as text, as the

master material on which all the magic, illusion and deception of the play is

based. Words making text, and text making pages, and pages making books

from which knowledge is fabricated in pictorial form these are the persistently

forefronted characteristics."

(Greenaway 1991b)

But Greenaway's pages are anything but simply texts and, therefore, belong to a richer
metaphor than that of the merely textual. Under a textual form of the metaphor,
hermeneutics becomes the mode of engagement for criticism, and exposition of work
becomes a form of rhetoric involving the devising of arguments, their arrangement,
and their stylistic articulation (Bordwell 1989: 205). Under this metaphor, the concepts
of palimpsest, temporal mosaic, cultural dominant, of iconography and iconology, and
even of calligraphy can be important.
A very important feature of the approach is that there will be a defined place
for a particular kind of reader constructed in the text

" it should be stressed that this implied reader is another aspect of the

process () The text itself carries this place and when it is occupied by a co-

operative reader that is someone willing to play the game according to the

rules a reading takes place which completes the processes which are carried in

the text. It is at this point that meanings are generated."

(Carter 1990: 144)

In Greenaway's work, however, we are only sometimes to expect defined places for
certain kinds of assumed readers and on others to expect defined places and roles for
certain kinds of assumed interlocuters of other sorts (viewers, art historians, literary
detectives, decipherers, cryptanalysts, correspondants, iconographers, and so on). If
his images are conceived of as pages rather than simply as page-sized views of texts
and therefore tend not to support any simple version of the textual metaphor,
nevertheless, because of the way his films cross-fertilise future projects, Greenaway's
work repays some investigation of his intertextuality.

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Questions of Relevance: Is that all there is? What else could there be? 9

4. APPARENTLY OBVIOUS DIFFERENCES

4.1 Two as compared with three dimensions

some of my empirical work suggests that this is not such a big issue
enclosure: immediate phenomenological experience not the same
the distinction between fictional and real experience more important

yet impression constructed in memory and negotiated through and with it in each
case
Meaning is dialectic. For example, beyond the scale of the single room our
understanding of any building derives not from direct experience but from a synthesis
negotiated in and with memory. Collections of spaces cannot be appreciated as
collections simultaneously. We take time to move from event to event or from space
to space. Even the single room cannot be directly appreciated as a room. It can only
be appreciated as a series of views. That is, the material and other 'facts' before us
may be regarded as postulates to which we respond with interpretations counter-
postulates. More generally, meaning is a matter continuously negotiated in and
through everyday life. 'Negotiated' is the key term. It suggests (or, is meant to
suggest) that 'deriving' meaning takes time, that meaning is continuously variable,
dependent on whim or fancy, health, attentiveness, and so on. Meanings, therefore,
are constructed.

4.2 Ephemeral cf timeless/enduring

:: Film : architecture

4.3 Circumstances of the experience/encounter

film: heavily framed as contemplative (opening framing in The Cook The Thief His Wife
& Her Lover), unusual circumstance cf everyday life (Danto)
this lecture more like a film in this
architecture: through the intervening situational amalgam
Although we commonly speak as if forms 'carried' meanings in the way that they carry
attributes such as shape, colour, material, size and so on, built form cannot act alone
and meaning is not located in forms or in their interlocuters (entirely).6 Meaning is
treated in this present work as a matter continuously negotiated. Objects, artifacts,

6 Bonta (1979: 110), remarks that " meaning is not an attribute of form, but a belief
about form ". (Emphasis in the original).

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buildings, or works of architecture are mediating foci of these negotiations. As before,

'negotiated' is the key term. The negotiations take place between producer and
contexts, interlocuter and artifact, interlocuter and contexts. Negotiations between
producer and interlocuter/viewer/user are always indirect and asymmetrically
completed. In the negotiation between producer and artifact, in the act of designing,
forms are suggested, a designing frame of reference for criteria of assessment is
negotiated, and so on. Here, the negotiation with the design occurs and is conducted
through and with the means of its representation (models, drawings, spoken and
written word, etc.) simultaneously with its negotiation through and with memory.
The architectural game is developed - that is, what is to be attended to, how it is to be
represented, what forms are to constitute its representation, and so on.
Importantly, all of these negotiations will always take place embedded in and
through the intervening holistic, ecobehavioural amalgams that are the situations of
everyday life.

