Peter Greenaway: "Cinema is brain dead"

The Independent reports on a wonderfully splenetic outburst by Peter Greenway at a Korean film festival yesterday.

Ever the iconoclast, Greenaway ripped into his fellow filmmakers for merely "illustrating novels" rather than innovating in cinema and ignoring the developments in technology that have transformed other media over the last quarter of a century.

"If you shoot a dinosaur in the brain on Monday, it's tail is still waggling on Friday. Cinema is brain dead.  Cinema [died in]1983, when the remote-control zapper was introduced to the living room."

He challenged film-makers to look at new, interactive forms and to reinvent cinema for the electronic age:

"Every medium has to be redeveloped, otherwise we would still be looking at cave paintings... New electronic film-making means the potential for expanding the notions of cinema has become very rich indeed. Now cinema has to be interactive, multi-media art."

"We're obliged to look at new media... it's exciting and stimulating, and I believe we will have an interactive cinema which will make Star Wars look like a 16th-century lantern lecture. Thirty-five years of silent cinema is gone, no one looks at it anymore. This will happen to the rest of cinema. Cinema is dead."

Then, to gasps from the students in the audience, Greenaway then went in for the kill:

"Bill Viola is worth 10 Martin Scorseses. Scorsese is old-fashioned and is making the same films that DW Griffiths was making early last century."

"Most cinema is bedtime stories for adults. We're still illustrating Jane Austen novels – what a waste of time."

That's fighting talk. Hurrah for the iconoclasts!

Sidebar - note how Variety abbreviates audiences to "auds" in their write up of this story.