Peter Greenaway Honored at Biografilm Festival in Bologna

At the Biografilm festival in Bologna, filmmaker Peter Greenaway (born 1942 in Newport) received the Celebration of Lives award, a career honor previously given to Marina Abramović, Judith Malina, Charlie Kaufman, Clint Eastwood, and Ed Lachman. Greenaway, who began as a painter, criticized cinema's reliance on text, stating screenwriters should be shot because 'we don't need books, but films, life stories.' His 2015 film 'Eisenstein in Mexico' offers an unprecedented portrait of the Russian director, whom Greenaway considers the quintessential cinematic hero. Greenaway outlined three future challenges: making multi-screen films set in the present, purely visual and non-narrative. He lamented that Biografilm only screened some of his films, not recent ones like 'Goltzius and The Pelican Company' (2012), which explores erotic prints and biblical episodes involving taboo themes. Greenaway also contributed to the Italian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, curated by Vincenzo Trione, with a projected fresco about Italy. He argued that cinema is still embryonic, invented only 120 years ago, and criticized fragmented viewing on small screens, saying 'nobody wants fragmented cinema when they come home.'