Питер Гринуэй цитаты

„Я люблю кульбиты. А искусство, которое стремится как можно более точно копировать природу, вы сами назвали иллюзионистским. Что хорошего в иллюзиях? Настоящие художники – не иллюзионисты. Иллюзионизм – путь ленивых.“

„Когда человек отчаянно хочет проспать хотя бы ещё одну ночь в стылом бараке, на грязных деревянных нарах, без одеяла, зато с полчищем вшей, из-за которых придётся раздирать себя ногтями до костей, поразительно, на какие чудеса он становится способен.“

„Что мне мешает снимать кино? Сценарий, камера, актёры.“

„У главной суки Третьего рейха, вероятно, единственного существа, чью любовь и преданность полностью разделял её хозяин, появился щенок, которого назвали Вольф. Гитлер всегда считал своё имя Адольф старой формой немецкого «вольф» (волк). То есть косвенно Гитлер как бы признал своё отцовство и, следовательно, по крайней мере метафорически, своё волчье происхождение.“

“Itch to read, scratch to understand.”

“If a player in the game of Deadman's Catch drops a skittle, he is obliged to suffer a succession of handicaps. First to catch using one hand, then to catch kneeling on one knee, then on two knees, then with one eye closed. If a player finally drops a catch with both eyes closed, then he is out and must take his place in the winding-sheet.”

“Grief: An emotional experience often brought about by a great sense of loss. The subject of this loss is completely immaterial.”

“Get the Titanic sailing correctly before you worry about the deck chairs.”

“The penis -- if you think about it -- is the most enterprising engineering feat imaginable -- a cantilevered structure, hydraulics, propulsion, pistons, compression, inflation, heat sensitive -- practically every engineering characteristic -- towers, draw-bridges, rocket-ships -- no man-made engineering structure to match it.”

“… [I] would certainly like to work with Dennehy again. When he was presented with the script he didn't know me from Adam, and why should he, small-time eccentric, esoteric Englishman that I am?”

“The start of a film is like a gateway, a formal entrance-point. The first three minutes of a film make great demands on an audience's patience and credulity. A great deal has to be learnt very rapidly about place and attitude, character and intent and ambition.”

“Secret: A private matter whispered abroad and never kept to oneself. By naming it a secret, we immediately indicate its presence. If we really wanted to keep secrets, we would not have a name for them.”

“Where is a book before it is born? Does a book grow like a tree? Who are a book's parents? Does a book need two parents -- a mother and a father? Can a book be born inside another book? And where is the parent book of books?”

“John Cage, composer, painter, and all-round thinker and cultural catalyst, said that if you introduce twenty percent of novelty into any artwork, watch out -- you are going to lose eighty percent of your audience at once. He said you would lose them for fifteen years. Cage was interested in fifteen-year cycles. But he was hopelessly optimistic. The general appreciation, for example, of Western painting has got stuck around Impressionism, and that was 130 years ago, not fifteen years ago.”

“As you probably know, I'm often accused of intellectual exhibitionism and all forms of elitism. Although I can understand this point of view, it's a rather wasted argument because, if we regard areas of information as being elite and therefore somehow not usable, it means our centre-ground of activity becomes very, very impoverished.”

“A series of ever-decreasing splashes drip and plop into black water… thus the beginning of the film is reprised.”

“I made, for a London television company a programme called 26 Bathrooms … which was about the ways in which people behaved in their bathrooms. It was about where people put the soap on one level, or the colour of the bathroom curtains, the acoustics, about whether you sang in the bath, and it was structured very simply on the alphabet. We had a man and a woman who arrived one by bus, one by bike, to come and demonstrate for me, in front of the camera, how a jacuzzi operated. I asked both of them to take their clothes off because obviously you don't get into a bath with your clothes on. They hesitate, but eventually their dressing gowns came off and they got into the bath. They had never met one another before. Six weeks later I got an invitation from these people that I had brought together so peculiarly in this jacuzzi -- they were planning to get married! I understand that now they have three children.”

“… there are tens of thousands of photographs taken here, all taken very patiently, because decay can be very slow.. Ten months for a human body… they say…”

“Sheep are especially sensitive to the exact moment of the turn of the tide. In this game, nine tethered sheep react, pull on the stakes, jolt the chairs and rattle the tea-cups. Bets are taken on the combined sensitivity of any three lines of sheep -- read vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. Since there are normally three tide-turns every twenty-four hours, it is normal practice to take the best of three results. Reliable clocks, calendars, and time-tables are used to determine the accuracy of the sheep's forecast.”

“Look, it was an accident. Five thousand accidents happen every day -- bizarre, tragic, farcical… they're Acts of God fit only to amaze the survivors and irritate the Insurance Company…”

“Book #10: A Book of Travellers' Tales. As it hits the water its pages detach themselves from the covers, which sink… and the pages form themselves into small paper boats that float away on the tide.”

“Counting makes even hideous events bearable as simply more of the same -- the counting of wedding-rings, spectacles, teeth and bodies disassociates them from their context -- to make the ultimate obscene blasphemy of bureaucratic insensitivity. Engage the mind with numbing recitation to make it empty of reaction.”

“Twenty-four pulleys, one hundred counterweights / two lenses, dark shadows…”

“Human relationships are patterned and cross-patterned and restricted and limited and de-limited and caged and freed again by the elaborate conventions, rules, and games we call Civilisation … the rules and the games are often absurd and farcical -- sometimes they are tragic -- yet we tacitly acknowledge that they are necessary.”

“This book is gaudy like a gilded cauliflower which smells so bad after a good hot water soaking, like hot chocolate sweetened with sugar beet / incompatibles blended incongruously to no purpose.”

“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37…”

“It is an awesome sight, repeatedly drawn and painted. How long did it last, this Fall of Angels? Was it all over in an hour? Or did it take days, weeks, years? Is it still going on?”

“A man bringing himself, melody and mathematics into perfect and enviable proportions. / only more so, much more so.”

“Imagine you are sucking the little fingers of a lady… or… no, you wouldn't understand that -- since you'd never get that close to a lady -- who'd want to get that close to you for God's sake?”

“If you were not to be its victim, this book and body would amuse you with its arrogance. It would make you laugh. Because you were not its victim, you could feel no pain of betrayal.”

“Death is not necessarily an old and withered book with dry pages. It can be a thousand leaves of strong and shining text on a powerful body, held erect on the vertebrae of a strong spine. The heart hardly breathes because quietus has been reached, the torso is like a rock, the legs are rooted, the ink is dependable. If the words of death should be considered faded and sere -- where could be the dignity in dying?”

“What's so special about it?”

“There are only two subjects that matters, one is sex and the other is death, what else we could talk about it. And most the cinema talks all the time about sex and death. And my cinema deals with sex and death so… ¿what's the problem?”