On Leaving the Century of Cinema

In his brief essay “Painting and Cinema,” André Bazin, after sharing the general dissatisfaction with films about artists and paintings, nonetheless remarks that, “the cinema, not only far from compromising or destroying the true nature of another art, is, on the contrary, in the process of saving it.” About half a century later, and a full century after the first presentation of the Cinématographe Lumière, it is tempting to read in Bazin's phrase a question that reverses the terms: is another art in the process of saving the cinema? This question makes sense, I believe, but only if one concedes that what prompts it is the very success of cinema, an “art” now so ubiquitous as to be all but invisible. Here I am posing it as a possible vanishing point for looking at a series of strategic steps – sideways steps, as they must seem – that Peter Greenaway has taken in recent years in his career as a filmmaker, by curating exhibitions and directing operas. As it happens, the steps fit into a project he has called The Stairs:

Needless to say, the film was never made. But as “architectural motif” and “general metaphor,” the stairs have a symptomatic role, not only in the Greenaway shows, mounted in Geneva and Munich under that title. They point in the direction of what Greenaway has had in mind for some time, namely “taking the cinema out of the cinema.” It turns out that the period of his greatest triumphs as an established, indeed sustaining pillar of the European art cinema, from THE DRAUGHTSMAN's CONTRACT (1982) to THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER (1991), has coincided with his greatest restlessness and dissatis faction about this medium and its history: