The Gory Arts Festival!

Peter Greenaway is the director of such enigmatic, visually stunning and innovative cinematic feasts as Drowning by Numbers, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and Prospero’s Books (to mention but three of his celluloid contributions). He is also the ideal interviewee. Throw out a relatively respectable question and you’ll be treated at length to the eloquent reflections of an artist who is refreshingly uninhibited as far as talking about, and debating upon, his own work is concerned. By his own admission Greenaway loves to talk. And he does so with relish about his latest movie The Baby of Mâcon, which like many of his other offspring has already generated more than its fair share of controversy. It was inspired at least in part by Olivieri Toscani’s use of a just born baby in a Benetton advertising campaign.

“These images were of a new born child just seconds, presumably, out of the womb covered in blood and mucous and because they were blown up thirty metres wide in all our high-streets there was a big fuss about them, I think on two levels. I suppose the first level was how dare Toscani, and therefore Benetton, use such an intimate image to advertise Benetton clothes? I actually think it was quite a witty and elegant campaign: we’re all born naked into the world, we’re all going to need clothes sooner or later, so why not Benetton, from their point of view?

“The second situation, which puzzled me, was why were people so offended? Why were people so upset by what for me was this extraordinarily powerful but very vulnerable and in some senses very beautiful image? Because it’s the human condition, it’s the way we all come out into the world, it’s not as though it’s some phenomenon that exists on Mars. As parents, maybe we actually witnessed the birth of our own children in the same way. What was this sensitivity? Why did it upset so many people so much?

“From there, I suppose, I wanted to talk about how children, and certainly babies were used in the advertising business. You know, how a sort of smiling, blue-eyed child could be used not only to sell nappies but also to sell machine part tools. It was going the same way as all those advertisements that put a nubile naked sixteen year old against a drawing pin or on a calendar. And that was where, I think, Olivieri Toscani was so clever.

“He said ‘look this gratuitous association of titillatory images in association with a product which has nothing at all to do with the image has been going on for years so if I introduce AIDS photographs, what’s the difference?’. I think he was opening up the possibilities of how commercial advertising only dealt in a small area of human experience: people never died, they weren’t really sick, I mean nothing an aspirin couldn’t cure, they were not really underprivileged, you didn’t see escapees, you didn’t see the blacks in South Africa. There was a whole area of human experience that wasn’t contained and he opened it up to all that.

“I would say there’s a certain exhibitionism about the man which I think is part and parcel of the phenomenon but I, in general, support very much what he wanted to do and his attitude towards advertising showed that it’s full of hypocrisy anyway.

“So it was starting off with these sort of images and then, also, addressing myself to other problems, including this big journalistic phenomenon which happened in maybe the last five years. We can now talk about child abuse, child molestation, child sexual exploitation where certainly I know my parents could never have talked about it. A totally taboo subject. We can actually mention situations like, you know, familial incest. You know even famous American celebrity stars like Madonna and Roseanne Barr, they can now talk about this. In fact, it almost becomes a rite of passage. Unless you’ve been abused somehow you can’t be a full adult – that’s to overstate the situation but there seems to be part of that phenomenon now.

“And now, of course we’ve seen the Michael Jackson affair. It’s no mistake that thirty years ago if you wanted to malign someone you accused them of adultery. Fifteen years ago you’d have accused them of homosexuality. Those taboos are passed now. If you want to seriously malign someone now you accuse them of child molestation. I know that child molestation is a different sort of phenomenon and much more reprehensible by a thousand light years than adultery and homosexuality but there is a way in which we’re talking about taboos here. Dangerous, sensitive areas. So, I wanted to make a film about all these things.

