The StairsPeter Greenaway
Merrell Holberton, paperback, 228 pages
Review by Gerald Houghton (1994)
Peter Greenaway comes from an informal tradition of British filmmakers as exhibited artists – the young Philip Ridley and the late Derek Jarman are prime exponents. It is a singular dedication suffused into all of his work – the baroque frames that populate the films, an elaborate use of symmetry, a genuine love of the grotesque. Cinema like The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover with its stylised excess, the absurdly mannerist whodunnit of The Draughtsman’s Contract, the picturesque evocation of English countryside and game-playing in Drowning by Numbers (1987) are works driven not so much by a sentiment for traditional storytelling as the experimental; films not of cinema as about the process of cinema itself. All of which meets a crescendo in the ugly extremity of Greenaway’s much undervalued 1993 deconstructionist commentary on church and audience, The Baby of Macon.
That film in particular seems to signal a change of outlook. In it, through the device of theatre and blurring of identity between performer and audience, he attempts to question the very process of film – what is acting? what is a film? when does the idea of performance coincide with that of viewing? To this end, Greenaway’s next film project is, as explained in this book, a film that will never be seen within the confines of a cinema; a film created but never projected. His purpose is to deconstruct the barriers between film and reality, and in doing so to ask the essential question – what is cinema?
Is this profound or absurd? Both – and possibly neither.
In his art, Peter Greenaway is the taxonomist extraordinare. The arcane and archaic, structures and collections dominate both his work as a painter and (assuming it is not the same thing) as a filmmaker: twelve drawings (The Draughtsman’s Contract), days of the week (The Cook), the numbers 1 to 100 (Drowning By Numbers), pairs (A Zed & Two Noughts). In his films Greenaway is as much alchemical curator as creator. Over the course of ten exhibitions The Stairs sets out to decode cinema: the Location, the Audience, the Frame, Acting, Properties, Light, Text, Time, Scale, Illusion.
The Location – the first, to which this is therefore catalogue and introduction - was staged in Geneva by invitation of the city’s Mayor. Specially constructed flights of steps were erected at 100 sites, allowing the viewer to see – via camera obscura – specific sites chosen by the artist to represent locations for the film. These ranged from the grand and obvious – The Music Conservatory, The Russian Orthodox Church, The Peace Statue – to obscure and trivial – the Night Safe on the Quai de L’Ile, the Passenger-Arrivals Exit Geneva Airport, numerous flights of steps – each treated with reverence, each accorded a unique number. The point is made that a city need not (indeed, should not) be seen purely in terms of its historic infrastructure.
The book is clearly divided in two, cross-referenced halves. Pages in the first are numbered with maps and specific details of each site. (This is Peter Greenaway: the text is simultaneously translated in English and French, 50 words in each tongue). The second are a collection of Richard Melloul’s splendid monochrome photographs – one a daytime view, one at night (in the case of some unlit locations this means essentially nothing), and a final shot of the appropriate steps in situ. The contrasting time frame between of each pair – day and night, light and dark – is often telling, adding mystery and beauty to a potentially sterile exercise. (The interposing of people – of everyday life – into the Location surely emphasises Greenaway’s purpose in the universality of film). Thus is formed a unique record, but as the curator notes, each picture can by definition only represent 1/24 of a second in a 100 day life-cycle; it will be an accurate, if much less than comprehensive, reflection of intent.
Text is composed of Greenaway explaining the genesis and antecedents to his show. He details exhibitions mounted in various European cities that act as progenitors to The Stairs – The Physical Self, in Rotterdam, with its naked people exhibited in glass cases; 100 Objects to Represent the World, in Vienna; Some Organising Principles, in Swansea. Shows not of the artist, but of the artist’s curatorial concern. In addition, Greenaway explains the way in which The Belly of an Architect (1986) formulated ideas about Location and Architecture that now find root in this new project. All of this lavishly illustrated with full colour images of the shows, paintings (by Greenaway and others) and stills from associated films.
The result is both to arm the reader with an over-abundance of image and information, and simultaneously baffle and intrigue. But since this is Peter Greenaway, the instinct is of nothing obscured – as a filmmaker, as an artist, the audience distanced by a perceived pretension is also encouraged by a willingness to explain. Peter Greenaway wants you to understand. To this end his work is never without its (often black) humour – sites 98 and 100 have no pictures because flooding prevented installation until after the book’s compilation; site 13 is The Laura Ashley Shop in Geneva, and ‘her death by a fall downstairs is fitting’.
This fascinating and lavish volume is accompanied by a CD of Patrick Mimran’s elaborate but coolly alluring soundtrack for the exhibit, one piece (100 tracks) for each site.
Ten books are envisaged to accompany each of ten stages of the event, stretching from now until the year 2000, of which this (9"x11") is the first. The remainder are predicted to become progressively larger.
Peter Greenaway has not been invited to exhibit The Stairs in the United Kingdom.