08 · 21 · 25

Peter Greenaway: Morelia 2015

Rafael Aviña

Peter Greenaway, born in 1942, is a filmmaker to whom we owe much of the renewal of modern British cinema. He is a writer, painter, mathematician, and book illustrator. He is one of the most personal and obsessive contemporary filmmakers, capable of extracting disturbing situations from almost abstract themes and creating characters that are considered more wretched than marginal. As a creator, he has a great capacity to enrich his productions with diverse artistic proposals, including painting, theater, music, and high-resolution video, as demonstrated in Prospero's Books (1991).

The Belly of an Architect (1987) was a dark modern fable about creation. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) presented an unusual mixture of sex, blood, and eschatology, similar to The Baby of Mâcon (1995). A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) explored the theme of evolution and organic decomposition to extraordinary extremes. Earlier, The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) moved perversely between thriller and cruel tale, as seen in The Falls (1980)—an anomalous documentary-reportage on violent events—or in Drowning by Numbers (1988), a disturbing semiotic-statistical study on horror and sexuality. All of these works exemplify the lucidity of a filmmaker obsessed with carnality, art, and crime, enhanced by exceptional soundtracks from extraordinary composers such as Michael Nyman, Wim Mertens, and Brian Eno.

His works share a climate of rising fatalism as shown in El libro de cabecera / The Pillow Book (1996). This film presents a love story pushed to extremes, featuring organic calligraphy and a fascinating metaphor about the epidermis. It centers on a young Japanese woman obsessed with tattooing written stories on her skin and on the skin of others. His films are structured around deceptive appearances, mystery, and hidden motives, the relationship between crime and sex, and the role of artists in a voracious, consumerist society that ultimately displaces them. These works also examine the artist's inability to capture reality.

It was in October 2015 that Peter Greenaway arrived at the 13th edition of the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM) to offer a master class and present his then most recent film: Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015), a Norway-Mexico-Finland-Belgium-France co-production. “I had to come to Mexico to go to heaven.” This phrase, said by Russian filmmaker Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, interpreted with enormous ease and self-confidence by Finnish actor Elmer Bäck, alludes to the revelation of his homosexuality at age 33. Alternatively, it may refer to his joyful discovery of a repressed eroticism that he uncovered during his stay in Mexico. The film explores Eisenstein's experience while he attempted to reinterpret the mysteries of this unknown land through his fascinating yet unsuccessful project entitled Que Viva Mexico (1931). Greenaway presents this story with his characteristically baroque style.

Eisenstein in Guanajuato capitalized on the beauty of the Mexican city, which the Russian filmmaker had not actually visited in real life. The film focuses on the romantic relationship between Eisenstein and his local guide, genealogist Jorge Palomino y Cañedo (portrayed by Luis Alberti). Their affair develops over ten days through a series of graphically explicit scenes and male nudes.

The real Eisenstein created fabulous sketches of Mexican landscapes and their curious religious syncretism. He also produced a series of erotic drawings considered obscene, which became an essential part of Greenaway's film. Much earlier, the late art historian and critic Olivier Debroise had explored similar themes in his unclassifiable and almost clandestine film essay Un banquete en Tetlapayac (1998). This work mixed fiction and documentary to investigate the ambiguous sexuality of the Soviet director. On the other hand, Greenaway incorporates, as in all his work, the weight of religion and power. Above all, he explores the discovery of sex and death as catalysts for his protagonist's filmic inventiveness.

With all those images in mind, Eisenstein tried in vain to give narrative coherence to the more than 20 hours he had filmed for Que Viva Mexico / Da zdravstvuyet Meksika! which would consist of four episodes: Zandunga, Maguey, Fiesta and Soldadera, plus a prologue and an epilogue designed to show the Mexican landscape and tell stories of exploited indigenous farmers, sexual initiation rites, and the religious impact on their lives. The filming took place in locations such as Yucatán, Tehuantepec, and Tetlapayac. This material becomes central to Peter Greenaway's atypical emotional biography of the Soviet director.

Translated by Abigail Puebla