“Now, I’m not a documentary film maker. I didn’t want to worry about the National Health, gynaecology, contemporary mid-wives. If I was going to have a birth under those circumstances then I’d have to embrace all of that. So I pushed it back into a historical context. Not only does that remove you from the situation a little so that maybe you can think about it as well as feel it, but it was also part of a trilogy of which Prospero’s Books is part one, which all take place in the Counter-Reformation because I have this feeling that a definition of the Baroque is like a definition of cinema. It uses light, sound, and sensation and colour and actors in order to proselytise something which isn’t there. It’s all about the suspension of disbelief.”

One of the other influential images which provided the for-mative ground for The Baby of Mâcon was another Toscani-inspired ad, which appeared on the cover of Elle magazine though Greenaway hadn’t been aware that the two images had the same creator until quite recently.

“The other image was the image of a model. I presume she was virginal. She seemed about fourteen or fifteen, wearing contemporary clothes but she was dressed in a way to deliberately remind us of those religious images of the mother and child. She was carrying a child who obviously wasn’t hers and being very, very charitable I tried to think of a way in which I could explain this relationship. And the only explanation that came up, in some senses since they were both gleaming and smiling and approaching the camera and presenting themselves, was the suggestion that they were a brother and sister. And I wanted to talk about the greatest exploitation myth in Western history which is the exploitation of the Christ-child in conjunction with all this local interest in child manipulation. And therefore the whole situation, in Baroque terms, became the substitute surrogate mother figure. And then the dilemma which is part of the way that Roman Catholics regard females and have done for many years: if you’re not a virgin you must be a whore if you’re not a whore you must be a virgin. And that’s the dilemma which all the males have great problems with in the film.”

Having read the British Press reviews of The Baby of Mâcon prior to viewing the film itself I fully expected to be confronted by an unwatchably violent two hours of gorily detailed and graphically depicted blood bath after blood bath. Not surprisingly, my expectations were misguided. At the very most there are three scenes which take up a grand total of ten minutes in all (out of the one hundred-and-twenty of the film’s duration) that could be loosely described as violent. Certainly, anyone who goes to The Baby of Mâcon in the hope that they will have their bloodlust satiated by a litany of guts and gore will be left sorely unfulfilled. Yet the brickbats in the British Press give the impression that The Baby of Mâcon is a tasteless and gratuitously cruel film.

“Well I think it’s just local, just in the London press,” he reflects. “Not even the British press, just the London press. I think the English have problems with the Baroque. They don’t understand the metaphor which I imagine somebody born and bred into Catholicism would. Not that I was. But I have a great interest through art and through the iconography of the painting to acknowledge an understanding of it. I think they’re embarrassed by Roman Catholicism, generally. They would have some problems worrying about – why even consider the problems of Roman Catholicism in a twentieth century play? I think there’s also a feeling that it’s about time to hit Greenaway on the head very hard. He’s too clever by half. He makes too many movies. How come he gets a chance to make movies and many other English people don’t?

“I think I’m also accused of doing my own exegesis. There’s a way in which I build in a critique of the film within the film. Like the audience in The Baby of Mâcon, for example. I suppose all these things are relevant. What else do we need to know? The film is being shown in Germany and in Holland. There’s always been mixed reactions. There always is to my cinema. But, in both those countries the reaction has been basically very positive. And already I’ve heard lots of encouraging noises here in Ireland.”

Do you think you’ve been a victim of the Jamie Bulger controversy?

“Well, the film was thought about in ’88 and ’89. It was made in ’91. I think we were virtually at Cannes when the event happened, so there’s no way people thought about it in terms of the film. But now, of course, the film is opening and it’s post the trial, people are asking those questions. I suppose the next question to ask is, like that judge suggested, should we have some curb over the qualities and examination of violence in the cinema.

“I’m pretty certain that two ten year old lads from Liverpool are never going to see a Greenaway film so I feel a little distanced from that relationship but I also think it’s very, very difficult to draw conclusions. As somebody suggested most murders, by far, happen in a family context and if you believe in this logic of copycat association you ought to ban families.”

