April 30, 2016No Comments

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Peter Greenaway, 1989

*** the Cook is a French, delicate man working in the restaurant of the Thief, who’s the archetype of pure evil, one of cinema’s best villain characters, his Wife is a beyond abused yet highly seductive woman, while her Lover is a plain librarian, reading while eating;

A few more than relevant Greenaway quotes, complaining that contemporary cinema is overtly reliant on books as sources of inspiration:

“Obvious example, you know Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, but everybody else from Almodóvar to Godard to Eisenstein, we have created a cinema where a producer has to be satisfied with a text first before he will give you the money. I think that’s, you know, rather unfortunate.”

“We do not need a text-based cinema … we need an image-based cinema.”

“This is probably a very unpopular thing to say, but all film writers should be shot.”

“For 8,000 years we’ve had lyric poetry, for 400 years we’ve had the novel, theatre hands its meaning down in text. Let’s find a medium whose total, sole responsibility is the world as seen as a form of visual intelligence. Surely, surely, surely the cinema should be that phenomenon.”

Fun, interesing fact - TCTTHWAHL has at its turning point a ritualistic murder of a librarian, chocked to death with pages torn from his gigantic library by, let me say it again, cinema’s best villain character. I can eeaaasily see Greenaway fall in love with his superb evil character, up to an identification point. Plus, if the villain is the filmmaker, then his demise - death by cannibalism - is as close as it gets to an image based form of art. 

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