4.4 Architecture less dependent on language

Discursive/nondiscursive (Langer), Christian Metz's view: film like narrative literature
and opposed to such systems of pure connotation and expressivity as music and
architecture (Andrew1984: 71)
Whilst I can accept that language is a particularly important feature of the structuring
and nature of everyday life,7 I cannot agree with the symbolic interactionists' emphasis
on its primacy over other modes of cultural expression, however, preferring the
emphasis placed on the complementarity of modes of cultural expression or
manifestation argued, for example, in Preziosi (1979).

I am prepared to deny that there can be fixed relations between the realms of (verbal
or textual) discourse and the realm of built form. That is, I believe that the articulated
interpretation of a work of architecture and, hence, the value of that work of
architecture, cannot be fixed once and for all time. The best we can achieve is a
continuously negotiated range of opinion, variously arrived at. It is not only that

7 And can, therefore, appreciate the point P Carter (1987: 7) is making in the following
passage:

"The significance of this overdetermination of meaning does not lie in the

direction of Cook's psychology, but in the revelation of the fact that Cook
moved in a world of language. He proceeded within a cultural network of names,
allusions, puns and coincidences, which, far from constraining him, gave him, like
his Pacific Ocean, conceptual space in which to move."

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disputation is an end in itself devoutly to be supported (which it might be). It is that

the bases for comparative judgements and the contexts within which such judgements
are exercised and unfold continually change the embedding interpretative
frameworks, the commentators' and the architects' frames of reference and their
respective funds of the architectural experiences and architectural images stored in
memory within which they try to place or with respect to which they try to judge
present experiences with architecture (their muses imaginaires) continually change.
Nor do I believe in absolute evaluative scales.

4.5 There are other expectations of architecture in everyday life

There are other expectations of architecture in everyday life than that it be a work of
art. There are the expectations of:
shelter and support,
punctuation and articulation,
symbolisation (which entails an invitation to art),
orientation or cueing, and
reification of (collective) selves.
We can certainly learn about these and possible relationships with art in the
contemplation of films and about .

4.5.1 shelter and support

At its simplest level, the built environment serves to support events and to shield them
from the elements. But this is not to say simply that buildings are expected to keep
off the rain and to provide floors. The built environment is expected to provide
adequate ambient levels of temperature, air exchange, lighting, and so on, and it is
expected to provide the physical accoutrements needed for those events envisaged as
taking place within its embrace. An expectation of architecture in everyday life is that
it support the definition and maintenance of situations and of ensembles of them. It
also serves to define situations and ensembles of them by cueing and supporting what
we can expect in them.

4.5.2 punctuation and articulation

The built environment is one amongst many means for articulating what would
otherwise be the continuum of everyday life. Architecture, like other objectivations of
individual and cultural mind (clothing, music, language, food, social occasions ),

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punctuates our experience, providing anchorage for meaning. The measure and
relative scale of spaces, the articulation of their plane surfaces, other features of the
ambience of those spaces, and the topology of spatial arrangements contribute both
to the shelter of the everyday situations there unfolding and to the physical and
communicative punctuation of the stream of behaviour that is everyday life. Speaking
of the design of the narthex for the Chapel of St Joseph at Box Hill, Peter Corrigan had
this to say, for example:

"It seemed to me that there was a requirement for a type of intermediate space,

a type of airlock where they could marshall their concentration and then they

could (in the traditional way) sort of straighten the tie, give the hair a bit of a

lick and go on, into the church."

(From transcript of interview, 23 April 1979)

Boundaries, cleavages, barriers, and partitionings both structure and are structured by
everyday life. Architects are designers of membranes between things, of
underscorings, of parentheses, and of strategic gaps. By providing partitions between
events and obliging us to make an effort and to take our time over passing from one
event to another, the built environment serves to punctuate everyday life.

