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" Whether you're Godard or Almodovar or Scorsese, it's text, text, text. Everything begins with the text, and this is a source of great anguish to me. So please let cinema get on with doing what it does best, which is expressing ideas in visual terms. "

Peter Greenaway

Ideas

Doing

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" Cinema, which demands suspension of disbelief, is an increasingly naive proposition. "

" In a world where we can all be our own filmmakers, the old elites are disappearing and there is no desire to look at somebody else's dream anymore because you can go off and make your own. "

" We do not need a text-based cinema... we need an image-based cinema. "

Peter Greenaway

Cinema

Need

" Religion is there to say, 'Hey, you don't have to worry - there's an afterlife.' "

" I believe that cinema died on the 31 September 1983 when the zapper, or the remote control, was introduced into the living rooms of the world. "

" I think that every artist dreams of renewing the forms which came before, but I think very few can be considered to have achieved that. We are all dwarves standing upon the shoulders of the giants who preceded us, and I think we must never forget that. After all, even iconoclasts only exist with respect to that which they destroy. "

" All religions have always hated females. "

" All really worthwhile artists, creators, use the technology of their time, and anybody who doesn't becomes immediately a fossil. "

" As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward. "

Peter Greenaway

Critics

Than

" It's very difficult to understand, but I'm looking for a nonnarrative, multiscreen, present-tense cinema. Narrative is an artifact created by us. It does not exist at all in nature; it is a construct made by us, and I wonder whether we need the narrative anymore. "

" I think there is no future whatsoever in 3D. It does nothing to the grammar and syntax or vocabulary of cinema. And you get fed up with it in exactly 3 minutes. "

" Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward. "

" I obviously irritate people. I obviously antagonise them. "

" Everything I try to do wants to be able to push communication through the notion of the visual image. "

" I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound. "

" If you knew when you were going to die, wouldn't you make your life more worthwhile? "

" We have to change the educational curricula and put a lot more emphasis on how important seeing and looking is. "

Peter Greenaway

Seeing

Looking

" I'm sorry - you know, culture is elitist. Culture has to be elitist: it's about seeing and knowing and about knowledge. "

" The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible. "

" My biggest critical success was 'The Draughtsman's Contract,' but then it wasn't the English who particularly thought so; it was the French, who are much more interested in Cartesian logic: in finding your way through more cerebral puzzle-making, if you wish. "

" I suppose I am gently cynical about notions of who we think we are, but I certainly don't hate my fellow man. I think my cinema, although it might often deal with death and decay, is highly celebratory. "

" We all know that we're going to die, but we don't know when. That's not a blessing, that's a curse. "

" Thanks to secondary education and the Internet, we're all knowledgeable now - if knowledge means the accumulation of facts. Curators are those who know how to maneuver around that knowledge. "

" I don't believe in the deplorable notion of realism in the cinema: you can over-reach it, and it becomes as false as convention. "

" I can't think of anyone who has done anything remotely useful after the age of 80. "

" It's a big criticism of Greenaway films that they are far too interested in formalism and not enough interested in notions of emotional content. It's a criticism I can fully understand from a public that has been brought up by Hollywood movies that demand intense emotional rapport. "

" Cinema ceases to be passive and becomes active: you, the audience, are now, in some senses, in charge of the filmmaking process. You have all got mobile phones, you have all got cam recorders, and you've all got laptops, so you're all filmmakers. "

" Most people are visually illiterate. Most people don't understand images: they don't understand how to interpret them or how to manufacture them. "

" For so many filmmakers, cinema is a means to an end. "