Peter Greenaway’s attempts to distance himself from the debate about violence in the cinema notwithstanding, what would have been the consequences, aesthetic or otherwise, if he had left out the violent scenes in The Baby of Mâcon, the first of which shows a bull goring the Bishop’s son to death as he is about to make love to the virgin in a stable suffused with reverse nativity connotations.

“There are two phenomena which I’m sure we’re all aware of. Cinema in the last ten years has certainly pushed hard on the whole area of violence. Also, I suppose on the humiliation of women. And certainly, I suppose, on the third area which even surprises me now each time I turn the television on is the act of copulation. Even soaps are doing it now. Even Emergency Ward Ten. Even Casualty. Even those run-of-the-mill BBC domestic programmes. There are people copulating all over the place. There’s obviously a great interest and there’s a great fascination for all sorts of reasons, good, bad and indifferent.

“Now I’ve never even met anybody who’s seen a snuff movie. I don’t think they exist– but we know that actors who are often spending a large amount of their professional life pretending to be dead or getting shot actors don’t die on the screen and neither, despite the publicity and the P.R. organised for some of these films do actors and actresses copulate. So we are pushing these two very sensitive areas in a completely unrealistic way.

“Now on one level, since we spend so much of our lives or rather our non-lives in eternity, what is it all this people want to play dead for all the time. I mean isn’t that a crazy idea? Why do we want to play at being dead when we’re going to be dead for so long. And also the whole phenomenon about how much copulatory activity would be very positive there’s a way that often its placement in cinema is very, very negative. I suppose it’s again like the comparison, though I’ve never completely understood it, the worst swear word in England is to call somebody a cunt which again is most paradoxically contradictory. But, the cinema plays with this phenomenon all the time.

“So I say – okay, if you want these activities, okay I’ll push them to the very, very edge. We’ll use all the powers of regular cinema language in order to posit these things. But you know all the time, since you’re an intelligent cinema goer, that this cannot be true. So you’re holding two ideas in your head. The suspension of disbelief is not really working here. There’s a dichotomy which is at the centre of all cinema language.

“It’s done for the first time when the baby’s brought on stage. Babies can’t act. They can only be real. Amongst all this artificial flummery of over-elaborate etiquette and costumes, when the baby comes in there’s a way in which the collapse of artifice is complete. How could you possibly see and make a baby act? It’s a total perversion of what artifice is all about. And the last shot when you come back and you come back, and you come back you find that there’s no difference at all between the so-called actors and the so-called performers and the so-called audience. We’re all a nation, all a world of people who are watching and being watched. I’m surprised there’s not a surveillance camera somewhere in this room.”

Something which struck me watching The Baby of Mâcon was its similarity to a Mass, albeit an extremely elaborate, possibly black mass, but certainly nothing which the church couldn’t stage.

“You know how this ceremony, The Procession has very largely disappeared from European life. I suppose you might still get it in perhaps a small town in Spain, or possibly here in Ireland, even, I don’t know. Where the whole of society is arranged in a procession so you know where everybody is. It’s a microcosm of how society is divided. You know where the rich are. You know where the poor are. All that sort of thing. So that when you paraded, it was a manifestation of how society worked and organised itself. This is highly elitist and arcane but I try to reflect that in some sense with the processions which wander backwards and forwards in this film. I am, I suppose, excited by the whole thing of The Procession.

“It’s the discipline again. Some people accuse me of being over-disciplined in the films. That I want to contain and hold everything together which I know is a paradox because I never can. There are some practical reasons. We have small budgets and so small time to shoot things and so we have to be well organised. But I think that again I’m constantly looking for structures, narrative structures which organise the way that we behave, the way that we look: colour coding in The Cook and The Thief, the alphabets and all those sort of things. I want to begin to understand the way that the ceremony works in this respect. And we can just see the beginnings of it here. I want to go further down this tunnel with the next film called Ausbergersfeldt, which is even more grim. It’s all about necrophilia so I can imagine the critics are going to get even more excited about it since it’s full of dead bodies basically.”