4.5.3 symbolisation
Collectively, we constantly interrogate the image we have of ourselves as a people, as
a culture. Constantly, we modify that image through the contributions we make in the
acts of our everyday lives to the material and conceptual worlds we inhabit. Thus, we
are engaged in a continual, mutual dialectical negotiation of the image we have of
ourselves as a collectivity, and we are engaged in a continual, mutual dialectical
negotiation of the supporting conceptual structures that are embedded in our culture
and that provide its continually transforming intellectual scaffolding, its recognised
frames of reference and points of view, motifs of argument, and systems of
categorising discriminations. This is where art is invited to participate in everyday life.
Thus, according to Sperber (1974), any symbolisation is a way of knowing the world, a
way of structuring our comprehension of it.

Architecture (or, more accurately, its physical manifestation), because it endures and
because it so public and will be encountered by so many members of a society and by
visitors to it, helps provide longevity for a culture's vision of itself. Architecture, too,
is expected to be a symbolising activity, whether designers intend it to be so or not.

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Secondly, to the extent that we treat architecture as if it is representative of

various events that might take place in it, as representing certain attitudes to life, or
as representing particular architectural or artistic intentions, then it is treated as
symbolic. With symbolisation, our interactions with the material world and with other
people are indirect, since we interact with representations rather than with 'the real
thing'.
Finally, symbolisation gives access to the autonomous realm of the symbolic
perhaps the most important of all the realms for humankind. This is, most powerfully,
the claim that people can only deal with symbols of what is 'out there'; that there may
be an independent physical reality, but for humans reality is symbolic.8

If punctuation articulates the spatial realm (and, to a large extent, the temporal), then
symbolisation articulates the inextricably associated realm of meaning.

4.5.4 orientation or cueing

We expect architecture to help us orientate ourselves in everyday life, to provide cues
to our place in space, in time, and in social contexts. Shelter and support, punctuation
and articulation, and symbolisation all contribute to our orientation in these ways.
Importantly, for example, it is one of the tasks of works of art, just as it is of
other situations in everyday life, to cue people in to how to interpret what is going on,
to indicate to them how they should interact with what is before them. Somehow, the
work has to help you to take an appropriate attitude to it, its maker has to provide
cues to the fact that it is intended to be treated as a work of art, as a work of art of a
particular kind, and as having some particular intent as a work of art.
This is true, also, of the 'architecture game' of a work of architecture.9 To
communicate as a work of art, a work of architecture will have to orientate those who

8 See, for example, the discussion in Charon (1979: 35-62).

I am not prepared, however, to accept that it is a condition of contemporary life that we
interact only with representations that have no actual referents as Baudrillard is prepared to
claim in that work of rhetorical legerdemain Simulations (1983). Though, given my assertion
that everyday life is a context-dependent mosaic of features coming into being anew or
persisting from different periods in the past, I am prepared to accept that he might be right in
some circumstances. This might certainly be argued in architecture of commercial office
developments, for example. However, I am not prepared to accept his view as a reasonable
characterisation of everyday life for the majority of us for the majority of our time.

9 For example :

"... order and relationship in a building must be made apparent to the

observer not only to convey meaning but also to impress upon him that the
building is a planned entity..."
(Raskin 1954: 107)

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experience it to the particular game of the conception that underlies the work of
architecture and it will have to orientate those who experience it to where they are
within the game of the work of architecture as experienced. There is, therefore,
another form of the expectation of orientation from works of architecture that are
intended to be works of art orientation to the 'architecture game' of a work of
architecture. Further, as with a work of art, orientation to the 'architecture game' of a
work of architecture entails orientation to an unfolding hermeneutic heterarchy:
orientation to the 'architecture game', and, as a work of art, to the game of the work
of art that it is, to an act of interpretation, to an interpretation, to an interpretative
context (an art situation), and to overarching frames of reference.

4.5.5 reification of (collective) selves.

5 THEMES IN GREENAW AY'S WORK

5.1 An art of ideas

"Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be left to the mere

storytellers."

(Greenaway 1985)

"I think civilisation has got where it is not by being led by its emotions, but by

degrees of rationalisation, in many complex ways. Why can't this be the subject

matter and content and structure of film-making? Because of my inclinations,

my cultural background, my education and my temperament, I get great delight

out of the manipulation of ideas. Some people find it very difficult to

understand that the mere discussion of ideas can be fantastically emotionally

satisfying. I try very hard to put that into the cinema so that maybe other

people can feel it as well."

(Greenaway cited in Barker 1991: 30)

on 'difficulties' of access
>>> issues of art, in art

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"if art is to have any function at all, it must be exercised through what it does

not have in common with life "

()

" the essence of art () lies in precisely what cannot be understood through

simple extensions of the same principles that serve us in daily life. Inevitably,

then, art is going to be mysterious "

(Danto 1981: 26 & 27, respectively, with emphasis as in original)

remember notion of art as a selection from a Bill of Fare ('Screen', 3RN, Oct,
first week)

"I suspect that all the great cultural landmarks of the last two centuries have in

some way been provocative and probably been speculative to be one may

mean to be the other. () I think any work of art which is worthwhile gives up

its meaning slowly and you have to work at it an activity that can make the

satisfaction greater. I also believe that all great works of art acknowledge their

own existence in some way. They see themselves from the outside."

(Greenaway, cited in Hacker & Price 1991: 214)

5.2 the ephemeral cf the enduring

"I'm very concerned about ideas of permanence and impermanence. I mean, can you

contemplate the world without you in it?"

(Greenaway, cite in Robinson 1990: 35)

Experiments on the Antiquarian Beach

Modernist method

"What happens if you put this sort of idea with this circumstance? What do you

get when you combine this view of things with these sets of pictures? If this is

considered a conventional moral position, what if you exaggerate it? What

happens when you turn this phenomenon on its head?"

(Greenaway, cited in Hacker & Price 1991: 213)

ends cultural tradition: European painting, architecture, literature

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"Sometimes I think I'm not really a film-maker but a painter working in cinema, or

a writer working in cinema."

(Greenaway, cited in Hacker & Price 1991: 207)

Low context High context

5.3.1 order versus chaos in architectural design

expressionist architectures in Melbourne:
Corrigan
Day
Raggatt
McDougall
Burgess
Mayes
Havelka
etc
city versus rural/arcadian models
urbane/modernist/typologists/classicists (in Melbourne and elsewhere)
Selenitsch
DCM
Woolley
Murcutt
Tzanes

5.3 Order versus chaos in human affairs

the mocking of artifice as a means of defeating chaos

"Instead of merely excising the narrative, Greenaway plays wickedly funny games

with its absence, suggesting through visual allusion countless possible stories,

latticing conspiracies as a safety net across the void but at the same time subtly

suggesting the ultimate danger that not just the film but its subject matter (life

itself of course) actually makes no sense at all."

(Watson 1985, with original emphasis)

"And if we think there is an order, could it be that this is our paranoid nature

seeking out giant conspiracies?"

(French 1985)

GKM for: The Architecture Society, Tusculum, Thursday 15 October

1992
Questions of Relevance: Is that all there is? What else could there be? 17

structurings

"If you like, the architects, by which I mean myself and Sacha (Vierny), are

behind the camera. Everything is seen in terms of facades, elevations, formal

plans () Classicism is all about balance, and harmony, and symmetry, and we

try to use that in the camera moves."

(Greenaway, in Clarke 1987: 7)

"My films are very Apollonian; they are concerned with the classical ordering of

the world. () My framing is deliberately related to the Renaissance sense of a

framed space, an organized space which is deliberately selected in order to make

use of composition."

(Greenaway, in McFarlane 1989?: 68)

the Violent Unknown Event of The Falls

punctuation/symbolisation (incl: the alchemical verities: death, life (sex), eating,
gender/sex, colour)/orientation

GKM for: The Architecture Society, Tusculum, Thursday 15 October

1992
Questions of Relevance: Is that all there is? What else could there be? 18

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1992
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GKM for: The Architecture Society, Tusculum, Thursday 15 October

1992