In spite of the fact that The Baby of Mâcon is first and foremost a powerful critique of the use and abuse of religion (“ Or faith and superstition, because there’s an awful lot of superstition in The Baby of Mâcon too.”) there are a couple of instances where the baby in question really does seem to be possessed of preternatural ability and, furthermore, he does bring fecundity to the barren area of Mâcon. Since one of the many juxtapositions in the film is that of Faith with a capital “F” versus reason and the Enlightenment, where exactly does Peter Greenaway himself stand in the battle of the irrational against the rational?

“I would say that I’m an atheist. I don’t believe that we have to have a moral system in association with any absolute values or Godheads. I don’t think that’s necessary. I would pursue the main general aims of humanism, although I believe in its present form it’s a rather wishy-washy undisciplined sort of affair. I would very much say that I’m a Darwinianist, that the answers which I want to get to the big questions of life can be to a large extent argued very cogently by the Darwinian theories of evolution. And also of self-interest, and propositions of motivation and so on. I would proselytise what some people would think is rather bleak and pessimistic – that we’re basically here to hand on the genetic material. As individuals we’re insignificant. Those of us who have done that, our role is finished.

“We are here now to create the most equitable circumstances for our children to grow up in. Mine certainly have grown up now and are free to wander the world at their will, so in a sense my purpose on earth is finished but I don’t particularly want to die just yet and I want to amuse myself between now and death so I can go on making these fantasies, these films which I believe have their own validity for myself but in a cosmic sense are pretty unimportant. There are certainly far more occupations and worthwhile things to do on the surface on this earth than make movies.”

Is there a possibility that the storm of controversy which has brewed up around The Baby of Mâcon , and which has forced Greenaway to explain the film so much, might be in danger of contaminating the audiences reception of his latest chunk of painterly celluloid.

“I think the debates set up by all the movies are often more interesting than the films themselves,” he counters “because the debates are going to go on. They don’t have solutions. And because the debate is everlasting I think the responsibility of a film maker, especially a film maker who wants to make personal statements, doesn’t finish when the film is put in the can. There’s a way in which responsibility still goes on.

“I still give seminars in the South of France about The Draughtsman’s Contract. The ideas I want to keep alive. I sincerely believe that ultimately there’s no content in anything, all we have is language. I mean the very way that you are seeing the film is different in some senses from the way that I see the film and that’s going to continue and go on as the film gets older because the circumstances of its creation are going to disappear. In five years time if I talk about this movie I’m probably not going to talk about Toscani. We won’t even talk about the James Bolger case. It’ll have disappeared into journalistic history. So there’ll be new set of values to talk about but the debate will still hold true: exploitation of children; humiliation of women; use of cinema language. I think these things are very exciting and interesting things to talk about.

“I think my main concern is aesthetics rather than politics but Lacan suggested aesthetics is really only another name for ethics, ethics is very close to politics so all these things are very closely associated.”

Where does the baby come from?

“In The Draughtsman’s Contract the child was aged about six. In A Zed And Two Noughts it’s grown a bit, it’s about eight. In The Belly Of An Architect it’s about ten. By the time you get to The Cook, The Thief’ he’s a kitchen lad of about sixteen. I thought what is this child who is always hovering around in the edges of the film? Shouldn’t I turn my attention away from those adults who are basically my age and who have grown older as I’ve grown older and look at this child who is creeping about in the margins of my films? And that I think is where the baby came from. I wasn’t prepared to take it from sixteen onwards. I wanted to go right back to the very beginning. The very moment of birth and follow it through from there.”

Does the child have a more metaphorical meaning for you, this child that is taken to pieces?

“Well, I think any film that has the baby in it somehow for me would be an indication of not only a continuing miracle but the possibility that we always have another chance. What is it? Thirty babies are born every second all over the world. Okay we can worry about population explosion. We can worry about feeding all these people. We can worry about the social conditions they’re going to live in. But we’re always being given another chance. The species is always being given another chance.”